Eliza Calvert Hall

Eliza Caroline "Lida" Obenchain ( Calvert; February 11, 1856 – December 20, 1935), known by her pen name Eliza Calvert Hall, was an American author, women's rights advocate, and suffragist from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was widely known early in the 20th century for her short stories featuring an elderly widowed woman, "Aunt Jane", who plainly spoke her mind about the people she knew and her experiences in the rural south.

Obenchain's best known work is Aunt Jane of Kentucky which received extra notability when United States President Theodore Roosevelt recommended the book to the American people during a speech, saying, "I cordially recommend the first chapter of Aunt Jane of Kentucky as a tract in all families where the menfolk tend to selfish or thoughtless or overbearing disregard to the rights of their womenfolk."

Biography Eliza Caroline Calvert, daughter of Thomas Chalmers Calvert and Margaret (Younglove) Calvert, was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky on February 11, 1856. She was known as "Lida" throughout her life. Lida's father Thomas Chalmers Calvert was born in Giles County, Tennessee to Samuel Wilson Calvert, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife Eliza Caroline (Hall) Calvert. Lida's mother, Margaret Younglove, was from Johnstown, New York.

Lida attended a local private school, and then Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio. She pursued two of the careers acceptable for a single woman in her era, teaching school and writing sentimental poetry. She began her professional writing career to help support her mother and siblings. Scribner's Monthly magazine accepted two of her poems for publication in 1879 and paid her the equivalent of US$600. She continued writing and had at least six more poems published before age thirty. See also her 1892 article, Why Democratic Women Want the Ballot published under the pseudonym, "A Kentucky Woman" for The National Bulletin in 1892.

Lida had been involved in suffrage concerns since 1897 when she wrote papers and other contributions to the KERA conventions each year. She was a frequent contributor to the Woman's Journal in 1899. She also served as corresponding secretary in the Bowling Green association, handing out literature and traveling to Nashville, Tennessee, to present papers.

In 1899, Elnora Babcock, superintendent of press work at the National American Woman Suffrage Association headquarters, urged the Kentucky ERA to fill a vacancy for press superintendent. In 1900, Kentucky Equal Rights Association President Laura Clay recruited Lida, then president of the Bowling Green ERA chapter, to the role of press superintendent for Kentucky. While she advanced ready-to-print material on the women's suffrage movement to newspapers, much of the material she submitted was her own commentary. In her role as press superintendent, Lida published more than 500 articles in Kentucky newspapers in 1901. The one newspaper in which she failed to obtain space for her articles was the Courier-Journal, whose editor, Henry Watterson, opposed women's suffrage.

In addition to writing newspaper articles, state press superintendents wrote articles for the national press superintendent. Lida frequently contributed pieces to Babcock, so much so that she began to advocate for greater resources to help her meet press work demands. At the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Buffalo, New York, in 1908, Laura Clay recognized Lida's diligence for press work, given the increased number of newspapers on her contact list.

Lida used her talent as a writer to draft original articles to advocate for women's rights in other media. In 1898 Cosmopolitan published "Sally Ann's Experience." The story was reprinted in the Woman's Journal, the Ladies' Home Journal, and in international magazines and newspapers as far away as New Zealand, making the story familiar to people around the world. "Sally Ann's Experience" became the first story of Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a collection of short stories published in 1907. She followed up with The Land of Long Ago in 1909 and Clover and Blue Grass in 1916. Lida published a short novel, To Love and to Cherish, in 1911.

Through Aunt Jane and the other characters in her stories, Lida tells of the problems facing women of her time with imagery and symbolism taken from the domestic arts of sewing, cooking, and gardening. Family responsibilities caused her to move to Dallas, Texas to care for her daughter Margery, who had contracted tuberculosis. She continued to write, but her most productive years as a writer were past. After the death of her daughter in 1923, she stayed in Texas, where she died on December 20, 1935.