Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dubbed her the "mother of 'The Woman Suffrage Association' in Indiana" for her early leadership and efforts in initiating the first women's rights convention in the state.

[2][3] Way was a schoolteacher by profession, but after the death of her father in 1849, she worked as a milliner (hatmaker) and seamstress to support her widowed mother and other members of her family.

[1][3] Way began her reform work as an activist in the local temperance movement, and in 1844 joined the Winchester Total Abstinence Society.

Way and around 40 to 50 other women armed with hatchets and hammers entered several local saloons and drugstores in Winchester to persuade the owners to sign a pledge and agree to stop selling liquor.

If the proprietors refused to sign, the women emptied the establishment's barrels of whiskey along with other wine and spirits into the streets and damaged other property.

Way was not included in a civil lawsuit that William Page, the plaintiff and one of the store owners, filed against some of the other women, as well as their husbands.

[2] She also delivered the convention's opening address, declaring that "unless women demand their rights politically, socially, and financially, they will continue in the future as [they have] in the past.

[9] As a representative of the IWSA, Way read a memorial on behalf of the organization before the Indiana General Assembly in 1871 in support of an amendment to the state constitution that would grant women the right to vote.

[11] In 1871 Way became a licensed minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church and moved in 1872 to Kansas, where she continued to remain active in the temperance and women's suffrage movements.

In the 1890s, when she briefly resided in Idaho, a state where women had the right to vote, Way organized a Friends Church in Boise.