Born in Madura, India, Julia Vida Scudder was the daughter of a Congregationalist missionary. In 1862 she and her widowed mother moved to the United States, settling in Boston. Scudder graduated from Smith College in 1884 and then studied Elizabethan literature for a year at the University of Oxford, England.

In 1887 she was appointed an instructor of English at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, becoming a full professor in 1910. Smith College awarded her an M.A. degree in 1889.

In 1888 Scudder joined the Companions of the Holy Cross, a semimonastic group of about 50 Episcopalian women devoted to prayer and the accomplishment of social harmony. She was active in a number of social welfare organizations, and helped found the Denison House Settlement in Boston later that year.

In 1903 she helped organize the Women's Trade Union League. Her support of the striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, led to widespread newspaper criticism of her and of Wellesley in 1912, but the college remained steadfast in defense of her right to speak and act freely.

In 1919, Scudder's former student, author Florence Converse (1871-1967) joined Scudder's household along with Converse's mother and they would live together in "radical causes and companion in the deepest spiritual experiences ... they shared both jokes and prayers."

She developed what became the Dennison (settlement) House with Helena Dudley and other young college women in New York City. Helena lived with Scudder the last decade of Helena's life, dying in 1932.

Scudder wrote numerous books on both literature and her socialist ideals, including The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets (1895), Introduction to the Study of English Literature (1901), Socialism and Character (1912), and her autobiography On Journey (1937). Scudder retired from teaching in 1928, and she died in Wellesley, Massachusetts.