She attended a Quaker boarding school in West Chester, Pennsylvania and then studied abroad for six years, during which time she converted to Catholicism.
She helped to research the psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard's seminal book The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness in which Goddard argued that variety of mental traits were hereditary and society should limit reproduction by people possessing these traits.
During this time, she began researching Franco-American topics and published Beaumarchais and the War of American Independence in 1917.
In 1934, she wrote Lafayette and His Companions in the Victorie, followed by The Catholic Part in the Making of America two years later.
Kite was instrumental in placing photostats of documents from the French Revolution in the Library of Congress, for which she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in the grade of Chevalier.