Bolton traveled for two years in Europe, studying profit-sharing, female higher education, and other social questions.

John descended from Henry Knowles, who moved to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, from London, England, in 1665.

At the age of 17, she became a member of the family of her uncle, Colonel H. L. Miller, a lawyer of Hartford, whose extensive library was a delight, and whose house was a center for those who loved scholarship and refinement.

There, the young girl met Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia H. Sigourney, and others like them, whose lives to her were a constant inspiration.

[1] Soon after her graduation she published a small volume, Orlean Lamar and Other Poems (New York City, 1863), and a serial was accepted by a New England paper.

She was soon appointed assistant corresponding secretary of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and as such, Frances Willard stated, "She kept articles, paragraphs and enlightening excerpts before the public, which did more toward setting our new methods before the people than any single agency had ever compassed up to that time."

She made a special study of woman's higher education in the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and elsewhere, preparing for magazines several articles on that subject, as well as on woman's philanthropic and intellectual work, and on what was being done for the mental and moral help of laboring people by their employers, reading a paper on that subject at a meeting of the American Social Science Association held in Saratoga Springs in 1883.