Her work included portraiture, primarily done in oil paint, botanical illustration, and political cartoons.

Through her persistence, and with the encouragement her husband Oakes (who gifted her with an extravagant set of books on famous artists while courting her) this vision became reality.

[3][2] In 1902, she began illustrating Oakes Ames's botanical publications, including his seven volume treatise on orchids, which is still considered one of the best researched to this day.

[2]: 100  Three years before in 1912, the Woman's Journal's offices had relocated its headquarters from New York to nearby Boston.

[11][12] Ames's etchings are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her oil painting can be seen at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Columbia University.

In 1915, when Massachusetts voters would decide whether to allow women the right to vote, Blanche attended 40 events throughout the commonwealth to spread the word of female equality.

[4][5] In this role Ames helped to form The Doctors Bill to Clarify the Law, which regulated the ability of doctors to provide birth control counseling to married women with health problems, and later helped establish universal access to birth control.

[14] Massachusetts did not legalize contraception for married women until 1966, the last state in the nation to do so, and Ames set the standard for perseverance in the decades-long effort.

[15] In 1941 Ames also served as a board member and later as President of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.

[16] Ames held patents for inventions which included a hexagonal lumber cutter and a method for entrapping enemy aircraft.

[9] During World War II, Ames came across the realization that thread could snarl and jam a sewing machine motor, Blanche then used that same principle to design a device to ensnare low-flying aircraft.

The artist would use these swatches to select the most realistic colors and the codes would be mapped out on a drawing before the paint was applied.

Profiles criticized Adelbert Ames in favor of his Reconstruction Era rival Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a key leader of the "Mississippi Plan" that suppressed African-American voter turnout and ultimately led to Adelbert Ames's resignation as governor of Mississippi.

Prior to publishing the book, Ames had frequently written Kennedy asking him to retract his criticism of her father in order to "bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.”[18]