[3] Born in Des Moines, Iowa, she was a child of Jewish parents, Joseph and Sabina (née Neumann) Hyman.

Joseph Hyman successively owned clothing stores in Des Moines, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and in Fort Dodge, Iowa, but the family's resources were limited.

She enjoyed reading, especially books by Charles Dickens in her father's small den, and she took a strong interest in flowers, which she learned to classify with a copy of Asa Gray's Elements of Botany.

The high school teacher who taught English and German persuaded her to attend the University of Chicago, which she entered in 1906 on a one-year scholarship.

Again unsure of her future, she accepted a position as research assistant in Child's laboratory, and she taught undergraduate courses in comparative anatomy.

I never received any encouragement from my family to continue my academic career; in fact my determination to attend the University met with derision.

[5] At the request of the University of Chicago Press, Hyman wrote A Laboratory Manual for Elementary Zoology (1919),[5] which promptly became widely used, to her astonishment.

[5] While at the University of Chicago, Hyman also wrote taxonomic papers on such invertebrates as the Turbellaria (flatworms) and North American species of the freshwater cnidarian Hydra.

In it, she developed her scientific theory that the phylum Chordata, including all vertebrates, was evolutionarily related to the apparently very different and very much more primitive Echinodermata, such as starfish.

She commented in a letter: "The polyclads of Bermuda were so pretty that I could not resist collecting them and figuring out Verrill's mistakes" (quoted in Schram, p. 126).