[3] After learning shorthand at business school, she began her journalistic career as women's page editor at Peck's Sun.

[3][4][5] She also wrote a series of articles about conditions in New York City tenements that was later published as the book The Submerged Tenth.

Each of her co-authors, some of them novelists of some renown like Henry James and William Dean Howells, penned one of the twelve chapters.

[3] Though it received a generally positive critical response and sold well, Jordan herself referred to the project as "a mess".

[5] She also helped publish novels by a number of female authors, including Zona Gale, Eleanor H. Porter, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

[3] Jordan was an active suffragist and in 1917 organized another collaborative novel, The Sturdy Oak, with fourteen authors supporting the cause, including Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Henry Kitchell Webster and William Allen White.