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Marriage Agencies

Heritage Community Foundation, Albertasource.ca and The Famous Five Foundation
 
         

 

"Marriage Agencies" The Rocky Mountain Echo [Pincher Creek AB] 2 Aug. 1904.

A new matrimonial agency is being extensively advertised throughout Western Canada by a London, England firm, which evidently thinks that the bachelors of the West are in a deplorable state and anxious one and all to wed. . . . Doubtless there are less favoured spots than Pincher Creek in the great North-West, and the obliging offer of the firm to provide a wife for five dollars down and forty-five on thirty days after the safe performance of the marriage ceremony will probably meet many takers.

The advertisement is nicely worded. For instance it described the terrible fate to which thousands of "good, intelligent and attractive girls" are destined in England, nothing but the prospect of "living and dying as old maids", surely a horrible destiny. Will not the youth and chivalry of Western Canada at once rise up and rescue these damsels from such a fate? . . . The applicant besides his five dollars must send such particulars of himself as "a sensible girl would expect" and here is where the hardships will come in. For if the application had not to be accompanied by references from a clergyman or the police, all would be left to the honesty of the man himself.

Reprinted by permission of Women's Press.

 
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