A "real man's ring": gender and the invention of tradition - American double ring ceremony, 1920s male engagement ring

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2003 by Vicki Howard

The new tradition also appealed to a growing sense of middle-class American identity that was based upon new conceptions of the family and proper gender relations. Spreading suburbs created a physical and psychological separation of public and private, work and home, changing both men's and women's roles. A groom's wedding band signified the new gender configurations that were part of the landscape in the 1940s and 1950s. The popularity of the double ring ceremony suggests that early twentieth-century "masculine domesticity" returned more broadly as an ideal around World War Two. With the rise of working-class home-ownership and the move to the suburbs, men's role changed as their domestic responsibilities increased and their focus turned inward toward the family. In this context, the rise of the companionate family, "characterized by romance, companionship, sexual fulfillment, mutual respect, and emotional satisfaction," transformed middle-class masculinity. (58) By the 1950s, married white, middle-class me n were ideally supposed to find their primary identity at home with their wives and families. Popular sources at the time heralded the young husband who shared domestic responsibilities with his wife. As historian Robert Griswold points out, however, studies of families in the l950s document the small role that men played in household tasks. (59) Women remained the primary consumers and provider of services for their families. However, the fact that women's magazines and other popular sources reported on dual-income families and wrote about husbands who shared childcare and chores with their wives suggests the presence of an alternate masculine ideal, one which nevertheless still validated a basic gendered division of labor. (60) The double ring ceremony naturalized this new, ultimately conservative version of masculinity, making it seem "traditional." The groom's band came to represent a man's acceptance of this form of domesticity, the shiny gold of his new ring a physical marker of his new role as husband and prospective father.

More and more men could claim this middle-class identity as the postwar economy boomed. Annual expenditures on such things as jewelry were twice what they had been in the years just before the war, and large numbers of Americans began to be able to afford the trappings of middle-class life. Before the war, most households were without refrigerators and other electric appliances. Only half of all urban families owned an automobile and most Americans rented. By the mid-1950s, three out of five urban dwellers owned their homes. (68) As increasing numbers of working-class men becoming middle-class suburbanites tending their gardens and their backyard barbecues, they found that the groom's ring fit. For example, accounts of marriage among garment workers at the Maidenform Company in Bayonne, New Jersey showed an interest in the double ring ceremony during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Working-class men, however, did nor necessarily always embrace the middleclass domestic role signified by the groom's ring. When Maidenform employees Doris Ryan and James Farrell had a double ring ceremony in 1946, the grooms resistance to the ring was the subject for humor on the shop floor. The account in The Maiden Forum, the company newsletter, is as follows: