[16] She was active as a writer, editor, scientist and research worker; she was the first woman to receive Ph.D. degree from University of California.

[6][17][18] Following her undergraduate graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, Shinn began work as an editor for the Overland Monthly.

Her first published essay was "Thirty Miles" which depicted what she would see on her journey from Niles to San Francisco by train and ferry.

[19][20][unreliable source] Shinn believed in the power of the press and thought that contributing to the literature of California would help aid in reducing the social woes that had arisen following the end of the American Civil War.

"[21] Additionally, Shinn's personal observational work prior to her doctorate program, "The First Two Years of the Child" was considered the first of its kind in the United States.

Her research focused specifically on observing the emotional and psychical health of her niece and her progression over the first two years of her life.

"[28][29][30] The Overland Monthly, the newspaper which Shinn helped resurrect at the age of 24, was based in California and produced its first series of works in the year 1868.

[6] Her life followed the path of academia, but family matters, described as the Family Claim, limited the amount of time she could invest in her personal aspirations and prompted Shinn to return home to act as a caretaker for her aging parents after receiving her Ph.D.[16] Her father, James, died before Milicent received her PhD.

These two concepts describe the household values held by the majority of families in North America during this time period.

Shinn did not let societal restrictions hold her back and pursued her efforts to collect data from her network of home-observers.

[50] Her network consisted of college-educated mothers who helped serve as observers of their own children which provided Shinn with much meaningful data.

This unique approach to in-home data collection led Shinn to produce in 1907 her powerful piece titled The Development of the Senses in the First Three Years of Childhood.

[51][29][52] While German philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann is credited with writing the first baby biography in 1787, followed by a German biologist Wilhelm Preyer in 1882, Shinn published one of the most well-known baby biographies in the United States in 1900, based largely on her observations of her niece, Ruth.

[53][54] Shinn had what she described as, "the notebook habit from college and editorial days, and jotted things down as I watched, till quite unexpectedly I found myself in possession of a large mass of data.

"[55][56] Her observations were delivered as a paper titled, "The First Two Years of the Child" which were presented at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where it was recognized as the first of its kind in the United States.

[58] Shinn noted that, "Thus it has come to pass that while babies are born and grow up in every household, and while the gradual unfolding of their faculties has been watched with the keenest interest and intensest joy by intelligent and even scientific fathers and mother from time immemorial, yet very little has yet been done in the scientific study of this most important of all possible subjects-the ontogenetic evolution of the faculties of the human mind.

[65] Thus, Shinn acted as a pioneer for other researchers like Bar-On and Parker (2000) and Sternberg and Grigorenko (2000) to study the development of practical intelligence.

[68][69] Infant imitation was recognized by Shinn, laying the foundation for later studies such as Ryalls et al.'s (2020) research in which 14–18-month-old infants watched a peer or adult model complete a 3-step sequence and then demonstrated significant ability to imitate what they saw immediately and one week later, more successfully for the peer than adult condition.

She identified the names that she used as M.W.S., John Henry Barnabas, J. Burns, R. Moore, H. Shewin, Pauline Carsten Curtis.