Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham
Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham was a notable American prison reformer and writer, born in Rensselaerville, New York, in 1815. She emerged from a challenging family background and experienced a transformative upbringing, which influenced her progressive views on women and reform. Farnham became the head matron at the women's section of Sing Sing prison in 1844, where she advocated for humane treatment and rehabilitation of female inmates at a time when societal views often deemed women offenders as morally corrupt. Drawing inspiration from the English reformer Elizabeth Fry, she implemented educational programs and improved living conditions within the prison, emphasizing the potential for redemption in women. Although her unconventional methods faced resistance, particularly from traditionalists within the institution, her pioneering approach laid the groundwork for future prison reform practices. Tragically, Farnham's life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1864, after a diverse career that included nursing during the Civil War and work at the Stockton Insane Asylum. Her legacy endures through her writings, including her influential book "Woman and Her Era" and her contribution to the discourse on criminal rehabilitation.
Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham
- Eliza Wood Burhans Farnham
- Born: November 17, 1815
- Died: December 15, 1864
Prison reformer and writer, was born in Rensselaer-ville, New York, the third daughter and fourth of the five children of Cornelius Burhans and Mary (Wood) Burhans. Her father’s family, of Dutch origin, had long been settled in the Hudson Valley. Soon after Mary Burhans died in 1820, Eliza Burhans, who disliked her father, was taken to western New York to live with foster parents. (The foster mother, an atheist, probably contributed to her charge’s generally unorthodox, freethinking religious views.)
In 1830 an uncle took Eliza Burhans back to eastern New York where she went to a Quaker boarding school for about a year and then, following a teaching stint, briefly attended the Albany Female Academy. Shortly afterward she went to live with a married sister in Tazewell County, Illinois, where, in 1836, she married a lawyer (later an explorer and a writer), Thomas Jefferson Farnham. They had three sons, of whom only Charles Haight, born in 1841, reached adulthood. About that time the Farnhams moved to Washington Hollow, near Poughkeepsie, New York.
Eliza Farnham made her first efforts on behalf of reform in 1844 when she became head matron at the women’s section of Sing Sing, the New York State penitentiary. (Previously she had written on women’s rights and shown interest in penology.) She entered prison work at a time when society reserved the least humane treatment for female offenders, who were regarded as traitors to the purity of their sex. This attitude produced suffering and depression among many inmates, alternating with periods of anger and rioting.
Like most of her contemporaries, Farnham regarded women as reservoirs of moral purity, but she did not therefore condemn her charges as traitors. Rather she argued that because women possessed innate spiritual and moral powers, all female offenders could be redeemed and lead socially useful lives if they were placed in the proper environment. Although not a feminist—she didn’t, for example, think that women should vote—Farnham believed that women were morally superior to men and were destined by creation to hold the highest place in society. Her views on female superiority are set forth in her best-known book, Woman and Her Era (1864).
In seeking to redeem “fallen women,” Farnham adopted the techniques used by the English Quaker Elizabeth Fry, who in the first two decades of the century had helped reform conditions among female inmates of London prisons. (Another influence on her methods was the coeval theory of phrenology—a study correlating the skull with intelligence and character.) Using Fry’s system, Farnham abandoned harsh treatment in favor of an improved prison environment intended to encourage rehabilitation. She ended the silent system by grouping women together for the purpose of educational instruction; established a library of secular books; and, with the help of the staff, taught the inmates reading, writing, history, science, and other subjects. She decorated the women’s wing with pictures and flowers, even bringing in a piano for holiday entertainments, and invited women from outside to visit, including Margaret Fuller from the Brook Farm circle. Although relying mainly on persuasion and the amelioration of harsh conditions, she believed in self-discipline and used solitary confinement to curb inmates who did not bend to her methods.
Farnham’s radical approach, praised by prison reformers for its evident success in encouraging rehabilitation, nevertheless alienated the more traditional among the Sing Sing staff. Her unorthodox religious views—especially her emphasis on secular, rather than religious, education—gained the enmity of the prison chaplain, and in 1848, after two confrontations, she was forced to resign. Upon her departure all her work was undone at Sing Sing. But her efforts were remembered by the next generation of reformers, for the techniques she employed were those that came to be accepted by penologists and professional prison administrators.
In 1848 Thomas Farnham died on a trip of exploration in California. After settling his affairs in that state and buying a farm in Santa Cruz County, Farnham in 1852 married William Fitzpatrick. She divorced him four years later and returned to New York City. A daughter born of the union had died in 1855.
In 1859 she traveled once again to California and during 1861-62 was matron of the female department of the Stockton Insane Asylum. She went back to New York in 1862 and the following year worked as a volunteer nurse among the troops at Gettysburg. She died of tuberculosis in New York City, at the age of forty-nine, and was buried in the Friends’ Cemetery at Milton-on-Hudson, New York.
Some of Farnham’s letters are in the collections of Harvard College Library, the California State Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York State Library, and the New York Public Library. A partially novelized autobiography describing her youth entitled My Early Days (1859) and republished as Eliza Woodson (1864) contains such fictional aspects as personal names. Her theories on prisoner rehabilitation are set forth in her American edition of a British phrenological treatise, Rationale of Crime, and Its Appropriate Treatment (1846); her ideas on female superiority are elaborated in The Ideal Attained (1865). In the absence of a full-length biography, the best recent account is the sketch in Notable American Women (1971), which provides an extensive bibliography of sources and secondary accounts. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1931). Obituaries appeared in The New York Daily Tribune, December 16, 1864, and The New York Times, December 18, 1864.