Dorr was a feminist from a very young age, becoming angered at things like women's gravestones listing them simply as wives. As a teenager, she would sneak out of her house to go listen to speeches by women's movement leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. When she tried getting a job for a newspaper, she was told that women writers couldn't be paid at all.
Eventually, Dorr got jobs with the New York Tribune and the New York Post . She covered stories with a special focus on women's problems, and even interviewed a female terrorist once. She went undercover to investigate the lives of women gold-beaters, and wrote on women's involvement in Russian uprisings and labor movements and strikes in the U.S. Dorr reported on conditions where women worked, like babies being born on factory floors, low wages, and unhealthy and dangerous work environments. She knew that most of the women she saw were the sole supporters of their families, so she spoke out against employers who paid women less, claiming it was because they didn't need the money.
Even though Dorr devoted much of her writing to women's issues, she also spent her spare time organizing marches and helping the suffrage movement. She went to England to help the women's movement there, smuggling them $20,000 sewed into her corset. A book was made of her series of articles on women and work that she'd written for Hampton's Magazine, titled What Eight Million Women Want . Her passion was for women's rights, and she spent most of her energy, at work and in her free time, trying to change things for women.
Dorr was known for investigating women at work. Today, many women all over the world, even immigrants in the U.S., suffer from the same horrible work conditions that Dorr wrote about. American companies that abuse female workers are now being exposed in the mainstream news. See if you can find articles related to the working conditions of poor women, and read about what their lives are like. If you find out that a company exploits women workers, refuse to buy their products, and tell other people about it. In the U.S., women are often not paid as much as men for the same work, and they suffer from harassment from male coworkers on the job. Many articles continue to be written about these topics.Talk to adult women you know, and ask them if they have ever experienced discrimination at work, been paid less than their male co-workers, or if they have been harassed in any way. Ask what they did to change things.