"[2] Her proposed solution to this oppression was "cooperative housekeeping," a system in which women would do domestic chores together and profit from it by requesting payment from their husbands.

An important component of her plan was the spatial reorganization of neighborhoods and homes to accommodate domestic cooperation between women.

[8] On February 24, 1836, Peirce was born in Burlington, Vermont in her grandfather Right Reverend John Henry Hopkins's house.

She was of English, French, German, and Irish background[10] At age four, Peirce began learning to sew, but openly expressed her distaste for it.

If they pray to God earnestly in their hearts, while they are hesitating, they will be enabled to resist the devil, and he will flee from them, [and] the hour of temptation will pass away from them without their doing wrong.

"According to her sister Amy Fay, Peirce played the melodeon, as well as hymn tunes in her father's church starting at age nine.

[14] As a child, Peirce studied in schools run by her parents in the various towns she lived in, including Montpelier, Georgia; Bayou Goula and New Orleans, Louisiana; and St. Albans, Vermont.

[1] "As well as the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic, her studies included Latin, French, and drawing, and a great deal of music.

[1] Two weeks after the death of her mother in September 1856, Peirce was in contact with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who recommended that she attend the Young Ladies' School of Professor Louis Agassiz, a renowned natural scientist and proponent of human polygenism, in Cambridge.

[1][6][15] In November 1859, she started school there,[1] where she studied "science, philosophy, literature, history, and other subjects usually well outside of the educational limits for young women, even of her class".

Peirce was also involved in a number of talks, in which she spoke about new insights gathered during her trip abroad, as well as views on "womanhood" suffrage.

In 1880, Peirce spoke at the Illinois Social Science Association, where she advocated the creation of a "Woman's House" as an alternative to the United States Senate.