Family / Annotation

Let Us Mate

Proposal advice from Inez Milholland, originally published in the Chicago Day Book, 1916.

via Lapham’s Quarterly on January 3, 1916

...brought the pair together—their charismatic intensity and steadfast devotion to equality—through its liberal use of quotes. Months later, Milholland collapsed while giving a speech in Los Angeles, dying soon after at the age of thirty. Boissevain later married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

How will the leap-year girl propose? How will the leap-year bachelor act when she lays her heart at his feet?

The beautiful Inez Milholland Boissevain, who proposed three times, answers the first question, and her happy husband, Eugen Boissevain, replies to the second.

Everybody in America knows Inez Milholland, the beautiful suffragist who started her career by stirring up feminist agitation in staid old Vassar College, scorned New York society, practiced law in the ponce courts, and finally got herself jailed in England for rioting with Mrs. Pankhurst’s “wild women.”

There was amazement in the suffrage ranks when she suddenly became the wife of Eugene Boissevain. Feminists marveled that their dashing young general had consented to become the mere wife of a mere man. They wondered how young Mr. Boissevain did it.

Then came the most amazing act of Inez’s amazing career. She calmly announced that she did the proposing. This most beautiful of all suffragists further admitted that she had to pop the question three times before the man of her choice accepted.

Here is her advice to all girls who wish to propose:

Let her go toward the man with extended hand. Let her put her case to him freely and frankly three times if necessary. I did! Leap year or any other year. I am for woman’s free education, free work, and free speech in love as well as out of it. To me it is much more dignified to say the actual words “Let us mate” than to resort to lures and to seek to place the responsibility elsewhere. When an honest proposal is made, at least the man has a fair chance to escape. But when a woman traps a man by smiles and blandishments, then the man, waking up, finding himself hopelessly cornered, snarls, “It’s your fault!” My husband and I would undoubtedly have been lost to each other if I had not done the proposing. That is why I am proud of having done it. The one who first realizes the affinity of heart and soul should make it known to the other. In a majority of cases this realization comes first to the woman.

Here is Mr. Boissevain’s version of what happened when those three never-to-be-forgotten proposals were made: “I never had even thought of proposing to Inez Milholland because I did not intend to marry. In general, I do not approve of marriage as an institution.”