Early Life and Education
Whitman was born in Long Island, New York, the daughter of Margaret Cushing (née Goodhue) and Hendricks Hallett Whitman, Jr. Her patrilineal great-great-great-grandfather, Elnathan Whitman, was a member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. Through her father, she is also a great-great-granddaughter of U.S. Senator Charles B. Farwell, of Illinois. On her mother's side, she is a great-granddaughter of historian and jurist Munroe Smith and a great-great-granddaughter of general Henry S. Huidekoper. Her paternal grandmother, born Adeladie Chatfield-Taylor, was the sister of economist Wayne Chatfield-Taylor.
Whitman attended Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, graduating after three years in 1974. In her memoirs, she says she was in the top ten of her class. She had wanted to be a doctor, so she studied math and science at Princeton University. However, after spending a summer selling advertisements for a magazine, she switched to studying economics, earning a B.A. with honors in 1977. Whitman then obtained an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1979.
Whitman is married to Griffith Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center. They have two sons. She has lived in Atherton, California, since March 1998. Whitman College, a residential college completed in 2007 at Princeton University, is named after Meg Whitman following her $30 million donation.
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