[2] One night when she was just 12 years old, Child and her sister snuck out of the family home against their father's wishes to hear Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton speak on women's suffrage.

[4] Even after her marriage Rheta Dorr continued to work as a journalist, interviewing gold miners returning from Alaska writing articles for New York newspapers as a freelancer.

[4] Conflict with her traditionalist husband grew and in 1898 the pair separated, with Rheta returning East with her two-year-old son, where she was forced to make her own way financially as a single mother.

They were tolerated because they were temporarily needed, but some day the status quo ante (woman's place is in the home) would be restored and the jobs would go back where they belonged, to the men.

Dorr wrote investigative features and gritty vignettes on the grim situation faced by urban working women for the short-lived reform periodical, Hampton's Broadway Magazine.

[8] Dorr's political efforts were instrumental on building the coalition of social reformers that forced the first major investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Labor into the conditions faced by female workers.

[3] In 1914 Dorr became the first editor of The Suffragist, official organ of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage — the organizational forerunner of the National Women's Party.

[3] Dorr dropped out of the Socialist Party over its opposition to American entry into World War I and her belief that the organization favored the "tyranny" of a German victory in the conflict.

Dorr returned to Washington, D.C., after the end of the war and planned to go on a tour of the United States to conduct research for a series of magazine articles.