She shared her views through essays and poems published in the Woman's Exponent, a periodical for Latter-day Saint women.

Raised by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and devout to the faith, Dalton was a feminist.

Dalton was born in Coosa County, Alabama, to Eliza Foscue and John Percival Lee.

[1][3]: 142  Her parents joined the LDS Church in Texas in 1849, and they made the trek to Utah Territory shortly after their conversion.

[4]: 25  In 1851, Dalton's family moved to the San Bernardino Valley in California as part of a Mormon expedition led by Amasa Lyman and Charles C.

[3]: 145  She came to the conclusion that she should marry Charles because of a spiritual witness they experienced together: "I felt that we were in the presence of the hosts of heaven; and a direct incontrovertible testimony was given me that it was the will of God and not my will that I should accept this man for my yokefellow.

She told her mother that the dress she sewed for him was like a funeral shroud, and after baby Charles's death at age two, she buried him in it.

[4]: 77 Dalton argued for girls and boys to have equal recreational and educational opportunities and for women to have fair wages.

[8] She believed that women had the right to suffrage, education, property, control over their earned money, and custody of their children.

She urged women to take advantage of public resources like libraries and museums, or if time did not permit, to enlarge their minds at Relief Society meetings.

[4]: 44  Some of her ideas were surprisingly radical for a Mormon woman at the time, and she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed that women needed to protect themselves from unjust laws.

The board of education did give the teachers a raise, but considered Dalton responsible for their petitioning and demanded that she pay the difference from her salary.

[2] Edward Tullidge, a fellow Latter-day Saint contemporary with Dalton, wrote that she was "a lady in whose writings are manifested the true spirit and independence of the Mormon women", saying that "the vigor and vivacity of her poetic productions are suggestive of a future enviable fame.

"[11] Another Latter-day Saint, Jill Mulvay, in Sunstone, called her poems "refreshingly imaginative, devoid of maudlin sentiment which marked much of the poetry of her age.

As a poet she is a compelling writer who reveals in her poems her apprehensions and aspirations her faith and feminism much of her poetry reflects the same commitment to reform that is clear in her essays and she uses both genres do effective political work.

"[4] Another thesis writer believed that Dalton's poem Winter Winds "demonstrates the consistent opposition between male-identified and female-identified natural elements within LDS women's literature.