The Women

Twelve good women and true were hard at work last week pondering such social problems as "Should a pock-marked woman marry a blind man?"

The American Woman's Jury (Mutual, Mon.-Fri., 1:45 p.m., E.W.T.) has been on the air for six weeks. They have been breathless weeks--even by U.S. radio standards. Fortnight after the show opened as a sustainer, it drew a fat sponsor (Lewis-Howe Co., makers of Nature's Remedy and Turns).

No Divorcees. Woman's Jury is a three-way parlay of courtroom drama, confession, and the endless domestic problems of the soap operas. The problems come out of the mailbag. One problem is chosen for each program and presented to the jury, which makes its decision after hearing the arguments of attorneys (one male, one female) for both sides of the question. The juries (a fresh one for each show) are chosen from Boston's women's clubs. No two-time divorcees or multi-widowed women are allowed.

The jurors take to their task like hens to corn. They arbitrate for women with fickle husbands, wives wanting to know whether to move in with mother, wives with husbands who drink.

"Damnation." The juries' verdicts are often a source of astonishment and dismay to 305-lb. George Bradford Simpson, divorced, the ex-soap-opera "doctor" and free-lance writer who thought up, oversees and half-owns the show. His score on guessing the decisions is close to zero. One decision which bothered him occurred in the case of a wife whose husband admitted that he loved another woman but wanted her to stay on while he pursued his new affair. She asked the jury what to do. They voted unanimously in favor of her staying on.

Another Simpson-baffling decision arose from the plight of a wealthy widow whose friends warned her not to marry a man because he was after her money. She was lonely and willing to take a chance, but the jury said no (7-to-5). An answer of no (9-to-3) was also given to a wife who could not decide whether to take her husband back after a long term in prison because their children did not know about his record.

Simpson, who is tickled at the swift success of The American Woman's Jury, has an answer for the verdicts that agitate him. Says he: "That's the damnation of women. Security is all they're after. As long as they have it, that's all they want."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.