Mary Frances Billington established her reputation as a journalist by holding a number of prominent posts on English newspapers and reporting on major social concerns and events, roles that were typically unavailable to women at the turn of the twentieth century. Her ethnographic study of women's lives in India, Woman in India, 1895, critiques Western preconceptions about Indian women's everyday lives and struggles. She devoted much of her later life to furthering the status of women journalists and serving in an important editorial capacity for the Daily Telegraph. Her two collections of writing published during the First World War offer some of the period's most comprehensive accounts of women's contributions to the war effort.