[2] In 1853 the family moved back to Windsor, Connecticut, where her sister Jane Augusta Ladd McCordia was born the following year.

Before Ladd turned five, her mother had taken her to a lecture given by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a well-known proponent of women's rights.

[3] Following the death of her mother in spring 1860 of pneumonia, Ladd went to live with her paternal grandmother in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she attended school.

[4] In 1865 Ladd graduated as valedictorian from Wesleyan Academy and pursued further education at Vassar College,[1][unreliable source] supported by her family.

[3] In the fall of 1866 Ladd enrolled in Vassar College financed by a loan from her aunt, Juliet Niles,[1] but left at the end of the spring term due to financial hardship.

While attending Vassar, Ladd began working under the mentorship of astronomy professor, Maria Mitchell, who was famous for having been "the first woman to discover a new comet, using a telescope, in 1847".

[5] Mitchell was also a suffragette and strove to inspire women to gain more self-confidence to enter into the male-dominated academia of the time.

[6] Because women in nineteenth-century America were prohibited from working in physics laboratories, Ladd chose to study mathematics.

[5] Later in life, Ladd would reflected her decision, saying, "had it not been for the impossibility, in those days, in the case of women, of obtaining access to laboratory facilities" she would have studied physics.

[8] She held a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University for three years, but the trustees did not allow her name to be printed in circulars with those of other fellows, for fear of setting a precedent.

In 1884, Ladd attended William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin's master class and met her future husband, Fabian Franklin.

Due to her studies with Sylvester and Peirce, Ladd became the first American woman to formally receive graduate instruction in both mathematics and symbolic logic.

Yet, it is evident that Ladd placed a high value on her ability to earn the academic affiliations necessary to become a successful contributor to her field.

[7] In another journal entry she writes about the lack of recognition of women who have earned advanced educational degrees, "That is the case with our clever girls -- they go to Germany and get the parchments, beautifully signed and sealed, that proclaim them to be doctors of philosophy, but no further consequences follow.

Although women in academic settings and laboratories were viewed as equally unwelcome as in the United States, she managed to secure a position.

[7] Ladd-Franklin was also able to work in the laboratory of Hermann von Helmholtz, where she attended his lectures on theory of color vision.

She observed that the most highly evolved part of the eye is the fovea, where, at least in daylight, visual acuity and color sensitivity are greatest.

[4] In 1959, Ladd-Franklin also joined Charlotte Moore Sitterly, Dorothy Nickerson, Gertrude Rand, Louise L Sloan, and Mary E Warga as the five women part of the first Optica Fellow class.