In the early 20th century, it was common knowledge that women could propose marriage to men during leap years. These postcards from that era reveal popular attitudes about women who proposed and men who were proposed to.
The reader is expected to understand the implications of the scenario on this 1908 postcard, despite the fact that the word “marriage” appears nowhere. Even though the woman broaching the topic is quite lovely, the man hems and haws when she says, “John! I have something to ask you. Don’t be in a hurry.” (The dog, meanwhile, is a real cynic, saying, “Poor John. I see his finish.”) The implication is that marriage is a raw deal for men no matter the appearance of one’s potential bride.
According to Dr. Katherine Parkin, postcards from this era can be coy. “It’s hard as a 21st-century reader to know the intention,” says Parkin. “Sometimes I think it seems quite clear, and sometimes it’s quite playful.” Here, it’s hard to tell whether “she landed him” because of her demure equestrian repartee or because she managed to chase him down on horseback. (Perhaps a little of both.)
This 1912 postcard, like many others, puts the woman in the implicitly ridiculous role of hunter. It’s not clear who the “dear creature” of the caption is in this image—the woman diligently pursuing a man in hopes of avoiding a thorny “single life” or the winged bachelor, enjoying his cigarette and cocktail as he evades capture.
Coming from the mouth of the cross-eyed, wild-haired anti-heroine of this 1915 card, the word propose has an effect like a gunshot. Parkin says postcards like this functioned “to anonymously shame people or criticize people”—in this case, by implying that any woman with a strong personality probably also has a face like a troll.
In keeping with the notion of marriage as punishment for men, this postcard compares walking past a crowd of flirtatious ladies to being repeatedly struck by a crowd of people wielding sticks. (Just imagine having to exchange pleasantries with a group of nice-looking women wearing low-cut dresses—doesn’t it make you feel for the guy?)
This postcard—one of series of particularly mean-spirited and grotesque cards put out by the company Winsch—suggests that the practice of allowing women to propose marriage not only emasculates men but also dehumanizes them. Apparently, what women really want is for their husbands to be glorified house pets.
Another Winsch card depicts an engaged man as “an unfortunate victim,” while bachelors are “survivors.” Parkin says that leap-year-proposal postcards enforced a double standard by valorizing bachelors at the same time that they depicted unmarried women as undesirable. (Indeed, these dudes all look like real catches.)
Leap-year-postcard artists often drew women resorting to violence in their attempts to get a man to marry them and showed women as bigger, stronger, and more forceful than men. “These domineering women were commonly depicted as unattractive aggressors,” writes Parkin in “Glittering Mockery: Twentieth-Century Leap Year Marriage Proposals.” Evidently, the woman in the red dress is so unappealing that she needs both a dagger and a hatchet to get this guy to agree to marry her.
According to Parkin, some artists emphasized the gender reversal of leap year proposals by giving women “elongated, red-tipped, phallic noses.” This postcard is doubly sexual: Note the suggestive imagery of the woman putting an (overly large) ring on the man’s (diminutive) finger. A woman who asks for what she wants: the ultimate boner-killer.
Other cards were less risqué and more clever in their gender reversals. This triptych shows a woman wooing a man first with letters, then by serenading him, and finally by taking him on her lap. (In this case, unusually, both parties appear to be enjoying the courtship.)
“Ah’s jumpin at the chance to get yo’ while yo’s helpless”
Leap year postcards could be racist as well as sexist. Though they mostly depicted middle- to upper-class white people, sometimes they stereotyped African-Americans with the black skin, red lips, and exaggerated drawl of minstrel-show characters.
Though most leap year postcards mocked single women who dared to propose and bachelors who allowed themselves to be emasculated by women, some took a more critical view of the institution. This leap year postcard tells women to ignore the prevailing cultural forces urging them to marry at all costs, since life for a married woman could quickly morph into a life of drudgery. It’s not exactly a knee-slapper—but compared with other leap year postcards, this one is practically a feminist manifesto.
In the roundly panned 2010 romantic comedy Leap Year, Amy Adams decides to travel to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on Feb. 29, since—according to the film’s interpretation of Irish tradition, at least—men proposed to on that rare day must agree to marriage.
While this premise sounds like a desperate attempt at injecting originality into a tired rom-com formula, there’s actually a historical basis for it—and it’s not limited to bad chick flicks. A hundred years ago, it was common knowledge in America that women were allowed to propose to men during leap years. (Most believed that the reversal held for the entire year, though proposal mania usually peaked in January and February.) The exact origins of the tradition are murky; one myth traces the tradition to an agreement between St. Patrick and St. Bridget in the fifth century, while another purports that Queen Margaret of Scotland instituted a law fining men who said no to a woman who proposed on leap day. Both of these origin stories are highly unlikely; the tradition didn’t enter the cultural lexicon until the 18th century and didn’t really catch on until the early 20th century.
Despite its uncertain roots, the tradition’s social function is easier to parse. According to Dr. Katherine Parkin, a historian at Monmouth University and the author of the article “Glittering Mockery: Twentieth-Century Leap Year Marriage Proposals” (recently published in the Journal of Family History), the leap-year-proposal rule felt like a way for women to exert a little power over their romantic fate, since their social freedoms in the early 20th century were otherwise not ideal.
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However, the tradition came accompanied by a big bundle of mixed messages. “While ostensibly empowering women to take action, this tradition functioned as a form of false empowerment for women by undermining their efforts to control their marital destiny,” writes Parkin. How exactly did it undercut women’s autonomy? With humor—every underminer’s favorite weapon.
In researching the tradition of leap year marriage proposals, Parkin discovered a vast quantity of cartoonish postcards depicting proposing women as fugly harridans. Postcards’ purpose in early-20th-century America fell somewhere between that of text messages and that of image macros—a way to convey practical information and share jokes back when mail was delivered twice a day. One of the most popular leap-year memes depicted proposing women as fat, unattractive, and domineering—sometimes even violent—and the men they proposed to as scrawny, weak, and emasculated. For example, one of the postcards shows a tiny man squeaking “I surrender” as two gargantuan women, brandishing a total of four deadly weapons, pin him against the wall.
Though the postcard craze had faded by the late 1910s, the idea that women could propose to men during leap years lasted until the late 1960s (although it still has some traction in the U.K.). Once strict gender roles softened and sexual mores loosened, the notion of a proposing woman began to seem less patently ridiculous. In an era when both Britney Spears and Halle Berry have proposed marriage, we’ve at least gotten past the stereotype that proposing women look like ogres.
Still, most Americans of today refuse to give up the ostensibly romantic ritual of the male proposal—even when a couple has discussed marriage in advance. Many progressive women still wait for their boyfriends to get down on one knee, just as many progressive men feel obligated to plan a special proposal. We may be past the point of assuming that men accept marriage proposals only at gunpoint, as one postcard from 1908 suggests. But we’re still far enough from true equality that it apparently never occurred to the producers of Leap Year that Amy Adams could just propose to her boyfriend one of the other 365 days of the year.
L.V. Anderson