[1][2] Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz (1854–1898) and his wife.
[3] She became a high school mathematics teacher in 1912, and soon afterwards began working towards a doctorate in German literature at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
She gained recognition for her expertise in eclipsing binary stars and additionally conducted mathematical computations for a range of diverse projects.
For a duration of four years, she dedicated her efforts to calculating firing tables for the Navy and Air Force within the Division of Industrial Cooperation at MIT.
After the war, when senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating her husband for his left-leaning political views, she came under fire as well, and in 1950 after she was discovered to have brought home data from Kopal on eclipsing binary stars she was relieved of her military work and of her security clearance.