Butterworth began her career teaching at
Ethel Walker School and then later taught history at her alma mater, Loomis Chaffee. While the couple lived in Kent, three of their four children were born, before they moved to
Sunset Farm in
West Hartford, which Oliver and his father operated. After the move, Butterworth became active with the
League of Women Voters and she became aware of an imbalance in the apportionment of representation in the
Connecticut General Assembly. Terms of the 1818 Constitution of Connecticut established that each town would have 2 representatives, which did not take into consideration shifts in population. When a Tennessee case
Baker v. Carr (1962) made it to the
Supreme Court and determined that
redistricting was within federal jurisdiction, Butterworth and Oliver joined a class action lawsuit along with eight other people to redistrict Connecticut. The initiative was sponsored and funded by the League of Women Voters and Butterworth was the "only female plaintiff in the case". Heard by a 3-judge panel in the
United States District Court for the District of Connecticut at
New Haven,
Butterworth et al. won their case in a 2–1 decision. Though the state appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, the District Court decision was upheld and voting districts were reapportioned based on population size. Having been involved with the
Democratic Party since she was first able to vote, for
Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1968 Butterworth became chair of the
presidential campaign for
Eugene McCarthy for Connecticut and served that year as a delegate to the
Democratic National Convention. Opposed to the
Vietnam War, she attended peace rallies and in 1971, Butterworth, as a member of the
American Friends Service Committee, traveled with 169 delegates to Paris to discuss terms to attain peace to end the war. A committed pacifist, she wanted an immediate end to the war, but after the conference felt that if the United States Government did not initiate a peace plan, with a scheduled withdrawal, the conflict would be prolonged. For decades Butterworth protested every Saturday, in West Hartford Center, against war, including those in Nicaragua, Iran and Iraq, as well as in opposition to nuclear arms. She also served on the national board of the
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, known simply as SANE. In 1975,
Governor Ella Grasso appointed Butterworth to serve on the state's Public Utilities Control Authority and made her chair in 1978, the first woman to hold the leadership position. Though she led the government body, in May 1979, Butterworth was fired by Grasso and then accepted the post as president of the
Hartford College for Women. The post was temporary, as the previous president had resigned and was slated to be replaced in September 1980. In 1981, she ran for a seat on the West Hartford Town Council and won with 11,222 votes, more than any other Democratic candidate. Butterworth traveled to
Nicaragua in 1984 as an international observer to the first democratic election held in the country in ten years. She was critical of the United States' policies in
Central America fearing that tensions might escalate into a "second Vietnam". In the election of 1985, Butterworth decided not to run for reelection to the town council. By the 1990s, Butterworth was working as the town historian and served on the committee planning events for the
sesquicentennial of West Hartford. In 1995, she attended the
World Conference on Women, hosted in
Beijing. To give a more balanced history of West Hartford, she wrote a book in 1997, researched by Sally Whipple, to relate the history of
African American contributions to the community. Her book, as well as an earlier town history by Ellsworth Grant, were eventually published in 2001 as
Celebrate! West Hartford: An illustrated history, when Richard "Dick" Woodworth joined them to help get the stalled project to press. In 2008, she wrote her memoirs, never intending them for publication, but in 2010
Just Say Yes was published. In 2018,
Lull Before the Storm taken from her diary kept during her 1938 trip to
Heidelberg became Butterworth's fourth book. ==Death and legacy==