Lois Black was born on November 16, 1931, in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Watertown Senior High School. She had an older sister who convinced her to go to college. Black spent much of her time at Pembroke College thinking about the ways in which sexism pervaded her life, and fighting the exclusions it perpetuated. She graduated in 1953 with an A.B. in biology. After college, Black pursued a Fulbright Scholarship in Strasbourg to study embryology, then came back to the U.S., received a master’s degree from Yale in zoology, and taught biology. She married a Yale graduate student and both went to Cornell for further graduate studies, hers a Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology. Together they had four children.
