[5] As educational opportunities were made more available in the nineteenth century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations.

[7] Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives.

According to Rena Robey of Art Times, "The early feminists began to leave the home to participate in clubs as moral and cultural guardians, focused on cleaning up cities and helping African Americans, impoverished women, working children, immigrants, and other previously ignored groups."

[citation needed] The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), established in 1805 by painter and scientist Charles Willson Peale, sculptor William Rush, and other artists and business leaders.

[11] However, curriculum changes instituted in the late 1860s moved it closer to the artistic and social orbit derived from the European academic tradition, like the Academy of Fine Arts.

While she frequently depicted domestic scenes featuring women and children, her illustrations defied categorization in a single genre.

[12][13] Stephens' connection with Harper's began in approximately 1882, as it printed the work of American artists and writers, such as Winslow Homer and Mark Twain.

[3][14] Upon her return from Europe, Stephens resumed her illustration career with contributions to the Ladies' Home Journal and several book projects for Houghton Mifflin and Crowell publishers.

[5] Stephens exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

[5][17] The Chestnut Street studio became a meeting point for other artists, including students from the School of the Design and the Academy of Fine Arts.

[13] Throughout the year 1897, Ladies' Home Journal ran a series called "The American Woman," featuring six full-page illustrations by Stephens.

[22] In 1899, Stephens was invited to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but she declined the offer due to poor health.

She reportedly told an interviewer that she refused to work during World War I, saying it was not "worthwhile to make pictures in the midst of destruction.

Following a long trip abroad in 1901–1902, the Stephenses had architect William Lightfoot Price convert a stone barn in the utopian community of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania into Thunderbird Lodge (1904), a sprawling house that contained studios for both of them.

[3] Following her death, her son Owen donated a collection of Stephens' drawings to the Library of Congress, which held an exhibition during the spring of 1936.

The collection also consists of correspondence, clippings concerning Stephens' work, nine reproductions of her illustrations, photographs she had taken, an exhibition catalog for the Plastic Club (1898), a booklet about her and three award certificates (1884–1895).

[citation needed] In 1890, she won the Mary Smith Prize for best painting for a resident woman artist at the annual Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition for her work Portrait of a Boy.