Zelie's mother was linked romantically with Andrew Carnegie as a young woman, and remained a friend and correspondent of the industrialist into later life.

[1] Emerson was active in the labor movement in Chicago for several years,[2] and worked at the Northwestern University Settlement house,[3] before she met Sylvia Pankhurst and moved to England.

[4] Pankhurst wrote that Emerson recognised that the working class audience appreciated that winning the women's suffrage would benefit the men also.

[5] Pankhurst and Emerson were arrested for violent demonstrating, including throwing stones at Bow police station[5] in February 1913, and sentenced to six weeks in Holloway Prison.

Emerson testified at one of her trials that she had decided to carry a "Saturday night club," a rope dipped in tar and weighted with lead, to defend herself against the police.

[23] In 1958, Emerson and another woman citrus grower, Bessie Bruce, sued the county and the state over drainage plans that would negatively affect their crops.