Lessons In Vintage Postcards: The Leap Year Proposal

Sometimes we go hunting for collectibles with empty pockets. No, we don’t shoplift! We go with just a few dollars or less just to see what there is to be seen – kind of like visiting a museum.

Not too long ago we took one of these field trips to a local antique mall and I took photos of things I was intrigued by, but was too cheap to buy, like this antique postcard.

The concept of a woman proposing due to leap year — via a postcard, yet — had me intrigued.

Clearly, the best way to get a man interested in the notion of marriage was to promote your womanly ways — with a needle. (Darn it!) I have no idea if this postcard proposal worked, but the cute buttons and socks didn’t move me to spend $5… I’m so cheap, I figured the photo was enough to remind me to research the notion of women prompted to propose during leap year.

That it did.

According to About.com:

The first documentation of this practice dates back to 1288, when Scotland passed a law that allowed women to propose marriage to the man of their choice in that year. They also made it law that any man who declined a proposal in a leap year must pay a fine. The fine could range from a kiss to payment for a silk dress or a pair of gloves.

Like most About.com articles, this info isn’t documented, or all that fascinating. But this article, The Leap Year Proposal, by Dorothy Dix, published in 1904 by The New York Times, is much more interesting.

In it, Dix begins by saying this:

That woman labors under a great matrimonial disadvantage in not being able to pop the question no one will deny. It forces her to take what is offered to her instead of the thing for which she would ask if she had the privilege, and even when leap year removes the bar against her speaking out in meeting it does her little good, for it finds her with no precedent to guide her, no experience to be a lamp to her feet.

…Of course people will say that this makes no difference, that a woman’s leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery that she does not dare to put to the test, but how does any one know this?

The past is no criterion. Women do many things now that they did not do forty or even four years ago. It is not at all impossible that many a discouraged spinster, worn out with waiting for her steady beaux to speak, and many a love-lorn maiden who has heretofore let concealment prey upon her damask cheek, will take matters into their own hands and propose matrimony to the man they love, in this year of grace 1904, so a few suggestions to the leap year girl may not be amiss.

The first one must necessarily be a warning. No one knows as yet just how a woman should propose, but it is to be hoped that when she does undertake to be a lovemaker that she will do it more romantically and poetically than man does. It is true that man’s way works, but this is because he has a monopoly of it. We all burn Standard oil because there is no other kind of oil. Woman have had to take the kink of proposal offered them or do without, and those who have suffered from this — who have seen their dreams shattered and their ideals smashed — who have had love made to them between the jolts of a street car, or across beef steak and onions at a restaurant table or in any other old place, ought to know enough to render their proposals a romance that a man will be glad to remember to the longest day he lives.

This so contradicts the actions of the dear lady who sent this postcard. And it gets worse.

Several paragraphs later, under “Avoid the Fatal Mistake”, Dix continues:

The first impulse of the Leap Year girl will be to propose by letter. This is a fatal mistake, because in the first place her billet doux will reach the man with his business letters, and thus pass over to the cold consideration of his stenographer. No American man is sentimental in banking hours, and during that sacred period of the day no woman may hope to compete in heart interest with the price of stocks or wheat, or lard. Moreover, the long-distance proposal, whether it be made by man or woman, seldom hits the bull’s-eye. It lacks the magnetism of personal appeal, of trembling hands, and anxious eyes, and quivering lips. Besides it is always easier to write “NO” than it is to say it, and the woman who wants a husband instead of somebody to be a brother to her will have to face the music, and make her proposal viva voce.

I now wish I had paid the $5, simply to see the date sent so I would know if the lady could have possibly read Dix’s advice… and maybe research the names on the back of the card to see if I could discover if the lady ever did marry…

I may never know any of that.  But I do know I should have spent the $5 that day.