[1][2] At age 16 (c. 1929), she became a female sports reporter (as "Betty Moore") for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, a Hearst newspaper.
She helped organize the American Newspaper Guild (now simply the Newspaper Guild), founded in 1933 by sportswriter Heywood Broun (who in 1930 had run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist) and journalists Joseph Cookman and Allen Raymond.
[4] She became an assistant to Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union, founded in 1934 by Quill for subway workers in New York City and which had leadership dominated by the CPUSA during its early years up through 1948 during the presidential campaign of Henry A.
[1] She worked for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, founded in 1936 by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), disbanded in 1942 to become the United Steel Workers of America, now the United Steelworkers (USW) union.
"[3] Her work was to result in a negative "political history" of Whittaker Chambers and a defense for Hiss.
Author John Chabot Smith cited Ferry's interview with Max Bedacht (whom Chambers claimed had delivered his summons to the Soviet underground) and wrote that "Bedacht denied the whole story; he told journalist Elinor Ferry it was a flat lie, and that he had never had any connections with an underground of any sort, Russian or American".
[12] In his "psychobiography"[13] on Chambers, author Meyer Zeligs cites copious usage of materials from Ferry.
[14] Author Julia M. Allen cited Ferry about Chambers' wife, "Recollections of Esther Shemitz reflect the gender rigidity of the time and help to explain why both Hutchins and Rocher felt especially protective of her.