She studied oratory at the Boston School of Expression with the actress Sarah Cowell Le Moyne,[1] and earned a license to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church tradition.

[2] From 1880 to 1885, Elizabeth Upham Yates worked in China under the auspices of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society.

[4] She spoke at a convention of the New England Woman's Suffrage Association in 1895 in Nashua, New Hampshire, on the same program as Julia Ward Howe and Alice Stone Blackwell.

[6] She delivered the Fourth of July address at the Providence City Hall, a novelty for a woman at the time.

[10] In 1934 she joined Carrie Chapman Catt's "committee of ten" prominent women, in petitioning Franklin Delano Roosevelt to admit German refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.