After an academic career teaching at the University of Missouri from 1907 to 1923, she was the first head of the Bureau of Home Economics, a federal office within the United States Department of Agriculture, from 1923 to 1943.

Her father was born in Maine, and was a judge in Florida and a Union Army veteran of the American Civil War.

[2] Stanley graduated from Peabody College in Nashville in 1903,[3] and earned a bachelor's degree in education from the University of Chicago in 1906.

[4][7] She participated in a White House conference on child health and protection, convened by Herbert Hoover in 1930, and led efforts to advise American families on nutrition in the early years of the Great Depression.

[39] There is a folder of materials related to Stanley in the State Historical Society of Missouri manuscript collection.