She was the seventh of eight children of Samuel and Rosalie (née Przylubska) Michelson, who immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1855 after fleeing Strzelno to evade anti-Semitic persecution.

In her review, Michelson's lighthearted and conversational tone of writing allow her to praise Women and Economics while also educating her readers that Charlotte Perkins Stetson's “radical views” were likely to provoke the male audience regarding gender relations.

The Women's Page section often consisted of content aimed toward the stereotypical American housewife, such as fashion, food, etc., but Michelson's work subverted the gender norms of her career and era by covering topics such as crime and politics.

Topics on progressive culture included critiques about imperialism, racism, temperance, suffrage, and debates about women's education, voting, and marriage status.

[6] Michelson was a part of a team of reporters covering the corruption in San Francisco's Chinatown in California more broadly, which was controlled by the Southern Pacific Railroad.

The first chapter of In the Bishop’s Carriage appeared as a short story in Ainslee's Magazine in 1903; afterward she was approached by the Bobbs-Merrill Company with an offer to expand and publish it as a full-length novel, which was released in 1904, with illustrations by Harrison Fisher and cover design by Margaret Armstrong.

She also employed the first-person in her articles, reminding the audience of her role as a reporter and the sympathetic subjectivity she acknowledges as an “outsider” to the events and stories she experiences.

Michelson's presence as a journalist was emphasized by her name appearing in many headlines and bylines of her work, despite most published newspaper articles at the time going unsigned by the author.

The emotional and strategic effects of her writing, its documentation of racial and ethnic diversity, and passion for championing societal prejudices were not considered sophisticated.

Although her work remains in obscurity, her popularity and success at the time suggest that women/writers’ voices were not silenced to the same degree as Michelson's literary fore-mothers.

Michelson's work in both fiction and non-fiction gave her the platform she needed to address a progressive mindset that was not limited to suffrage, exposing women's political and social issues such as prejudice against the merits of “a single life and an independent career”, and the economic status of housewives.