After some years in the countryside, her family moved to Louisville, and Watson received an education there and later in Chicago.

She published tales and superstitions collected from African-American peoples, apparently in the dialect of the teller, and speculated on a type of ethnographic racialism.

[8] Although Watson cautioned against pursuing activism at the expense of the family, she noted "a new sense of power and capacity among American women", and published The New Woman of the New South & the Attitude of Southern Women on the Suffrage Question with suffragist Josephine Henry in 1895.

[9] In 1913, General James Grant Wilson submitted Watson's poem titled "The Siege of Vicksburg, a Battle of the Bluffs" on her behalf for the 43rd reunion of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee.

[10] In 1914, Watson published Golden Deeds on the Field of Honor: Stories of Young American Heroes, which focuses on the Civil War, primarily from the Southern perspective.