She attended some of the lectures of the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet and after winning a prize for an essay on Aristotle, the examiners persuaded her to apply to go to Oxford University.

She taught philosophy in the faculty of arts and in 1900 she was the first woman to deliver McGill's annual university lecture on 'History and progress'.

In 1908 hygiene lecturer Oakeley, Alice Ravenhill and Thereza Rucker created a home science course at King's College, London in the Women's Department[2] and it would go on to be a degree subject.

[3] In 1915, the college turned coeducational and the women's department closed, she retained a part-time lecturership in philosophy at King's.

[4] Oakeley wrote more than forty articles in philosophical journals on a wide variety of topics including time, history, ethics, political philosophy, and idealism.