[1][2] Partnering with her sister, Lucy Kennedy Miller (1880–1962), and Jennie Bradley Roessing, Mary E. Bakewell, Hannah J. Patterson, and Mary Flinn Lawrence during the early 1900s, she helped to found the Allegheny County Equal Rights Association (later renamed as the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania and then the Allegheny County League of Women Voters).

[5] Their investigation led to Mayor Charles H. Kline's indictment by a grand jury on forty-eight counts of malfeasance and his subsequent conviction in 1932, which resulted in a six-month prison sentence.

[10] In 1915, her parents announced her engagement to Raymond Templeton Smith (1888–1967), a graduate of Cornell who subsequently went on to become an executive vice president of the Pittsburgh Coal Company.

[4] Partnering with her sister Lucy and fellow suffragists Jennie Bradley Roessing, Mary E. Bakewell, Hannah J. Patterson, and Mary Flinn Lawrence, Eliza Kennedy Smith also helped to create the Allegheny County Equal Rights Association (later renamed as the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania),[3] and served as the organization's treasurer.

After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in June 1919 and leaders of Pennsylvania's suffrage movement determined that suffrage organization names should be updated to reflect their changing missions, officers of the Equal Franchise Federation of Western Pennsylvania formally changed their chapter's name to the Allegheny County League of Women Voters in August 1920.

[4] A "relentless, tenacious watchdog of the City's purse strings" who "probably attended more budget sessions over the years than anyone else in Pittsburgh either in or out of government," according to The Pittsburgh Press, Eliza Kennedy Smith "spearheaded drives for grand jury investigations into rackets and alleged vote frauds" and "hounded … both Republican and Democratic administrations," monitoring "nearly every facet of City government from bridge painters to rubbish collectors" in a non-partisan manner.

During one of her investigations, she noticed that garbage collectors were taking advantage of the city's policy to pay "by the pound" by "watering down the refuse in order to collect a higher fee."

During the 1940s, she "led the fight for a revamped and modern central communications center in the police bureau," following a "wave of sex slayings."