She successfully overcame accusations of being merely a "sentimental middle-class liberal" or "bourgeois intellectual" and showed that enthusiastic and idealistic college-trained women organizers could perform at least as well as the working-class men who dominated the labor movement.
As organizer and activist, she helped to reduce and alleviate the hardships of child labor, provide relief for families in distress, and place unwanted children in good homes.
[citation needed] Craton's first job out of college was as a case investigator and adoption supervisor for the Washington, D.C., Board of Children's Guardians.
[16] A news piece in the Washington Post in 1915 described Craton as "mother at large" to 150 children of "varying ages, colors, races, and parentage".
[13][21] While that group failed in its attempt to achieve government regulation, it succeeded in investigating and publicizing the extreme hardship caused by unregulated child labor.
The Amalgamated opposed the American Federation of Labor's relatively narrow focus on skilled trades and in particular its cautious approach to unionizing women in the garment industry.
[2]: 1020 At first, Hillman dismissed her as a "sentimental middle-class liberal", but recognizing that English-speaking workers had become outraged by the poor English spoken by Amalgamated staff members, he put her on the payroll and told her to report immediately to the shirtmakers' union in Philadelphia for training.
[2]: 1022 [20]: 164 [1] After a short period of training in Philadelphia, Craton began organizing in the runaway shops of the anthracite mining region of northeast Pennsylvania.
[20]: 167 [26] Thereafter, working in the tiny rural hamlets of the Schuylkill valley, she met many coal miners' daughters, widows, and wives who were, as she said, "exploited and overworked and underpaid".
Despite the opposition of elected officials, sheriffs, clergymen, and factory owners, Craton found that the girls and women she encountered were generally eager to join up.
Craton wrote, "What pleased me as days went on were the steadily increasing badly spelled notes in childish handwriting from young shirtmakers in all the surrounding towns begging me to organize them.
Craton's success as an organizer was real, but the local's achievements were short-lived as a business slump subsequently caused the employers to shut down many rural workshops, including this one.
Dispatched to a Boston suburb, she was asked to gain the cooperation of impoverished but in their minds respectable American-born women who had continued to work when Italian-American union members went out on strike.
Taking care to honor their dignity and self-reliance, she won over these Yankee women one by one until, in the end, the last of the scabs capitulated.
[29]: 191 [30] The following year, she wrote an article for Amalgamated's journal, Advance, in which she ridiculed a large open shop clothing manufacturer who tried to convince his workers and the public of his benign intentions.
She joined organizations that gave encouragement to girls and young women, relief to disaster victims, and support for garment industry strikers.
[35] In 1927, she served as secretary for an ad hoc group called the Committee of One Hundred for the Defense of Needle Trade Workers and in that position defended the American Civil Liberties Union against an accusation of Communist sympathies.
[38] When she insisted that all the funds collected for relief should be distributed to the striking workers and none of it diverted to the communist group, she was taken off the project and returned to New York.
The reporter said, "She stands at the front of the platform, gestures little, speaks slowly and clearly, in simple language, repeats the expression, Fellow Workers constantly.
She told her superiors, "I am giving you the most flagrant examples so that at Washington you may realize what local chapter relief means and what responsibilities we have been forced to put into the hands of well-meaning but hopelessly ignorant and bigoted people".
Once accepted, recipients were given work providing income sufficient "to prevent physical suffering and to maintain living standards" and there was to be no discrimination on the basis of race, color, citizenship status, or political affiliation.
In that time Craton edited its monthly bulletin and acted as a field coordinator covering state projects in the South and West.
[50]: 108 When the project was disbanded in May 1934, Craton joined the team that was formed to dismantle the organization, help to place artists on state relief rolls, and disperse the many works of art that it then owned.
She had received this recommendation, in turn, from her brother-in-law, the well-known eclectic artist Peter Blume who was then working on his anti-fascist painting called "The Eternal City".
[20]: 163 When the city's police force disregarded a congressional joint resolution providing for protection, the marchers were jostled and harassed by crowds that had gathered along the march route.
"[23]: 218 The papers of Ann Blankenhorn in the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University include an unfinished manuscript from the 1920s called "Fact Finding" in which she mentions a social club she helped organize that, in the words of one source, "kept open the discussion of women’s equality, politics, and changing sexual morality".
In publications such as The Nation, The New Republic, Labor Age, Daily Worker, The Liberator, and New Masses, she summarized the abuses and obfuscations of mill owners and gave vivid accounts of women's work lives and union activities.
[77][note 9] During her married life, Craton carried out some research on social conditions in coal mining areas and assembled materials for a biography of her husband.