MAIL ORDER HUSBANDS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3441, 10 March 1932, Page 6

MAIL ORDER HUSBANDS

CHICAGO INVESTIGATIONS

“When lovely woman stoops to folly . . . What art can wash her guilt away?” sang Goldsmith long ag-o, and a Chicago committee representing 15 civic organisations says that the saying is true to-day The committee has been investigating the matrimonial bureaux concerning which there were such sensational revelations in the recent trial of Harry Powers, executed for the murder of two women, both of whom he met through his marriage bureau. More than 100,000 women last year sought “mail order” husbands. The study was undertaken to seek to prove the effect of the agencies on white slavery. The committee finds little evidence of this, but does find that the bureaux are frequently used for illegal ends. Chicago has 22 marriage agencies, and San Francisco 11.

The committee reported: “From the Belle Guinness murders of 1908, in which a woman was alleged to have lured men to her Indiana farm through matrimonial advertising, to the recent Bluebeard Powers murders in West Virginia these advertisements have been used for ci-iminal purposes.” The committee has gone to the trouble of analysing a composite portrait of the women least likely to win the attentions of a “mail order husband.” She has red or pey hair, weighs 16st., and is a spiritualist, a universalist, or a Latter Day Saint.