We will profit more by admitting the negro into our Federation than they [would], for we would be doing a very fine, honest, just thing, and if women's clubs are to be broad, if you are not to be narrow, exclusive women, you cannot but see the justice of my argument. The next year, Craft appeared before another women's group, the California Club, and, according to the "San Francisco Examiner,"  there was a very warm time in the club because Miss Mabel Craft, one of the members with a hobby in favor of the admission of colored women's clubs to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, did a little politics. As a result of her work[,] the club, before it knew what had happened, had voted in favor of the admission of colored women, and then the trouble began. The "Examiner" said that Mrs. Lovell White, California Club president, announced her intention not to accept the nomination for president of the State Federation of Women's Clubs but that "the color-line question has nothing to do with my determination not to accept the nomination." Craft was put forward in 1902 as a candidate for presidency of the National Federation (then called the General Federation), she said without her knowledge. She rejected the idea in a letter she wrote to Mrs. Robert J. Burdette, who was one of three declared candidates for the office. In 1896, Craft was treasurer of the Fifth Ward Political Equality Club, a group of women suffragists. In April of that year she sought signatures at the Oakland Hall of Records on an initiative petition favoring granting California women the right to vote. Along with her husband, Frank P. Deering "(see below)," by 1903 she had been made a life member of the National American Women Suffrage Association. In 1910 Craft was added to the list of contributing editors for the women's rights publication "Woman's Journal," "to take the place made vacant by the death of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe." In 1911 she was a director of the College Women's Franchise League and chairman of the California state press committee, and in 1913, "The Citizen" of Ottawa, Canada, reported that "much of the credit of winning equal suffrage in California" (in 1911) belonged to her. "It is doubtful if suffrage would have secured any material vote in California without this educative work." Craft was married on November 22, 1902, to Frank P. Deering in East Oakland. A society article noted that "The bride will be unattended.