Fifty Books Project 2023

The Courtship of Eva Eldridge by Diane Simmons

This is a fascinating story that Simmons (whom I knew many years ago in graduate school) has built into a compelling examination of 1950s America.  Simmons grew up on an Eastern Oregon farm; Eva Eldridge was a neighbor, a glamorous woman when Diane was a little girl.  They stayed in touch and when Eldridge died she named Simmons as executor of her will.  As a result, Simmons came into possession of a large trove of letters and began to explore her friend’s life.

Eldridge grew up on an Eastern Oregon farm during the Depression.  She came from a deeply religious family and was expected (and fully expected herself) to be married with a family by the time she was 19 or 20.  Mother and housewife were simply the only occupations considered worthy and moral for women.  But World War II intervened:  her fiancé was sent to Europe and Eva moved to Portland to work in a shipyard now desperate for women laborers.  In the city, with an independent income, Eva discovered a different kind of life.  She enjoyed going out, dating different men, living in her own apartment.  Her fiancé returned from the war with what we would call PTSD and demanded she give up her independence to take care of him.  She decided not to give up her independence.

However, as the war ended, the world around her changed.  Marriage was once again the only worthy goal for a woman.  This stricture was enforced culturally – by magazines like Good Housekeeping and The Ladies Home Journal as well as by movies with Doris Day and others.  But it was also enforced economically.  Shipyards and factories that had begged women to work in 1942 began laying them off within days of VE Day.  Soon, whole sections of labor were once again reserved for men and women who tried to get or keep such jobs were labeled disloyal – there were returning veterans who needed employment.  The Courtship of Eva Eldridge tells the story of how an independent woman tried to navigate that new world.  

Simmons skips a bit on the details of Eva’s life immediately after the war.  She remains single, working in the hotel industry, is briefly married to an alcoholic veteran, but generally navigates her independence despite the disapproval of society in general and her mother in particular.  The most dramatic element, and the main focus of the second half of the book, is her 1958 marriage to Vick Virgil.  Eva is already 35 years old – an old maid rescued by true love.  The couple seems deeply in love, but eighteen months after the marriage, Vick disappears.  Eva comes home and finds the closet empty and the bank account light.

In the course of searching for the husband she is still devoted to, Eva discovers that Vick has been married before.  Simmons ultimately turns up 10 marriages, one after the other over the course of nearly two decades.  Virgil would not divorce these women, but simply disappear and within a few years marry again.  He was a con man, but monetary gain was not high on his agenda – he stole money and cars from his wives, and left three of them with children to raise, but he did not seek out wealthy women and did not go out of his way to bankrupt them.  He seems to have thrived on attractive working class women who would feel like he was a prize.  He sought out the feeling of perfect love, from a woman who would treat him like a hero.  When that honeymoon was over, and the day-to-day reality of marriage set in, he was gone. 

Simmons skillfully weaves scholarly looks at psychology, social history and pop culture into these biographies and through this very dysfunctional couple gets a riveting picture of what she calls the “marriage-mad fifties.”  What struck me most strongly about this was the way she was able to place those fifties into the culture of the decades that came before and after them.  The way deprivation colored the dreams of teenagers in The Depression, the way the upheaval of the war changed women’s view of their place in society, the extreme pressure to change back in the post-war era, and the cracks in that view of the nuclear family that began to form in the 1960s.  

I personally found Eva much more interesting than Vick.  Though his case was dramatic, he simply embodied a stereotype we are all familiar with – he was literally a love ’em and leave him sort of guy.  The fact that he seemed to come as close as he could to actually loving these women makes him more complicated than a thousand characters in country and rock songs, but he is still totally recognizable.  Eva is not nearly so unique at first glance, but Simmons gets into her head and places her in context very effectively.  She becomes a lens through which to examine the American family in both its idealized form and its reality.

We never forget that Simmons knew these people – she was the flower girl when Eva married Vick and kept in touch with Eva for decades after that marriage.  As the book goes on, she becomes more prominent, with much of the second half narrating her own search for the truth of Eva’s past.  She is a restrained presence, however.  We understand her reactions to events she is uncovering, but the focus is always on Eva’s reaction – or Simmons’ best understanding of that reaction.