She and her husband Harold Fowler McCormick were prominent in Chicago society, supporting many causes, including the city's first opera company.

She remained prominent after her divorce from McCormick and helped sponsor and organize several "Women's World Fairs" celebrating female achievement in the 1920s.

She was the fourth daughter of schoolteacher Laura Celestia "Cettie" Spelman (1839–1915) and Standard Oil co-founder John Davison Rockefeller.

The married couple spent their first two years living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where Harold managed a branch of his father's business.

A biographer of her father, however, makes it clear that this could not have been true: at the time of her son's death, Edith was with him at the family estate, Kykuit, at Pocantico Hills, New York.

[6] As wealthy socialites, with two family fortunes available, the McCormicks were prominent in Chicago social and cultural circles, donating large amounts of money and time to causes.

[10] In 1919 McCormick donated land she had received from her father as a wedding gift to the Forest Preserve of Cook County, to be developed as a zoological garden, later to become Chicago's Brookfield Zoo.

The article noted that she was "glad to be rid of the gay Harold McCormick, but hasn't succeeded in convincing her friends she will never marry again.

[15] In February 1923, she received some minor press for claiming to be the reincarnation of the wife of King Tutankhamen, whose tomb had just been explored and was a popular topic.

In 1925, she and other wealthy Chicago women including Miss Helen M. Bennett, Mrs. John V. Farwell, Mrs. Silas Strawn, Mrs. John Alden Carpenter, Mrs. B.F. Langworthy, Mrs. Florence Fifer Bohrer, and Mrs. Medill McCormick sponsored an international exposition to celebrate the progress and achievements of American women – The first Woman's World's Fair, which was held at the American Exposition Palace on Lake Michigan in April 1925, and was held again each year in Chicago in April or May from 1926 to 1928.

A local paper noted, of the first fair, that "One feature of the exhibit will be a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings, from various countries during the last 200 years emphasizing the storm of protest which greeted every suggestion for a freer social status for women.