Garrigue was born in Brooklyn to a Unitarian family with Huguenot ancestry on her father's side and Mayflower passengers[1] on her mother's.

[3][4] In 1877, visiting a friend studying at a conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, she first met her future husband, Tomáš Masaryk, who was staying there after having earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna.

[5] After the wedding, her husband added her surname into his name, thus becoming Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, as he is remembered in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (or often by the abbreviation TGM).

[2] After the outbreak of the First World War, her husband left for exile with their daughter Olga to seek international support for the independence of the nations of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, notably the Czechs and Slovaks.

Of the couple's five children, four reached adulthood - Alice, Herbert, Olga, and Jan, who later became a noted Czechoslovak diplomat and politician (Foreign Minister).