Elisabeth Irwin was born in Brooklyn , and educated at Packer Collegiate and Smith College, She first became a journalist, and later took a degree in psychology at Columbia University.

In 1916, as a staff psychologist for the newly formed Progressive Education Association, she commenced a landmark "experiment" in education that was part of a wholesale rethinking of American education and which would result in the founding of one of the most well-known schools in the world-the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School.

She was a declared lesbian, living with her life partner Katharine Anthony and the two children they adopted. She died in the New York Hospital