Marjorie Bell Chambers (Marjorie Bell, Marjorie Chambers) was born in New York in 1923. In 1943, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in Art History and political science and went on to earn an M.A. from Cornell University in 1948. She married physicist, William H. Chambers in 1945 and the couple moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico a few years later where he worked in the National Laboratory. In 1974, Chambers received a PhD in History and Political Science at the University of New Mexico.