Eliza Calvert Hall: Kentucky Author and Suffragist
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 2007 Eliza Calvert Hall: Kentucky Author and Suffragist Lynn E. Niedermeier Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Niedermeier, Lynn E., "Eliza Calvert Hall: Kentucky Author and Suffragist" (2007). Literature in English, North America. 54. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/54 Eliza Calvert Hall Eliza Calvert Hall Kentucky Author and Suffragist LYNN E. NIEDERMEIER THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Frontispiece: Eliza Calvert Hall, after the publication of A Book of Hand-Woven Coverlets. The Colonial Coverlet Guild of America adopted the work as its official book. (Courtesy DuPage County Historical Museum, Wheaton, 111.) Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2007 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Niedermeier, Lynn E., 1956- Eliza Calvert Hall : Kentucky author and suffragist / Lynn E. Niedermeier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8131-2470-4 (alk. paper) 1. Hall, Eliza Calvert. 2. Suffragists—United States—Biography. 3. Feminists— United States—Biography. I. Title. PS3515.A3168Z78 2007 813\52—dc22 [B] 2007016756 Member of the Association of American University Presses In memory of Emma Sailer and Agnes Crichton Young Contents Acknowledgments ix Prologue 1 1. Fighting and Preaching 4 2. "It Did Not Look as We Had Pictured You" 12 3. Exile 25 4. The Major 39 5. Cook, Scullion, Nurse, Laundress 51 6. Straight to a Woman's Heart 63 7. Money and Marriage 82 8. Sally Ann's Experience 93 9. A Jumble of Quilt Pieces 106 10. Aunt Jane of Kentucky 120 11. Seeing Double 131 12. A Woman Spinning and Weaving 148 13. Riding to Town 161 14. "Be Glad You Are Not a Woman" 174 15. Grandmother's Debut 188 16. A Hard Worker All Her Life 200 Epilogue 212 Appendix: Calvert and Younglove Family Members 217 Notes 221 Selected Bibliography 265 Index 277 Illustrations follow page 130 Acknowledgments For their assistance in the preparation of this biography, sincere thanks are due to the following institutions and individuals: the Kentucky Li- brary and Museum, Western Kentucky University; Jonathan Jeffrey, WKU Professor of Library Special Collections; Debra Day and Selina Langford, WKU Interlibrary Loan Librarians; Diane Kaufman, the Western College Memorial Archives; Kathleen Goodner Marine; Di- ane B. Jacob, Preston Library, Virginia Military Institute; Beth Bur- nett and Meg Meiman, University of Alabama Archives; Tim Tingle, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives; Sheila Biles, U.S. Military Academy Special Collections and Archives Division; Bob Glass, Grace Doherty Library, Centre College; Rachel Roberts, Dal- las Historical Society; Josh Clough, University of Oklahoma Western History Collections; Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Claire McCann, Special Collections Librarian and William J. Mar- shall Jr., Manuscripts Curator, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky; William Bennett, for permission to use items from the Esther Bennett Deposit in the Laura Clay Papers; Eastern Kentucky University Library Special Collections; the Filson Historical Society; the DuPage County Historical Museum, Wheaton, Illinois, and its senior curator, Steph McGrath, for providing very helpful information on the Colonial Coverlet Guild of America; Dr. Morris A. Grubbs of Lindsey Wilson College and an anonymous reader for the University Press of Kentucky, for their thoughtful comments on the manuscript; and Cora Jane Spiller, for her generous gift of Lida's books. Prologue Lord, give me work, and strength enough to do it. —Aunt Jane "A HUMAN LIFE IS THE MOST interesting thing in the world," Eliza Calvert Hall once observed in reaction to the biography of a fellow author.1 This book seeks to show—for what it tells us about the times of an ordinary Kentucky woman who resolved to be a writer and a feminist in the late nineteenth century—that no more interesting life can be chronicled than that of Eliza herself. Eliza Calvert Hall was the pen name of Eliza "Lida" Calvert Obenchain, whose fame crested with her 1907 collection of stories, Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Appearing in at least thirty-three editions, the book endeared its principal narrator, the elderly, cheerful, plain- talking Aunt Jane, to perhaps a million readers.2 Lida earned further acclaim with two more collections of stories, a novel, and a ground- breaking study of coverlet weaving. By the 1920s, however, she and other popular women writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Glasgow, Kate Chopin, Alice Hegan Rice, and Annie Fellows Johnston had begun their slide into decades-long obscurity beneath a new wave of mostly male authors that included Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Er- nest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in Kentucky, Jesse Stuart and Robert Penn Warren.3 The American women's movement of the 1960s initiated a redis- covery of Lida's generation of female storytellers. Aunt Jane's gentle, 2 Prologue homespun philosophy became newly quotable, particularly after fem- inists succeeded in elevating one of her domestic talents, quilt mak- ing, from an aesthetically trivial craft to the realm of legitimate art.4 Although Lida remains largely ignored by anthologists of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women writers, she too has been af- forded some recent attention in scholarly journals, popular drama, and reissues of Aunt Jane of Kentucky.5 To know Aunt Jane, nevertheless, is to know little about Lida, her literary achievements, the sources of her creativity, or the chal- lenges she confronted as both a woman and a writer. She was born into a family that was a microcosm of the stubborn principles, divid- ed loyalties, and anguished choices that would soon ignite the Civil War. After the war, she suffered the economic dislocation common to many Kentuckians, but through circumstances that were uniquely catastrophic. Although the war abolished slavery in her state, Lida entered adulthood subject to laws that not only denied the vote to members of her sex but fixed their age of consent at twelve and, upon marriage, relieved them of most of their property and civil rights—all within a social framework of chivalrous, southern-style worship of the Kentucky woman's legendary beauty and charm. Of the few vocations open to respectable single women, Lida pursued two, teaching school and composing sentimental poetry, before becoming a wife and the mother of four children in eight years. By the end of Lida's life, almost all of women's legal and political disabilities had vanished,6 but she had hardly been a spectator to this transformation; indeed, the story of her contribution to Kentucky lit- erature must be told alongside the story of her work with the Kentucky Equal Rights Association and its founder, Laura Clay. Lida's advocacy of simple justice for her sex—for every woman's right to vote, make a will, control her property, earn and keep her wages, develop her mind, and be accorded respect for her housekeeping and childrearing—was inseparable from her fiction writing. Even as these two passions com- peted for her time, she readily subordinated them to a third, the wel- fare of her family. As a consequence, Lida became starkly acquainted with the choices known to all women who take up the pen—between work and home, solitude and connection, dreams and duty, truth and propaganda, creativity and utility—in short, between the elusive pre- requisites for art and the categorical demands of life. Prologue 3 Like many authors, Lida bristled at the notion that her fiction proceeded wholly from autobiography and that her own personality was identical to that of her Muse.7 Her surviving letters to friends and family help to sustain her objection, even if they also trick Lida into exaggerating her flaws through personal missives that were nev- er intended to be read cumulatively, much less by a stranger born one hundred years later. In contrast to the fictional Aunt Jane, a con- tented old woman who treasures her memories of a long and demo- cratic marriage, accepts others' failings and believes that everything will work out for the best, Lida was more often troubled, pessimistic, quick both to judge and to regret, impatient with faith when it defied logic, and narrowed by assumptions—particularly about race—that marked her as a product of her time and place. At the same time, Lida possessed not only talent but other strengths that proved critical to her success in literature and to her effectiveness as a champion of her sex: courage, loyalty, independence, robust intel- ligence, and the determination, despite significant obstacles, to keep her gaze fixed on things greater than herself. The life of Eliza Calvert Hall provides us with an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the battle for women's rights and women's writing—stories that, Aunt Jane would agree, are always worth telling.