Atkinson continued her education, conducting research at Glasgow University and the London School of Economics, before going abroad to study at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania for a year.

[2] Relocating to London in 1908, she became a tutor for the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) and lectured on economics from 1908 to 1915 at King's College for Women.

[1] She published articles in the Daily News on feminist and political themes including topics on celibacy as a prerequisite for women's employment, suffrage, the gold standard and trade unions and wrote an economics textbook with Margaret McKillop in 1911.

At the outbreak of World War I Atkinson began lecturing on peace and supported creation of an organisation such as the League of Nations to act as an authority over nationalist concerns.

However, her anti-war stance did not stop her new husband, Andrew Robert Barratt Palmer, an Australian journalist whom she had married on 2 July 1914 in Kensington, from joining the war effort.

Atkinson continued her work on women and social concerns publishing in 1916, Life-Saving in War-Time, which evaluated infant mortality and its relationship to poverty.

[3] After retiring from NUC in 1936 Palmer began her noted work to found university education for Non-Whites in Natal.

[9] During her tenure, the enrolment increased from 19 to 350 and while many of her students were grateful for the education,[1] her lack of understanding of African and Indian cultures created some frictions.

[4] A women's residence hall on the UKZN campus, designed by Hans Hallen is named after her,[12] as is one of the houses at Westville Girls' High School.