Courtship practices, meanings, and relations, to be sure, vary dramatically from one setting to another. Take the case of engagement; the transition from courtship to engagement still marks an important moment in American young people’s lives. For many couples, it involves substantial expenditures. Indeed, a recent study shows they spend an estimated annual $9 billion in engagement rings and wedding bands (Tannenbaum 2003). According to another study, for 70 percent of all U. S. brides and 75 percent of firsttime brides, the diamond ring is a couple’s first wedding-related purchase (Ingraham 1999: 51). But engagement has evolved substantially over time.
Westerners have employed various forms of betrothal—public announcement of a couples’ intention to marry—for centuries. Under such regimes, a marriage-bound couple commonly took on formal obligations to churches and families in addition to their mutual commitments. Indeed, churches and families often enjoyed rights to impose sanctions on young people who flaunted those obligations, for example, by eloping or by withdrawing from the commitment to marry after a period of intimacy. In the United States, however, the custom known as engagement only became common during the nineteenth century (Rothman 1984: 157-68). Less a church and family announcement than a couple’s own declaration of intentions, engagement consisted of a pair’s designating each other publicly as committed to marrying. As a consequence, relations to other parties—former lovers, friends, and family— changed significantly.
Engagement stood between informal courtship and marriage. It involved sexual exclusivity, greater intimacy, and a distinctive set of economic transactions. Couples withdrew from more general courtship activities with others, not carrying on the usual conventions of flirtation, and commonly appearing together on social occasions. Despite significant class and ethnic differences, in all cases engagement also involved greater physical and emotional intimacy than less-committed forms of companionship. In 1926, famous feminist and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger strongly endorsed the special intimacies of engagement:
One indispensable truth the engaged girl must remember: The fiance’s breath, odor, touch, embrace, and kiss must be pleasing to her. If they are not, if there is an impulsive or instinctive emotional and physical recoil, then under no circumstances should the engagement be prolonged.. .. The intimacies permitted during the engagement, the legitimate intimacies of
kisses and caresses, in the protecting atmosphere of poetic romance, thus fulfills a distinct and all-important function—the deepening of desire and the commingling of the spiritual and the physical. (Sanger [1926] 1993: 74-75)
Legitimate sexual intimacies between the engaged couple escalated. At about the time Sanger was writing, engaged couples were increasingly likely to have sexual relations before marriage (see Fass 1977: 289; Modell 1989; Rothman 1984: 297).
The engaged couple further marked their relationship with a variety of economic transactions. The most dramatically public was the engagement ring. Beginning in the 1840s, couples announced their new relationship with a mutual exchange of rings. Only later did the ring become a female token (Rothman 1984: 161-62). But a wide range of other joint economic transactions followed from the fact of engagement. They included the trousseau, acquisition of goods and housing for the prospective cohabiting couple, and exchange of personal gifts. In fact, the trousseau often accomplished both of the first two, outfitting both the bride and the home.
Nineteenth-century trousseaus turned into a formidable economic venture, as future brides sewed and shopped for increasingly elaborate sets of clothing, linens, and various other household furnishings. Men, meanwhile, were typically saving money for housing. In addition to a couples’ own economic preparation for marriage, engagement frequently changed other relations within families. For example, interviewing retired Amoskeag mill workers in New Hampshire in the 1970s, Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach report the recollections of seventy-one-year-old Anna Douville, the last to marry out of twelve children in her family. While she still lived at home, Anna turned her entire pay over to her mother, unlike her siblings, who only contributed board. When Anna met her future husband, the mother reciprocated:
She got me started on my hope chest. After the week’s shopping was done and the bills were paid, we would take all the money that she had left to the store and buy me sheets and pillowcases.
She bought me a dishpan, all my pots and pans, knives, and
dishes. When I got married [in 1933] we didn’t have to buy a damn thing for years because I had all the things I needed. My mother thought I deserved it because I gave her all my pay to the last week that I worked. She never did that for the others, and they got jealous about it. They were on their own when they got married and had to buy all the stuff they needed themselves. (Hareven and Langenbach 1978: 289)
Besides the engagement ring and the trousseau, engaged couples entered a distinct informal gift economy. Etiquette manuals were emphatic: expensive presents “unless it be the engagement ring” were “not in the best taste.” Nor was wearing apparel, especially not the wedding dress. Even if the bride was “as poor as a church mouse,” advised experts, a very plain trousseau was preferable to “the elaborate outfittings towards the purchase of which the groom- expectant has largely contributed” (Cooke 1896: 124; Cushing 1926: 110). The first edition of Emily Post’s noted Etiquette, which came out in 1922, while somewhat less strict about a “bridegroom-elect’s” gifts to his future bride, still insisted that any item considered “maintenance”—such as wearing apparel, a motor car, a house, or furniture —was off-limits. Post was quite specific: “It is perfectly suitable for her to drive his car, or ride his horse.. .. But, if she would keep her self-respect, the car must not become hers.. .. He may give her all the jewels he can afford, he may give her a fur scarf, but not a fur coat.” While the scarf was an “ornament,” Post explained, the coat was “wearing apparel” and thus an unfit gift for a bride (Post 1922: 311).
Etiquette writers thus struggled to draw a line defining proper and improper gifts between engaged parties. Their boundary drawing excluded gifts that would be appropriate between husbands and wives on one side, and from a prostitute’s clients on the other. The wrong gift, warned Emily Post, could cast the bride “in a category with women of another class” (311), meaning a prostitute or a kept woman. That is why courtship gifts were supposed to express affection or admiration without suggesting payment or support. The gift economy changed radically when the bride became a man’s wife;
her husband’s gifts and his money then turned into household transfers, subject to a different set of rules and expectations. Etiquette manuals reminded brides of the distinction between engagement and marriage transfers: “until the fateful words are spoken that make the twain one flesh” instructed one etiquette writer, the bride “has no claim whatever on the purse of her future husband.” As she approached marriage, however, the bride was advised to start treating her husband’s money with wifely concern and discourage, as Post put it, any “charming, but wasteful, presents.” Unless the fiance was very wealthy, noted Ethel Frey Cushing’s Culture and Good Manners, “a young girl prefers to have [her fiance] save his money for the home and its furnishings” (Cooke 1896: 143; Post 1922: 310; Cushing 1926: 110).
For all their period charm, these concerns about proper engagement etiquette have not disappeared today. A late 1990s edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette declares, for example, that
the engagement ring is worn for the first time in public on the day of the announcement. In the United States it is worn on the fourth finger (next to the little finger) of the left hand. In some foreign countries it is worn on the right hand. It is removed during the marriage ceremony and replaced immediately afterward, outside the wedding ring.
An engagement ring is not essential to the validity of the betrothal.
Some people confuse the engagement ring with the wedding ring and believe the former is as indispensable as the latter.
This is not the case. The wedding ring is a requirement of the marriage service. The engagement ring is simply evidence that the couple definitely plan to marry. A man may give his fiancee a ring no matter how many times he has been married before.
(Post 1997: 666)
The same manual devotes eleven full pages (672-82) to enumerating items that belong in a proper bride’s trousseau.
Similar issues become acute in the case of broken engagements. If an engaged couple have acquired common property, pooled their funds, started shared economic enterprises, received support from families, or exchanged substantial gifts, the status of those economic transactions after an engagement ends frequently becomes a matter of rancorous dispute. Engagement rings provide an obvious case in point: typically expensive and closely tied to the public announcement of a commitment to marry, rings raise the question of ownership when the engagement ends. The 1990s Emily Post manual states the rule unequivocally:
In the unfortunate event of a broken engagement, the ring and all other gifts of value must be returned to the former fiance.
Gifts received from relatives or friends should also be returned with a short note of explanation:
Dear Nancy,
I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mitch and I have broken our engagement. Therefore I am returning the towels that you were so sweet to send me.
Love, Elizabeth
A notice reading, “The engagement of Ms. Caroline Muller and Mr. John Ryan has been broken by mutual consent,” may be sent to the newspapers that announced the engagement, although this is not at all necessary and it is seldom done.
If the man should die before the wedding, his fiance may keep her engagement ring. However, if it happens to be an old family heirloom and she knows that his parents would like to have it remain in the family, she would be considerate to offer to return it. She may keep any gifts that were given her by friends.
If the bride-to-be should die, her family should return the engagement ring to the groom and any gifts received to the donors (Post 1997: 672).
A bride whose wedding the New York Times reported in 2003 “proudly noted” that on the occasion of two previous broken engagements “she’d returned all of the gifts” (McKinley 2003: ST11). Thus the matching of economic transactions to relations continues in force. The purveyors of etiquette spell out practices that represent a very general set of understandings about engagement: that it is a distinct form of relationship rather than a weak form of marriage; that the man and woman involved retain control over their own property, and yet, that a proper engagement involves preparations for the married stage of their lives.