Photo by Flickr user espelina. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Eric Felten, writing about leap-year traditions for The Wall Street Journal revives memories of a once very real but (I hope!) now nearly forgotten school ritual, the “Sadie Hawkins” dance.
In Mansfield, Ohio, in 1976, a spot called the BAR-n celebrated the calendar anomaly with Leap Year Dreamsicle Cocktails (vodka, orange juice, and vanilla ice cream) and promised the drink was “Guaranteed to make your dreams come true.”
What sort of dreams? Marriage — in particular, marriage as proposed by the distaff half of the relationship. According to folk tradition, the leap year (and especially the leap day) is when women can take the lead in popping the question — and when their proposals cannot be refused. Well before “Li’l Abner” cartoonist Al Capp morphed the conceit into Sadie Hawkins Day, the symbol of ladies’ leap-year frolics was the butterfly net used to capture one’s man.
...
...Washington Post no doubt had it right in 1972 when the paper predicted that the custom was doomed: “With the woman’s liberation movement growing by leaps, by leap year 1976 Sadie Hawkins may be all but forgotten.” The image of desperate maidens armed with man-catching nets is long out of date. These days, a woman can propose to a man whatever she likes (within the legalistic confines of sexual-harassment law, of course), whenever she likes, without risking the slightest opprobrium. Progress, yes, but it does rather take the fun out of leap day, which used to be honored with all sorts of parties and dances riffing on the Sadie Hawkins theme.
I can say in all honesty that when I was in 7th Grade, roughly same time the soon-to-be solid 2nd-Wave of feminists were just reaching college age, I wasn’t anybody’s idea of a feminist-sympathizing man. So when I got to what was then called Junior High School (7-9th Grades) and was told by a beaming homeroom teacher that in addition to a sock hop (just like your parents had) there would be a “sadie hawkins” dance where the girls would ask the boys to dance… I had no idea how something like that could possibly work. Girls ask boys?
But seriously, back then? Might as well claim women would admit enjoying seeing naked men in a ski-resort rental condo shower. It just wouldn’t happen.
In my own defense it was two years before my first kiss when a (very young) woman my age suggested I do so. By then I thought nothing of it (and indeed had thought nothing of it till just now! Funny how it can take you 40 years to notice something like that.)
Submitted by 1963 (not verified) on Sun, 2008-02-24 10:10.
Always hated that Sadie Hawkins dance. I suppose I subscribed to the aforementioned belief that I was responsible for attracting the boy's attention, and he was responsible for asking (not that it actually happened very often). There was NO way I ever would have made that move, for fear of being shot down. I guess I always had it in my head that it didn't bother boys as much. Like y'all were somehow trained to expect it and could just blow it off.
As the mother of a boy, I'm a tad ashamed of myself for that.
[You're right that it hurts like mustard in a paper cut, Biscuit, and it doesn't help that the resignation and irony and bitterness and other emotional calluses that builds up as rejections accumulate becomes its own self-reinforcing problem. Life would still suck if everyone instead of just men asked each other out, but at least then we'd have twice as many people to commiserate with us and *nobody* out there saying "it's so easy for [pencil in other gender here]." And I guess what I'm thinking (with no irony at all, by the way) isn't that you were a bad person back then, you're just a better person now. --fl]