[1] As a young girl, Diaz was the secretary of a juvenile anti-slavery society, to whose funds each member aimed to contribute twenty-five cents weekly, which was a large sum at the time.

[1] For a time, the family lived in the Brook Farm communal experiment in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, her father built a house there and in the 1840s, she was a teacher there.

To support them, she taught at public and private schools, was a housekeeper at an island resort near Plymouth, and "put out" garments for a large clothing manufacturer.

An important work of that association was giving legal protection of helpless women and girls from employers and advertisers who did not pay fair wages.

Edward Eggleston became editor of "Hearth and Home," he was advised by William Dean Howells to write to Diaz, and he did so, the correspondence resulting in the series of papers upon the household life of women found in The Schoolmaster's Trunk.