[3] She also founded the Ossoli Circle, the oldest federated women's club in the South,[2] and led efforts to bring coeducation to the University of Tennessee.

[6] Around 1870, Lizzie Crozier starred alongside future author Frances Hodgson Burnett in a performance of She Stoops to Conquer.

In October 1885, with the aid of her sisters, she reopened the East Tennessee Female Institute, which her grandfather had helped establish in the 1820s, but had been closed since the Civil War.

[4] In October 1893, the group established the Mount Rest Home to care for elderly destitute women, and later gained funding for a reformatory and an industrial school.

French assailed the commission over this ordinance, and engaged in a back-and-forth with Mayor Samuel G. Heiskell over the city's refusal to arrest men who hire prostitutes.

[11] During this period, French began publishing a magazine, The People, the purpose of which was to expose the corrupt "ring leaders" running the city.

She pointed out that the journal was not a guide for "society ladies," stating, "you will not learn from these columns how to butter your bread or hold your fork.

[13] As the suffragist movement gained momentum in the 1900s, she was elected president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, and organized a writer's club to help women write letters-to-the-editor to newspapers across the state.

[3] In 1913, she engaged in a widely publicized debate with Rogersville anti-suffragist Annie Riley Hale at the National Conservation Exposition at Knoxville's Chilhowee Park.

She was in the Washington area to attend a conference of the National Woman's Party in Baltimore and to lobby the U.S. Congress in favor of a support of a bill intended to benefit working women.