Vintage Leap Year

Editorial cartoonists in the past thought that the Leap Year/Day tradition of "Ladies Privilege" was very amusing. 

The Tacoma Times, December 23, 1903

The Evening World, New York, NY, December 31, 1904

New York Tribune, February 28, 1904

But not just cartoonists found the Leap year tradition an entertaining subject.  In the leap year of 1892, popular authoress, Edith Sessions Tupper wrote  "But some philanthropist, to whom women should be eternally grateful, ordained that once in four years they should have a whack at proposing.... Rouse maids and widows! the battlefield is open for conflict."

The Salt Lake Herald, January 1, 1892

Los Angeles Herald, December 25, 1892

An article in the Los Angeles Herald on December 25, 1892 gave this bio for Mrs. Tupper:

        "Mrs. Edith Sessions Tupper is a daughter of the Hon. Walter Loren Sessions, ex-member of      

         congress and prominent in New York politics, and was born at his home in Chautauqua county, 

        N. Y., about the beginning of the civil war. Her early opportunities were of the very best.  She  

        was reared in an intellectual atmosphere, educated at Vassar and acquired all the varied  

        knowledge and social standing possible to a congressman’s daughter in Washington city.  Ten 

        years ago she married Mr. Horace E. Tupper, a railroad manager, and went to live in Chicago, 

        where she launched into journalism and made a brilliant success from the start.

        After doing much good work for The Herald, Tribune and Inter Ocean she removed to New 

        York and soon became known as one of the most versatile writers in the country.  In poetry she 

        has decided talent for society verses as they are called and her lines beginning,

              Painted and perfumed, feathered and pink,

              Here is your ladyships fan,

        have been much quoted.  As a closing personality it may be added that she weighs 150 pounds, 
        is most “unfashionably healthy” and has a wealth of light brown hair that is the admiration of  

        all her friends and the envy of many."

Some books she wrote were By Whose Hand?,  Heart's Triumph, and The Stuff of Dreams.  Her short stories were published in many magazines; some magazines that published her stories were All Story Weekly, Love Story, Breezy Stories and Women's World.