Woolley grew up a child of the depression in the Bronx, New York City: Her father, hit by a truck, died on his way to a public hospital; her maternal grandmother who had worked in a sweatshop made all her clothes; her widowed mother worked as a stenographer for GM; but Woolley, who said "as a twelve year old, I admired the smart gray uniforms with the red trimming" of the Cadet Nurse Corps (during World War II), was selected to go to the elite all-girls Hunter College High School to which she commuted by public transport one hour each way.

[1] At Hunter, she won the all-city Latin Poetry Contest in 1949 and graduated second in her class, subsequently attending Queens College and then Cornell University's School of Nursing, which granted her a bachelor's degree in 1954.

[5] Having moved to New Jersey with her husband and children in 1969, Woolley became an instructor at Atlantic Community College, but was soon offered the task of creating a B.S.

[8] In 1989 she received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Cornell School of Nursing Alumni Association.

[16] But before her death in 2005, she was working on oral histories of women who, like her, had been recently admitted as members to the once all-male Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C.[17]