Although Ross was primarily a journalist, she did a great service to historians with her 1936 book Ladies of the Press, which chronicled women journalists up to that time. At a time when people still believed women couldn't write, her book showed the public that females had been an important part of journalism since the beginning, and were just as talented as men in that field.
Ross spent most of her career as a newspaperwoman, writing front-page leads for the New York Herald Tribune and covering crimes, disasters, and her special interest, airplanes. Her skills as a journalist were especially needed because so many men were fighting in World War I when she began. When she went to the Tribune, she worked at a desk next to Emma Bugbee. Although she often didn't get her name published by her stories, the paper depended on her to write leads and cover certain kinds of events, even in emergencies when she wasn't immediately there. She was a very serious, insightful person and writer, which intimidated some of her male coworkers. She wrote several fiction books, but thought that it was more difficult to create stories than to report the news. Her huge work on female journalists was more her style, and was a success. She started writing more non-fiction, and published 20 biographies and historical works after Ladies of the Press.
From the time she was very little, Ross wanted to write. She read all the time, and wrote constantly, even if it was just letters or helping other writers. She felt writing was an essential part of her life.
Ross's most well-known accomplishment is her history of female journalists. Research women in a certain field, like science, sports, or literature, and put together a project about the history of women in that area. Although women's contributions to society have traditionally been ignored, nowadays many women purposely do research on them. Your local library will have lots of books to help you, or you can do searches on the Internet for women's history sites. You'll find that women were important parts of history in every field imaginable.