EVERY YEAR A LEAP YEAR? or Let Bachelors Beware

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 241, 4 February 1944, Page 18

EVERY YEAR A LEAP YEAR? or Let Bachelors Beware

(Written for "The Listener" by

Uramao

NCE more a Leap Year () swims into our ken, The old Scottish Act of 1228 will be taken out of its pigeon-hole and waved in the faces of willin’ and unwillin’ Barkises. Here it is: "Be it ordonit that during ye reign of her maist blessed Majestie Margaret, ilka maiden ladee of baith high and lowe estaite shall hae libertie to bespeke ye man she likes. Gif he refuses to tak her to be his wife, he shall be mulcted in the sum of ane hundrity pundes, or less as his estaite may bee, except and alwais gif he can make it appeare that he is betrothit to anither woman; then he shall be free." One naturally asks: Stood Scotland and Scotsmen 700 years ago as viligantly on guard of their bawbees as they stand to-day? Or did the bachelors of Auld Scotia seize their dirks and claymores (or whatever weapons of offence and defence were then used) and, plaided and plumed in their tartan array, rise in rebellion against a law that would mulct them in "ane hundrity pundes" if they failed to respond to the aggressive "ilka maiden ladees’ who seized the opportunity Leap Year presented? Possibly the wealthy minority paid up to prolong their own liberty, and considered the price cheap. * * * EAP YEAR proposals and the advisability of making every year a Leaping one will be debated on the termination of the war. Already the cognoscenti are busy on the subject of making marriage compulsory to increase the population. The privilege which a Leap Year concedes women, many maintain, should be cartied into post-war years. After all, they say, the war work of women in all branches of national service has been so successful that they should prove equally effective in selecting fathers for their children. They argue further that woman, continuing her work after the war, will be able to maintain a husband in the style of life he has been used to, minus, of course, any masculine habits she fails to approve. Those too who say that husband and wife should pursue their own careers outside the home, that institution being transformed into a sort of club where they meet in their hours of ease, are bound to wake up too. We may in short expect a demand for a lease-lend system till both parties are satisfied they have met the one and only one. None of these will be new demands. Douglas Jerrold argued that marriage would be successful only when a man could treat his wife as he would a bank note. On attaining her 40th year he should be able to exchange her for two twenties. FrOR some reason or other the statisticians do not give us any figures concerning the success or failure of Leap Year marriages, but the partiality of little wisps of women for prizefighters with broken noses and cauliflower ears, and of 15-stone Amazons for little shrimps of men, suggests that one year in four is too many for such a right, and that women with their choice of rejection and acceptance of marriage proposals are already in a very strong position relatively to men.

A serious school of thought maintains that a woman’s intuitive faculties are always right while man’s reasoning faculties frequently land him in difficulties. ‘Discussing this matter, and the advisability of making every year a Leap Year, Dr. A. F. Schofield, lecturing before an audience of women in London at the Victoria Institute some time ago, urged that the custom of males proposing marriage was detrimental to the status of women and her offspring and harmful to the race. He predicted that woman would one day select her mate in a way that would now be considered grossly indecent. As an example of the accurateness of woman’s intuition, he told this story. One day he was driving through a city street with a woman friend and a man (till then unknown to the woman) who was one of the most esteemed and prominent men in the city. When

the latter got out of the vehicle the woman said: "That is one of the wickedest men I have ever met. I feel it." The doctor, shocked at her estimate of his friend, warmly defended him. But the woman was right... Listen. Three years later that man stood in the doctor’s consulting room confessing to a series of appalling offences. NOTHER proposal we are sure to hear of this year is that of making bachelors more sensible of the obligations they owe to the State. We shall again be told how in old Korea a bachelor was forced to wear skirts and only permitted to shed them on attaining the married state; how in ancient Sparta, the celibate was loaded with indignities, one being marched through the desolate parts of the city chanting a dirge on his unhappy condition; how in Penguinland, where Nature has furnished every denizen with an evening dress and a dicky tie-a land of born gentlemen in short ~-the bachelor is regarded with undissembled feelings of aversion. Well, scientists may find it diverting to watch a lonely bachelor being shooed off from one pair of birds only to crash into another, till finally he makes for the open sea to ruminate on the joys of bachelordom. But let us not be too (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) 2 severe on the human bachelor. It may be his love for the female sex that keeps him celibate. Have we not all heard of the bachelor who confessed that he regarded women much as he did the lions and tigers at the zoo. Their great lustrous eyes fascinate him; their soft and alluring furs hold him in thrall; the grace of their movements is bewitching. But he would climb a tree if you brought — one home to him for a mate.