Marjory Nelson was born in 1928 in New Brunswick, NJ, the last of four children and the only daughter born to Dorothy Lewis and Thurlow Christian Nelson. Her siblings were Thurlow Christian Nelson, Jr. (1922-2000), Edwin Lewis Nelson (b. 1924), and John Eric Nelson (1925-1999). Nelson entered Oberlin College in 1946 but left after her freshman year and, on her nineteenth birthday, married ex-Marine Howard Hoekje, a chemist who worked in academia and in corporate chemical research. The couple had three children: Carol Lynn Hoekje (b. 1950), Barbara Jean Hoekje (b. 1953), and Peter Lindsey Hoekje (b. 1956). Although Nelson briefly attended New Jersey College for Women (1947-1949), she defined herself primarily as a wife and mother until the mid-1960s. Inspired by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Nelson returned to college in 1964 and began to participate in the radical political movements of that decade. She graduated from the University of Akron with a B.A. in 1966 and an M.A. in Social Psychology in 1968. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976, having completed a dissertation which examined the National Woman's Party, and was instrumental in the founding of Women's Studies at both SUNY-Buffalo and at Antioch College in Ohio. Nelson has been involved in peace, civil rights, feminist, and lesbian activism; her most notable political activities include lobbying for the ERA in Congress, organizing to free Joann Little and the Wilmington Ten, and co-founding the Women's Building in San Francisco. Her articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of feminist publications including Sinister Wisdom, Sojourner, Off Our Backs, and many others. Since the 1980s Nelson has lived in San Francisco where she works as a feminist therapist and a lesbian feminist activist.