 She was active in Republican Party politics and campaigned for women's suffrage.She worked for a time at the pension bureau in Washington D.C.

Smith was quoted extensively in the 1912 best-selling book "The Sinking of the Titanic" by Jay Henry Mowbray.Her letters and other recollections were also used by the documentary filmmaker Melissa Jo Peltier in the A&E Network documentaries "" and "" to illustrate the hours between the "Titanic"s encounter with the iceberg and the rescue of the survivors by RMS "Carpathia", and in the documentary "Titanic