She first took part in public affairs on the occasion of the great bazaar in May 1845 at the Covent Garden Theatre, when £25,000 was raised to further the anti-Corn Laws agitation, and she afterwards aided her husband in his various public projects. In 1870, she visited the United States, when she began to take a deepened interest in temperance reform and the women's suffrage question. She subsequently engaged in the work of the Association for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice, and became president of the British Women's Temperance Association, of which she was one of the chief founders. Her annual addresses were always marked with deep earnestness. She paid a second visit to the U.S. in 1886, in order to attend a convention at Minneapolis as president of the World's WCTU.