District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey of Manhattan named her to a panel on revising the Domestic Relations Court Act.
During World War II she served as the Office of Civilian Defense's director of group activities in New York, New Jersey and Delaware.
In 1959 Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller appointed her Secretary of State of New York, the second woman to hold that post after Florence E. S. Knapp.
During her tenure she issued the nation's first regulations against "block busting", in which brokers manipulated property owners' fears about racial or ethnic changes in the neighborhood to provoke sales.
She then married Irving W. Halpern (d. 1966), who was chief probation officer of the New York City Court of General Sessions.