She was the daughter of Roswell Hart Rochester, an executive who worked as Treasurer of the Western Union Telegraph Company, and his wife, the former Louise Agatha Bauman, who had been a public school teacher before her marriage.

[7] Rochester was admitted to Bryn Mawr College, one of America's premier women's liberal arts universities, located ten miles west of Philadelphia.

[7] Her coursework proceeded as well as could be expected, but she found her collegiate career cut short by family matters, with her father dying of a heart attack in the middle of her freshman year and her mother falling ill of "nervous collapse" near the end of her sophomore session.

[9] It was there that Rochester met Vida Dutton Scudder, a political activist motivated by the social gospel, and her lesbian partner, the writer Florence Converse.

A male suitor was turned away in 1907, and a return to Philbrook Farm in 1908 invigorated Rochester's interest in sociology and the ongoing progressive campaign to ameliorate the ills of modern industrial society.

[10] Rochester continued in this same area in 1915 when she moved to the United States Children's Bureau, a government agency created in 1912, where she again worked on research and publications.