 Writing about this book in 2003, British historians Kristofer Allerfeldt and Jeremy Black called it "the one significant contemporary study of the immigrant and the American legal system".While working at the Tenement House Department, Claghorn became the founding treasurer of the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later to become the Women's Political Union), an organization founded in 1907 by suffragette Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch as "the political wing of the Women's Trade Union League".In 1909 Claghorn was one of 60 signers of the "Call for the Lincoln Emancipation Conference to Discuss Means for Securing Political and Civil Equality for the Negro", which became the founding document of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.