Leap Year ladies
Editorial boards past took note of leap year, that quadrennial quirk of the calendar, with about the same frequency. In one editorial, the board expressed gratitude for an extra work day. But mostly they worried about all the shrewish Sadie Hawkinses who, unable to finagle a marriage proposal in the other three years, waited to exploit the leap year custom that lets them pop the question on unsuspecting men.
On Jan. 9, 1908, the board respectfully disagreed with one Dr. Denslow Lewis, then-president of the Medico-Legal Society of America, who thought that women should be able to propose marriage every year. Why? Because, the board claimed, women never really have to ask:
Now every married man knows that his wife really proposed to him although she hypnotized him into making the actual declaration. Every year is leap year to a woman who has made up her mind that a certain man has got to marry her . They were as much hunters as hunted.This leap year business is just a little “jolly” to which the world clings . It enables the fair sex to make merry at man’s expense. The word “expense” is used with malice aforethought because leap year has been costly to man ever since woman was legally given the privilege of popping the question . Financial penalties were attached to “slight or contumely” by an act of the Scottish Parliament passed about 1228, which ordained that “Gif he refuses to tak her to be hys wyf, he shall be mullet in the sum of £100 or less, as his stait may bee, except and allwais, gif he can make it appeare that he is betrothit to another woman then shall he be free!”If every year were leap year what an enormous sum the men would have to pay in fines!
Four years later, the board praised leap day for knocking a day of rest off the calendar:
Leap Year in 1912 has done more than add one extra day to the normal 365. Compared with 1911 it will have two work days more and one Sunday less .Anyone who attempts to figure the immense sum represented by two extra days’ pay to every worker in the United States will admit that for labor this present leap year has a considerable value. Also a fifty-second subtracted from every collection plate in every church in the land will represent a sum sufficient to pay the ordinary salaries of a good many clergymen....The Russians, strange to say, have refused to use the extra day in Leap Year As a consequence time as now reckoned in St. Petersburg is thirteen days behind the true solar year. It would be an interesting problem to work out whether, if Russia were to correct her calendar, she would catch up with the Leap year nations in some other important respects.
On April 10, 1912, the board somberly intoned:
Twice as many marriage licenses were issued Monday as on the busiest day during Lent. April in leap year is a dangerous month.
In 1916, the board threw a bawdy joke (we think) in with the usual dread of female assertiveness:
Tremble, ye bald-headed bachelors, for the day of judgment is at hand! Two stark and raving facts presage your doom. This is Leap Year and women are no respecters of the Monroe doctrine or of persons. While the open season on unattached males does not begin legally until the 29th day of February, advance Leap Year parties are already being given for the spreading of the nets, so to speak.
And later that year, the board mocks a local practitioner of polyandry:
A lady at San Bernardino appears to have contracted six husbands quite informally. Husbands are all right in a way, but they should be allowed to serve their sentences serially and not concurrently. The lady in the present instance might be considered by some as a bad leap year example.
The board declared 1920 a good year for marriage, and took its most generous tone toward the institution:
The sea of matrimony must be all cluttered up with new banks. During the month of August a total of 1,030 marriage licenses were issued in the city of Los Angeles. Cupid Sparks went out in a blaze of glory. We will say that for him, even if it does mix our metaphor . This is leap year and the marriages have been going strong. You can wake up at almost any old hour and hear the thrilling strains of the wedding march.
When even a leap year couldn’t raise the number of marriages in the country, the board stayed optimistic. In a Dec. 14, 1948 editorial titled “The Girls Must Have Found Leap Year Disappointing,” the board wrote:
The national decline in the issuance of marriage licenses, apparent last year, is continuing, and in Los Angeles County is especially notable . These figures are surprising, inasmuch as it was leap year and our population has continued to grow. The war, of course, caused the postponement of many marriages until the postwar years and this “backlog” has run out . Whatever the cause, the facts are inescapable. But it is nothing for serious thinkers to worry about. The institution of marriage is in not the slightest danger of extinction.