[4] Five years later, she was granted a two-year scholarship to Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois where she studied education, during the Great Depression.

She also held jobs as a schoolteacher, switchboard operator, and then from 1956 to 1961, she worked in the publishing house Henry Regnery & Sons, Chicago, as assistant editor.

Set on a poor Midwestern farm, Hired Girl has no lesbian subject matter, but it does explore other controversial sexual and political themes.

The book, which describes a lesbian love affair, concludes with the main character forming a heterosexual relationship, which according to Lisa Walker disappointed later readers but was one of the few types of endings 1950s publishers would accept.

[5]Through her six popular lesbian pulps, Valerie Taylor became known for writing characters and plots which deal with the experience of life in the working class, as well as the imbalance of social and economic power between male employers and female employees.

"[5] In the afterword to a 2003 reprint, Lisa Walker of the University of Southern Maine wrote that "The Girls in 3-B is a part of the unofficial history of women in the 1950s.

She belonged to the Daughters of Bilitis, contributing her work to their magazine The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication.

Taylor was instrumental in starting the gay and lesbian advocacy group Mattachine Midwest along with Pearl Hart in 1965.

[6] She protested at the 1968 Democratic Convention with other members of Mattachine Midwest, and she worked with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

She dedicated the inaugural conference to her friend, the pioneering librarian and researcher in the field of lesbian literature Jeanette Howard Foster.

[citation needed] In 1965 she met Pearl Hart, another founder of Mattachine Midwest and a Chicago feminist lawyer.

[12] Upon her death, her work was placed in the Cornell Library's Human Sexuality Collection by Tee Corinne, the executor of her literary estate.

[5] Her name was added post mortem to a lengthy list of other members of the LGBTQ community at the Tucson Gay Museum.