Sylvia Pankhurst on the leap year

As reported in Inter Ocean, 12 January 1912, p.1 (Image from newspapers.com).

"The idea of proposing to a man never entered my head. I have other and more important things to think of."

Reporters asking Sylvia Pankhurst upon her arrival in America in 1912 if she would be taking advantage of the custom that says a woman can ask a man to marry her on this anomalous day received short shrift.

For 1912, like 2020, was a leap year. Pankhurst had travelled for eight days across the Atlantic Ocean to undertake a punishing three week tour to argue for political equality and to expose the repression of women campaigners in Britain. To be asked on arrival whether being allowed to propose was any kind of emancipation was trivialising and informed by the stereotypes about suffragettes being frustrated spinsters. She responded: "You ask me a silly and personal question."

She challenged those sexist assumptions and turned the scrutiny back onto her interrogators: "The only people who think anything of leap year and the chance of girls taking the initiative in making proposals of marriage are men." And that seems to me a good feminist answer to a silly and personal question.