Eliza Calvert Hall: Kentucky Author and Suffragist (review)

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist scholars began to recover and reassess the stories of women long marginalized, excluded, or misinterpreted in traditional historical accounts. This effort of recovery and reassessment has focused copious attention on women's rights advocates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Feminist literary critics have highlighted the works of women writers of this period, bringing them from "feminine" backwaters to the mainstream of literary and cultural analysis. In particular, authors of local color or regional fiction like Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke, and Kate Chopin have been recognized as some of the most significant writers of the late nineteenth century.

Lynn F. Niedermeier continues this process of critical reclamation in her biography of Eliza Calvert Hall, the pen name of Kentuckian Eliza Calvert Obenchain, whose life intersected the worlds of both literature and advocacy. Born on February 11, 1856, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hall would go on to become a popular local color writer and fierce crusader for suffrage and women's rights. With the achievement of the vote in 1920, along with the decline in popularity of local color fiction, however, Hall sank into what Niedermeier sees as an undeserved obscurity. Thus, Niedermeier's aim in this work is to reestablish Hall's historical significance as writer and feminist in turn-of-the-century American society.

Niedermeier ably shows how the circumstances of Hall's life shaped both her fiction and her passionate commitment to women's rights. The greatest trauma of Hall's young life—her father's indictment upon charges of embezzlement, followed by his long exile from Kentucky, and the family's descent into poverty—impressed upon her the social and economic fragility of women's lives. Hall's family troubles closely paralleled those of Laura Clay, her close friend and political ally. Both women channeled their frustration and resentment at women's legal and economic disabilities into work for the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) and the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Although generally tethered to home and family after her marriage in 1885, Hall continued to promote the cause of women's rights through her writings. She contributed regularly to suffrage journals in which she attacked anti-suffrage arguments along a wide front. Hall's sharp-edged essays took on critics ranging from unsympathetic clergymen--"all the Reverends and Right Reverends and Very Reverends"—to chivalrous gentlemen who sought to protect their "queens" from the dirty business of politics—"no real queen ever had to cook, scrub, and sew . . . and seek leave from the legislature to control her own property"—to tradition-bound, long-suffering women who committed the "sin" of unselfishness (71-76).

In the early years of the twentieth century, Hall moved her struggle for social reform from the intellectual arena to the literary one. And it was Hall's fiction that captured the public imagination and brought her nationwide popularity and financial reward. Aunt Jane of Kentucky, Hall's best-known work, was advertised in the New York Times as "The Book President [Theodore] Roosevelt Recommends" (122). Hall set these stories in the pastoral hamlet of Goshen, presided over by her most celebrated literary creation, Aunt Jane, a charming, sharp-witted, elderly lady who tells humorous tales of the past to an unnamed female narrator. Flowing through Aunt Jane's homespun anecdotes, however, is a subversive, political subtext: women's legal and social injustices, their economic dependence upon men, the realities of patriarchal marriage and religion, and men's hypocrisy.

Overall, this book has much to recommend it. It is well-written, carefully researched, and brings to light a woman long overlooked by women's historians. Niedermeier skillfully weaves Hall's story into the history of both the women's rights and local color movements. In so doing, she makes a convincing case that Hall should take her place alongside her more famous contemporaries in the history of both movements as a subject of continued...