After a difficult childhood (three siblings dying as infants, father soon absent, mother supporting Charlotte and her three surviving brothers by keeping boarders, frequent moves interrupting her education), she became the head of the household after Richard's death in the mid-1850s.
In 1860 Charlotte, her mother and two of her brothers traveled to Cuba, returning to New Orleans from Havana on March 21, 1861, the same day Louisiana ratified the Confederate Constitution.
When Charlotte's brother David enlisted under-age in the Civil War, the family tried to bring him back, but were trapped in occupied Memphis, Tennessee for the rest of the conflict.
After the war, the family went to Mobile, Alabama, where Charlotte opened an enormously profitable dry goods store, and Catherine ran multiple boardinghouses.
[2] This publication was noteworthy in several ways: edited by a woman, but not a women's magazine, containing unusual amounts of science but virtually nothing about suffrage, and aiming with fiction, poetry, and essays at educated readers in general.
Swiftly obtaining the ear of Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire, partly by her undercover research into working conditions for women and girls, she became a formidable lobbyist for her causes.
On May 19, 1885, Charlotte Smith's brother, Robert Emmet Odlum, a swimming instructor, decided to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge to prove that it was possible; he died in the attempt.
In 1892 she founded a third periodical, the Woman Inventor[8] which ran for two issues, and crusaded for a permanent exhibition of women's inventive work in Washington, DC.
[2] During these years (1880s - early 1890s), she was one of the best-known women in America, with hundreds of articles appearing about her in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and smaller newspapers as far away as Montana and Hawaii.
[2] The Boston Herald carried an obituary for Charlotte Smith stating the “champion of the working girl and indefatigable crusader against vice and everything else she has found amiss in the world about her, died from pneumonia late last night at the City Hospital.