Bryant graduated from the University of Oregon in 1909 and quickly made a name for herself as a poet, columnist, and radical feminist. She illustrated for the Oregon Monthly and Oregon Spectator and also contributed writings to leftist publications like The Masses. Bryant married, keeping her maiden name, and from her Portland home entertained such radical activists as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. In the effort to gain women’s voting rights, she traveled the state with other activists in support of suffrage, turning her writing skills to speeches and lectures. Bryant joined the Oregon branch of the College Equal Suffrage League in 1912, and rode a suffrage parade float in Portland’s Flag Day celebration that June.​

After the 1912 campaign, Bryant left Oregon for Greenwich Village in 1915 to pursue two new loves: the art of journalism and a man named John Reed for whom she left her husband. Bryant and Reed lived a bohemian lifestyle in New York, agitating for progressive change and reporting on the plight of the working class. They moved to Russia near the end of World War I to publish on the civil war and rising Soviet government. While other American suffragists were mounting their campaign to pass the 19th Amendment, Bryant was observing a bloody revolution in progress. Her most famous work, Six Months in Russia, was read across the United States in part for its sensational reports of powerful female revolutionaries.