She and her life partner, Charles Robert Drysdale, also a physician, actively supported a number of causes, including free love, birth control, and destigmatisation of illegitimacy.

Vickery returned to England in 1877, after the King and Queen's College of Physicians, Ireland, refused to recognise her previous qualifications.

Vickery became an early member of the Malthusian League and an outspoken supporter of birth control after the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who were arrested for publishing a book about contraception in 1877.

She resumed membership in 1880, when she obtained her degree, and spent the following decades lecturing about birth control as a key element to the emancipation of women.

[5] Both Vickery and Drysdale joined the Legitimation League, set up in 1893, and campaigned for equal rights for children born out of wedlock.

[3] She delivered a talk to the Actresses Franchise League on "The Injustices and Inequalities of Marriage Laws", sharing a platform with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

[11][8] Vickery also instructed the working class women of south-east London in birth control methods, after an invitation by Rotherhithe social worker Anna Martin.

[12][13] Vickey also became one of the first members of the Eugenics Education Society,[3] but questioned their neglect of highlighting the relationship between family size and female emancipation.

[17] In an obiturary written by Edith How-Martyn for Women, and reprinted in the Ethical Record, she was described as doing "spade work for the woman's side" in the Malthusian movement,[18] and "above all a feminist".