Born into the landed gentry of Poland, her family were members of the intelligentsia and encouraged Iwańska to pursue her literary dreams.

When arrests began involving the underground movement, Iwańska was forced to flee to the United States in 1948, where she reluctantly applied for asylum.

Having never felt at ease in the United States, that year Iwańska moved to London, where she began a period of intense literary creation.

Alicja Iwańska was born on 13 May 1918 into the landed gentry on the Gardzienice estate [pl], near Lublin, to Stanisława Stachna (née Miłkowska) and Jan Iwański.

[3] Her grandfather August Iwański had significant property holdings in Ukraine, but purchased the estate in the Lublin Voivodeship and relocated his family to evade border unrest during World War I and the Greater Poland Uprising.

Iwańska was born on the estate, but when the turmoil reached them at Gardzienice, they sold the property and moved west to the village of Mikorzyna, near Poznań.

When Iwańska began to show an interest in writing, her father consulted with poet Julian Tuwim to improve her skill.

[1] Her trip abroad made her aware of the rising nationalism spreading across Europe, as well as the anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic sentiment of the times, though she was in fact an atheist.

[1] She moved to Poznan in 1945 and began working as the literary director of Głos Wielkopolski [pl] (The Voice of Greater Poland).

[1] Arriving in the United States with very poor English and uncertain whether she wanted to stay, Iwańska hesitated to apply for asylum but eventually did so when friends warned her she had been named in investigations.

Iwańska felt at home there, lecturing on similarities between political, religious, and racial persecution in Europe and the situation in the United States.

[1] Iwańska moved to Chicago, Illinois, that summer and began working for the Slavic Peoples' Project, a Yale University-Pentagon initiative that focused on preserving Czechoslovak and Polish culture.

Presented to the American Anthropological Association in 1957, her report contrasted the differences between the treatment of Mexican seasonal workers and European peasant farmers.

[1] She began collaborating with the American anthropologist Sol Tax, studied the Mazahua people,[11] and was one of the first to publish details of the civic-religious system of duties employed to maintain order in their society.

[1] Works like The Mexican Indian: Image and Identity and The Truths of Others: An Essay on Nativistic Intellectuals in Mexico questioned the duality of indigenous people's treatment in the larger society, noting that while the government ideology officially celebrated their culture and artworks as part of the unique Mexican identity, they experienced racism from the public.

[1] Her reputation earned her an assistant professorship at the State University of New York at Albany in 1965, where her work, over the next two decades, focused mostly on immigrants and emigrants in American history.

In the study, she looked at Polish and Spanish[16] diaspora communities and how the various layers — core members, proven loyalists, and people with national ties — unite to sway international policy, also covering the perception of exiles living abroad.

[23] Returning to London, she worked on Wojenne odcinki (War Episodes, 1990), presenting the letters she exchanged with Jan Gralewski from 1940 to 1943; a volume of poetry, Niektóre (Some, 1991); Właśnie tu!

(Right Here, 1992), a biography of Jean-Marie Guyau and an autobiographical comparison to herself; and Potyczki i przymierza (Skirmishes and Covenants), a diary covering the period from 1918 to 1985.

[11] In 2019, Grażyna Kubica-Heller of Jagiellonian University presented a paper Strong authorial 'I' and feminist sensitivity – two Polish women-anthropologists in British and American academia at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Congress.

The paper evaluated why Iwańska and Maria Czaplicka's contributions to anthropology were forgotten for decades and how re-imaging history in a feminist perspective has recovered their works.