Wilhelmine Amalie was the youngest daughter of John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Calenberg, and Princess Benedicta Henrietta of the Palatinate.

Her two surviving sisters were Charlotte Felicitas, who married Rinaldo d'Este, Duke of Modena, and Henriette Marie, who died young.

The adviser of Eleonore, Marco d'Aviano, had convinced her that Wilhelmine Amalie, being pious and older than Joseph, could act as a tempering influence and discontinue his sex life outside of marriage, and to Leopold, he claimed that he had a vision that the pair would be happy.

Joseph had a long line of mistresses, both servants and nobles, such as Princess Dorothea Porcia (1683-1738), born Countess von und zu Daun.

At the death of her spouse, the stress caused the venereal disease of Wilhelmine Amalie to return in full force after several years remission.

His inability to produce male heirs irked Charles VI and eventually led to the promulgation of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, a document which abolished male-only succession and declared his lands indivisible.

[8] In 1712, the elector sent the famous Gottfried Leibniz to her to assist her in defending her daughters rights against Charles, and on 21 April 1713, Charles VI presented the Pragmatic Sanction in which he adjusted himself to the memorandum of Wilhelmine Amalie from the document of pactum mutuae successionis, after which she celebrated with a dinner for the empresses and archduchesses at the table of Empress Dowager Eleanore, where she was congratulated on her success and answered that she hoped the emperor would have a son.

[10] In 1722, after her daughters were married, Wilhelmine Amalie retired to a convent that she had founded earlier in 1717, the Salesianerinnenkloster auf dem Rennwege in Vienna.

During the War of the Austrian Succession, Wilhelmine Amalie initially supported her son-in-law, Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, in his pursuit of the imperial crown, but soon retired again to private life.

In June 1741, Empress Maria Theresa visited her and asked her to act as a mediator between herself and her son-in-law the Bavarian elector, but she refused.