[1] After graduating from the area high school in 1904, she attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years before transferring to Barnard College.

She worked as a teacher in black-only schools in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Memphis, Tennessee, for three years and then became an administrator with the organization, serving as Assistant Superintendent of Education in the Deep South.

In these books, Beam "adopted a feminist perspective by focusing on the changing historical context that affected women's lives between 1895 and 1930, as well as by analyzing the dominant-submissive relationship between the male physician (Dickinson) and his female patients".

[6] Beam wrote vividly about growing up with her grandparents in Marshfield, Maine, at the turn of the century, describing the residents, institutions, lifestyle and community tenets.

[2] Her papers are held by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.