Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham

Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham (born Nov. 17, 1815, Rensselaerville, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 15, 1864, New York, N.Y.) was an American reformer and writer, an early advocate of the importance of rehabilitation as a focus of prison internment.

Eliza Burhans grew up from age four in the unhappy home of foster parents. At age 15 she came into the care of an uncle, and she briefly attended the Albany Female Academy. In 1835 she went to live with a married sister in Tazewell county, Illinois, where in 1836 she married Thomas Jefferson Farnham, a lawyer who soon won fame as a Western explorer. In 1840 they settled in Washington Hollow, near Poughkeepsie, New York. While her husband was working on his widely read Travels in the Great Western Prairies (1841), Farnham began to take an interest in reform movements. One of her earliest published essays, in Brother Jonathan magazine in 1843, was in opposition to political rights for women, a step she feared would actually reduce the influence of women.

In 1844 Farnham won appointment as matron of the women’s division of Sing Sing State Prison in Ossining, New York. She instituted a highly advanced regime, allowing inmates to speak to one another, which had previously been banned, and setting up a system of discussions, privileges, and useful training. Her liberal approach to penology won her numerous enemies, however, and in 1848 she was forced to resign. During that period she had published her first book, Life in Prairie Land (1846). She then worked briefly with Laura Bridgman, who was deaf, at Boston’s Perkins Institute, until she heard of the death of her husband in September 1848 in San Francisco. The following spring, after a period of ill health, she set out for San Francisco accompanied by a small number of unmarried women she had recruited to bring refinement to the disorderly city. She bought a farm in Santa Cruz (California) county in 1849 and in 1852 married again, but she was divorced in 1856. In that year she returned to New York City and published California, In-doors and Out. Over the next several years she organized numerous parties of destitute women seeking homes in the West.

In 1859 Farnham published My Early Days, a fictionalized memoir reissued in expanded form in 1864 as Eliza Woodson; or, The Early Days of One of the World’s Workers. Also in 1859 she returned to California, where she delivered a number of public lectures and in 1861 became matron of the female department of the Stockton Insane Asylum. She returned to New York City in 1862. She joined the Women’s National Loyal League in 1863 and in July of that year volunteered for service as a nurse in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg. In 1864 her magnum opus, several years in the preparation, was published as Woman and Her Era. In this work she expounded the natural superiority of women over men and attributed the disabilities laid on women in the practical spheres to the unconscious recognition by men that women were not meant to labour or serve on an equal footing but were rather to occupy a higher station from which their moral influence would shape the course of events. Her fictional The Ideal Attained appeared posthumously in 1865.