Campaigner. Born in Edinburgh, the daughter of a textile manufacturer, was brought up in the Newington district of the city. Her step-mother was Jane Wigham (1801-88) and her family were Quakers who campaigned against slavery. She became secretary and treasurer of the Edinburgh Ladies' Emancipation Society, where she met Elizabeth Pease Nichol (1807-97) and Priscilla Bright McLaren (1815 - 1906). Wigham and Nichol attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. In 1863, Wigham wrote The Anti-Slavery Cause in America and its Martyrs, a pamphlet intended to influence the British government from supporting the slave-owning Confederates in the American Civil War.
Wigham, together with her step-mother, McLaren and Nichol set up the Edinburgh National Society of Women's Suffrage in 1867 as a focus for women's rights in Edinburgh.
Wigham moved to Dublin in 1897 and died there two years later. Two streets in the Burdiehouse district of South Edinburgh were named in her honour in 2021; namely Eliza Wigham Bow and Eliza Wigham Place. These connect to
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