Born July 25, 1871 in New York City, Margaret Floy Washburn was raised in Harlem by her father Francis, an Episcopal priest, and her mother, Elizabeth Floy, who came from a prosperous New York family. Her ancestors were of Dutch and English descent and were all in America before 1720. Washburn was an only child; she did not appear to have childhood companions her age and spent much of her time with adults or reading. She learned to read long before she started school; this caused her to advance quickly when she started school at age 7. In school, she learned French and German.  When she was eleven years old, she started at public school for the first time. In 1886, she graduated from high school at the age of fifteen, and that fall, she entered Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, as a preparatory student. This preparatory status was due to her lack of Latin and French. During her undergraduate years at Vassar, Washburn developed a strong interest in philosophy through poetry and other literary works. She also became a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, and was first introduced to the field of psychology. After she graduated from Vassar in 1891, Washburn became determined to study under James McKeen Cattell in the newly established psychological laboratory at Columbia University. As Columbia had not yet admitted a woman graduate student, she was admitted only as an auditor. Despite the derogatory feelings toward women gaining education at the time, Cattell treated her as a normal student and became her first mentor. She attended his seminary, lectures, and worked in the laboratory alongside men.  At the end of her first year of admission at Columbia, Cattell encouraged her to enter the newly organized Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University to obtain her Ph.D because this would not have been possible at Columbia as an auditor student. She was accepted in 1891 with a scholarship.

At Cornell, Margaret Floy Washburn studied under E. B. Titchener, his first and only major graduate student at that time. Her major was psychology. As a graduate student, she conducted an experimental study of the methods of equivalences in tactual perception, as was suggested by Titchener. After two semesters of experimental study, she subsequently earned her Master’s degree in absentia from Vassar College in the late spring of 1893 for that work. During her work on the method of equivalents, Washburn had simultaneously developed the topic for her master’s thesis, in which was done on the influence of visual imagery on judgments of tactual distance and direction. In June 1894, she gave her oral presentation, and became the first woman to receive a PhD in psychology (as Mary Calkins had previously been denied her PhD because she was a woman). She was also elected to the newly established American Psychological Association. Her master’s dissertation was also sent by Titchener to Wilhelm Wundt, who translated it and published it in his Philosophische Studien in 1895. Following her graduation, Margaret Floy Washburn was offered the Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and Ethics at Wells College, in Aurora, New York. She accepted the offer and delighted in spending the next six years there. While she was there, she made sure to visit Cornell often to catch up with her friends and work in the laboratories. However, she then grew tired of the place, and sought a change. In the spring of 1900, Washburn received a telegram proposing her the warden’s position at the Sage College of Cornell University. She accepted the offer and spent the next two years there. Washburn was then offered an assistant professorship of psychology at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio. This position also gave her full charge of the psychology department. She took the job, but only remained there for one school year before becoming homesick. While at Cincinnati, she was the only woman on the faculty.

In the spring of 1903, she gladly returned to Vassar College as Associate Professor of Philosophy, where she remained the rest of her life. When she started working there, she became the head of the newly founded psychology department. She treated her students well and in turn they appreciated her as a professor. A large number of her students continued to advance in the field of psychology after graduation. Margaret Floy Washburn published many of her students’ studies during her career. The students would collect and work with the data while she wrote up and published the experiments. Between the years of 1905 and 1938, she published 68 studies from the Vassar Undergraduate Laboratory. These studies were the largest series of studies from any American university at the time. At one point, her students gifted her with a large sum of money and they wanted her to use the money for leisure. Instead, she used the money as scholarship aids for students in the psychology department. In 1937, a stroke necessitated her retirement (as Emeritus Professor of Psychology). She never fully recovered and died at her home in Poughkeepsie, New York on October 29, 1939. She never married, choosing instead to devote herself to her career and the care of her parents