Etiquette and Leap Year Proposals

Could this “The Gilded Age” proposal have been any more romantic? Etiquipedia thinks not, especially if Peggy Scott had done the proposing! Besides, 1883 was not a Leap Year.
 – “Considered in the abstract we do not see why a woman should not express her natural preferences as freely as a man in regard to the opposite sex. Indeed, she seems to be free to do so in every other respect but that of love and marriage.”

A Leap Year Proposition

As leap year is upon us the momentous question, Shall women propose? confronts us in various newspaper columns, with its usual four yearly regularity. Conservative people will of course pooh-pooh the idea, and the more frivolous laugh at the same. Some of our radical, would-be social innovators will be advocates, and others will fulminate their varied denunciations.

Considered in the abstract we do not see why a woman should not express her natural preferences as freely as a man in regard to the opposite sex. Indeed, she seems to be free to do so in every other respect but that of love and marriage. And yet is not this the most important of all earthly relations to the human race as society is at present organized?

Mere reasoning aside, however, other considerations enter into our estimates of propriety. Here we have sentiment, which so largely makes up the sum of womanly opinions on most subjects outside of bread and breathing.

As the majority of people think now, and as they will probably continue to think for many years to come, there are certain moral and social questions wherein old time precedent will doubtless continue to rule! The realm of courtship and marriage still lies fully within these prescribed limits.

In this affair it has from time immemorial been her inalienable and altogether charming privilege to be the one who should be sought, wooed and won. Whether this be abstractly right or wrong it is so ingrained in the very nature of society at large that the isolated kicks which are here and there made have so far produced little or no effect. Yankee Blade, 1893

  🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia