This move was spurred because Marchant's father had been appointed chief of the Translation Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Brazilian government.
[2][3] According to Marchant's obituary in The Washington Post, she told USA Today in a 1992 article that she recalled as a young girl seeing women in the suffragist movement "being arrested in Lafayette Park and bundled into paddy wagons.
[2] Marchant received her undergraduate degree in 1931 and then went on to law school at George Washington University, which at the time was known as the National University of Washington, D.C.[5] Amidst her studies, Marchant worked for a year as a junior law assistant for women's rights pioneer, Alice Paul, who at the time was working on the ERA draft.
When the man who was head of the Anglo-American Law Section was drafted in World War II, Marchant took his place.
[5] Marchant returned to Rio de Janeiro to work as attorney for a Canadian power company.
[5] She then went back to Washington D.C. in late 1948 and became one of four women attorneys at Covington and Burling, Dean Acheson's firm.
[6] Naiad Press was founded, in part, to publish Marchant's first books under the Sarah Aldridge pen name.
[10] Under the name Sarah Aldridge, Marchant was the author of fourteen literary lesbian works, eleven of which were published by Naiad Press.
They mostly published the remaining few Sarah Aldridge books, along with works from other authors, such as Ann Allen Shockley.
[5] Marchant met Muriel Inez Crawford (April 21, 1914 – June 7, 2006) in 1947 and they became a couple in 1948, though they remained largely in the closet until the '90s.