Portions taken from
http://www.sierracollege.edu/ejournals/jsnhb/v4n2/farnham.html
"In her time, the public knew her. Eliza Farnham's name first appeared in newspapers in 1840. It stayed there twenty-five years. Her public lectures on phrenology, spiritualism, prison reform, and the superiority of women attracted audiences and admiration: “The entire people present seemed determined not to lose a sentence. They were right. There was not one word but deserved attention; not a weak, worthless paragraph in the whole of it. The impression left predominant was that the entire lecture was all of thought….the production of an earnest, philosophical, enlightened mind…imbued with clear perceptions and pure aspirations.”
Her every move made good copy. Following her controversial administration at Sing Sing Prison, Mrs. Farnham attempted to take 130 marriageable women to gold rush California, captivating editors on both coasts. Magazines knew her name, too. In Brother Jonathan she debated the editor, John Neal, on woman's rights; in the Knickerbocker she humorously described an Illinois camp meeting; in The Prisoner's Friend she revealed how famed deaf-mute Laura Bridgman, her student at Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe's Massachusetts Institute for the Blind, learned to communicate in a trail-blazing technique famously practiced years afterward with Helen Keller. "
"In California, Eliza Farnham married and divorced an abusive husband, then returned east. In New York, during the financial panic of 1857, she founded the Women's Protective Emigration Society, escorted several hundred unemployed women to jobs in Illinois and Indiana, and inspired more public praise: “Few ladies…have labored with more true zeal…to ameliorate the condition of the laboring class of women, and those who, by reason of misfortune, need aid, than Mrs. Eliza W. Farnham. Truly can she be classed among our noblest female philanthropists…. God speed her in her noble mission.” "
" In 1863 she was again in the East, this time at Gettysburg, serving with Dorothea Dix as a volunteer "