She is best known for her roles as first Director of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry[1] and as a co-founder of the Affiliated Schools for Workers (later known as the American Labor Education Service),[2] although she also had a long career in government service supporting education for underserved groups including women, laborers, African-Americans and the elderly.

The Smith family spent its summers in West Park, New York, where young Hilda would later establish two resident workers' schools in the 1930s.

[citation needed] When she was twenty-five years old she returned to Bryn Mawr at the invitation of President of the college, M. Carey Thomas, to oversee a residence hall as a Warden, and began to teach an informal class on social work at the request of a group of undergraduates in which she introduced the concepts of child welfare, family rehabilitation, delinquency, immigration, and housing.

She returned to her studies at the School of Philanthropy in 1914 and soon established a community center for youth in New York City that served many boys of Irish, Italian, and African American descent, which she ran until Carey Thomas offered her the position of Acting Dean in 1919.

[7] Money was raised for scholarships to support the students, who were between the ages of 18 and 35 and came from diverse backgrounds including different nationalities, races, religions, industries, non-unionized and union affiliations.

About 100 women attended each year that the school operated, gathering to live, eat, and sleep together while they studied a variety of liberal arts subjects with distinguished faculty drawn from local institutions.

[citation needed] The object of the school, as stated in prospectus and distributed to a variety of news outlets, was "to offer young women of character and ability a fuller education and an opportunity to study liberal subjects in order that they might widen their influence in the industrial world, help in the coming social reconstruction and increase the happiness and usefulness of their own lives.

[13] The later years of Worthington Smith's career were dominated by federal appointments, listed here:[13] Worthington Smith retired at the age of 83 to focus on various writing projects related to her life experiences and career, including a narrative of her seven years with the Office of Economic Opportunity and a revised and expanded version of her autobiography, Opening Vistas in Workers' Education,[4] which was self-published in 1978.

She died of leukemia, aged 95, on March 3, 1984, in Washington, D.C.[13][14] To sum up Jane's life a story done in 1984 for The New York Times does come close to sewing 1919 to 1983 into a fine embroidery.