The Fifth C?
Cut, Color, Carat, Clarity… Chemistry?
Is it possible that the mind of a scientist can create more beauty and romance than Mother Nature? The Ultimate Diamond Alternative ® , DiamondAura ®, was created with one mission in mind: Create brilliant cut jewelry that allows everyone to experience more clarity, more scintillation and larger carat weights than they have ever experienced. So, we’ve taken 2 ½ carats of our Ultimate Diamond Alternative ® DiamondAura ® and set them in the most classic setting—the result is our most stunning, fiery, faceted design yet! In purely scientific measurement terms, the refractory index of these stones is very high, and the color dispersion is actually superior to mined diamonds.
Perfection from science. We named our brilliant cut diamond alternative stones DiamondAura because “they dazzle just like natural diamonds but without the outrageous cost.” We will not bore you with the incredible details of the scientific process, but will only say that it involves the use of rare minerals heated to an incredibly high temperature of nearly 5000˚F. This can only be accomplished inside some very modern and expensive laboratory equipment. After several additional steps, scientists finally created a clear marvel that looks even better than the vast majority of mined diamonds. According to the book Jewelry and Gems–the
Buying Guide, the technique used in our diamond alternative DiamondAura ® offers, “The best diamond simulation to date, and even some jewelers have mistaken these stones for mined diamonds.”
The 4 C’s. Our 3-Stone Classique Ring retains every jeweler’s specification: color, clarity, cut, and carat weight.
The transparent color and clarity of our diamond alternative DiamondAura ® emulate the most perfect diamonds—D Flawless, and both are so hard they will cut glass. The brilliant cut maximizes the fire and radiance of the stone so that the light disperses into an exquisite rainbow of colors.
Rock solid guarantee. This .925 sterling silver ring is prong-set with a 1 ½ carat round brilliant stone in the center, showcased between two round brilliants stones of ½ carat each. Adding to your 4 C’s, we will include our Ultimate Diamond Alternative ® DiamondAura ® stud earrings for FREE! Try the DiamondAura ® 3-Stone Classique Ring at $39 for 30 days. If for any reason you are not satisfied with your purchase, simply return it to us for a full refund of the item purchase price and keep the stud earrings as our gift.
Not Available in Stores
3-Stone Classique Ring
(2 ½ ctw) $299† $39 + S&P Save $260 FREE stud earrings with purchase of Classique Ring— a $99 value!
Available in whole sizes 5-10
You must use the offer code to get our special price.
1-800-333-2045
Your Offer Code: DAR942-05
† Special price only for customers using the offer code versus the price on Stauer.com without your offer code.
Stauer® 14101 Southcross Drive W., Ste 155, Dept. DAR942-05, Burnsville, Minnesota 55337 www.stauer.com
“I can’t begin to describe this gorgeous ring...it is absolutely stunning. The workmanship and style is out of this world. Please order this ring, you won’t be disappointed.”
— J., Stuart, FL
fashion and demanded damages for lost wages. GM answered by pre-emptively attacking the constitutionality of the Michigan law upon which St. John’s case now hinged. An ensuing three-year legal battle culminated in the decision by the Michigan Supreme Court to uphold the 20-year-old statute, which no one had ever sought to enforce until then. Having ruled that St. John and company had standing for their suit, the high court sent the case to the Ingham County Circuit Court for trial, where the burden was on St. John to prove there was a pay disparity.
The trial began on June 2, 1941, before Judge Charles Hayden, in an ornate courtroom that today still occupies the third floor of the Ingham County Courthouse in the town of Mason, just outside Lansing. The women girded themselves for a trial that would consume six oppressively hot weeks, see some 70 witnesses testify and receive in evidence more than 10,000 exhibits.
Beginning with St. John, the women told of their pay history as compared with the men’s, of men and women side by side doing the same heavy and technically demanding work, of the cooperative atmosphere on the production floor. St. John and Merreta Cobb told the judge how they had to do their heavy assembly work at unimaginable speed, cranking out one harmonic balancer about every 30 seconds to meet their quota of up to 105 an hour.
“It was one of the heavier operations,” their foreman admitted at the trial, referring to the harmonic balancers—an admission that undermined GM’s claim that women did only lighter work, thus meriting lower pay.
As the days wore on, the women watched numerous GM foremen and managers testify that men were more versatile, stronger, able to work longer and at night, easier to train and more mechanically inclined. The managers said St. John and other women had complained about the difficulty of their jobs; that foremen had ordered women not to lift heavy loads; that the company had hired men whose only job was to help the women. The women even had a hot plate in a break room, the managers protested— which GM had reluctantly allowed the women to use after St. John had smuggled it in.
GM’s lawyer Jacob Tolonen argued strenuously, week after week, that the plaintiffs couldn’t prove they were paid less on the basis of sex because, he claimed, they weren’t. Finally, Planck convinced Judge Hayden to make GM cough up payroll records, initially withheld to protect GM’s right against self-incrimination. “Court was delayed a half-hour while the cartons of time and rate cards, cancelled checks and other pertinent material was carried up three flights of stairs,” the Lansing State Journal reported.
The proof of pay discrimination was thus laid bare on counsel’s table. Judge Hayden found for the plaintiffs, and on May 29, 1942, the case made national news. “29 Women Win $55,690 in Wage-Equality Ruling,” the New York Times announced.
Three years of GM appeals later, on January 2, 1945, the women were awarded $55,690—close to a million dollars in today’s money. By then, the plant had been refitted for war production, and equal pay for women at America’s wartime factories had been the rule since 1942. That groundbreaking feat was made possible by Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon and Mary Anderson of the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau in Washington, D.C., who used St. John’s court victory to convince the War Labor Board to equalize pay rates between men and women, which it did on November 24 of that year.
David Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School, who brought the case back to light in 2017 while tracing the origins of employee class-action
lawsuits, outlined in a 2018 Stanford Law Review article how St. John’s remarkable success inspired other women in Michigan to sue for wage discrimination, and spurred legislatures in 21 other states to pass wage-equality bills before the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Of all the states’ bills, however, Engstrom found that only two—Massachusetts in 1945 and Oregon in 1955—actually offered provisions that would allow women to sue for equal pay in court. At the time, many labor leaders saw courts as a threat to unions’ sovereignty in the workplace, Engstrom writes, and therefore lobbied against many of these bills. Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that after World War II, employers and lobbyists for business groups also played a role in weakening equal pay laws at both the state and federal level.
Engstrom says revisiting St. John’s case can help scholars and policy makers better understand the roles women and organized labor can play in defending workers’ rights. Though he has written that it was “almost certainly… the first significant damages payout in a job discrimination case in the case history of U.S. law,” Engstrom says that Florence St. John v. General Motors Corporation has limited value as a legal precedent for civil rights lawyers today because it is confined to Michigan law. It was also curiously forgotten, including by the media: When the newly formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recompensed an underpaid typist in 1968 who had been denied a promotion at one of GM’s parts manufacturers, the Detroit Free Press declared, “She Wins $885 and Makes History.” St. John died two years later, on December 21, 1970. Engstrom imagines that sometime during those two years, as a recently widowed snowbird returning to Michigan from Daytona Beach to visit her two grown daughters, St. John may have seen the Detroit Free Press headline and smiled.