The Courtship of Eva Eldridge
A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage-Mad Fifties
by Diane Simmons
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Pub Date Aug 15 2016 | Archive Date Aug 15 2016
University of Iowa Press | University Of Iowa Press
Description
Everyone got married in the 1950s, then moved to the suburbs to have the children of the soon-to-be-famous baby boom. For Americans who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, prosperous married life was a triumph. The unwed were objects of pity, scorn, even suspicion. And so in the 1950s, Eva Eldridge, no longer so young and marginally employed, was the perfect target for handsome Vick, who promised everything: storybook romance, marital respectability, and the lively social life she loved. When he disappeared not long after their honeymoon, she was devastated.
Eva hadn’t always been so vulnerable. Growing up pretty and popular in rural Oregon, she expected to marry young and live a life much like that of her parents, farming and rearing children. But then the United States threw its weight into World War II and as men headed to battle, the government started recruiting women to work in their places. Eva, like many other young women, found that life in the city with plenty of money, personal freedom, and lots of soldiers and sailors eager to pay court was more exhilarating than life down on the farm. After the war, she was ambivalent about getting married and settling down—at least until Vick arrived.
Refusing to believe her brand-new husband had abandoned her, Eva set about tracking down a man who, she now believed, was more damaged by wartime trauma than she had known. But instead of a wounded hero, she found a long string of women much like herself—hard-working, intelligent women who had loved and married Vick and now had no idea where—or even who—he was.
Drawing on a trove of some eight hundred letters and papers, Diane Simmons tells the story of Eva’s poignant struggle to get her dream husband back, as well as the stories of the women who had stood at the altar with Vick before and after her. Eva’s remarkable life illuminates women’s struggle for happiness at a time when marriage—and the perfect husband—meant everything.
Advance Praise
“The Courtship of Eva Eldridge is both a riveting narrative of detection and a moving story about individual lives caught up in the changing gender roles generated by World War II. Diane Simmons employs dogged research, smart analysis, existing scholarship, and lively prose to create a history that is hard to put down.”—Susan Hartmann, author, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s
“Diane Simmons has brilliantly used a collection of never-before-seen World War II letters to tell a story that has all the twists of a true crime novel. At its heart, this is a poignant, extraordinary tale of a woman who married a man with a secret and a troubling past.”—Andrew Carroll, editor, War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, a New York Times bestseller
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781609384616 |
| PRICE | $19.95 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Reviewer 153322
This is a brilliant book--the author, Simmons, knew Eldridge as a glamorous and mysterious adult who would sweep into their small Eastern Oregon town throughout her childhood in the 1960s. After inheriting all of her papers, Simmons began piecing together an extraordinary story of a completely shameless con-man who married Eldridge (along with an eventual total of nine other women) in a string of bigamy that spun out over 30 years. On one level, this is a master class in historical detective work, as Simmons tracks down all the paperwork and the living participants and gently extracts the narrative, while on another, it is a page-turning contextualization of how extremely capable women who had survived the depression, been Kaiser aircraft employees in WWII, put up with no shit in demanding jobs and lived alone happily fell for and then pursued a man whose own warped childhood in the 30s set him on a course to love them and leave them (almost always at the wheel of the brand new car jointly purchased).
Jessica C, Reviewer
In a time where it's very difficult to change who you are, and all the hoops you have to jump through to get married, let alone get a job and secure housing, this book about a many who married multiple women is almost hard to believe.
This is an interesting look at one woman's life in the era of the depression through to after WWII. An independent, strong, courageous woman, almost hell bent on doing life her way. She gets crossed by a man she thought she would spend her life with, only to discover the awful depths of his betrayal. A wonderful look at her search for the truth, with personal letters to give a real time look into what was happening, what Eva was going through. Overall a great book looking back at a time many of us have only learned about in class.
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