[1] Josephine Roche was born in Neligh, Nebraska, and raised in Omaha, attending private girls' schools there before matriculating at Vassar College in 1904.

[3] Over the following decade, Roche held a number of jobs in Denver and Washington, D.C., including serving as chair of the Colorado Progressive Party and campaigning against child labor in the sugar beet industry.

While in Washington, she was briefly married to author Edward Hale Bierstadt, a colleague at the Foreign Language Information Service, of which she was the director; the marriage lasted from 1920 to 1922 and ended in divorce.

After being defeated in the Democratic Party primary[2] by Edwin C. Johnson, president Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

In 1936, she had John L. Lewis, president of the UMWA and also of the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) meet with New Deal legal expert Lee Pressman, later an admitted Communist and alleged Soviet spy.

From her position as Roosevelt's assistant secretary of the treasury, Roche led an interdepartmental study team and convened a 1938 conference to address national health.

The major legislation proposed by the liberal leader in the Senate, Robert F. Wagner, died in 1940 in the face of opposition from the Conservative coalition.