[2] In response to her family's experiences, Ridley decided as a child to devote her life to improving the circumstances of people through activism.
[2] Based on the publicity the duo received, Pitman Hughes encouraged Steinem to found a female-operated media source, Ms. Magazine, with other partners,[8] beginning as a special edition of New York.
[5] Pitman Hughes also co-founded with Gloria Steinem the Women's Action Alliance, a pioneering national information center that specialized in nonsexist, multiracial children's education, in 1971.
[9][5] Pitman Hughes and Steinem are pictured together in an iconic black and white photograph, now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Taken by photographer Dan Wynn for Esquire Magazine and published in October 1971, Wynn captured Steinem and Pitman Hughes signaling their feminist solidarity by raising their fists in the raised-fist salute first popularized by members of the Black Power movement.
[10] Pitman Hughes noted the unlikely nature of their friendship at the time, admitting the terror she felt of being seen in public with a white woman in her hometown of Lumpkin, Georgia, when Steinem would visit.
[11] In 2017, Ms. Pitman Hughes commissioned photographer Dan Bagan to create an homage portrait of the two friends together again in a similar pose for Ms. Steinem's 80th birthday.
[12][13] In 1972, Pitman Hughes was a signer of the Ms. campaign "We Have Had Abortions" which called for an end to "archaic laws" limiting reproductive freedom, they encouraged women to share their stories and take action.
In May 1997, Pitman Hughes began to offer HOS stock at $1.00 a share to individuals, corporations, partnerships and non-profit organizations focused on African-American children.
It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing (The Gentrification of Harlem) providing advice to African American business owners who might want to utilize similar government programs such as the JOBS Act, signed into law by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012.