Betsy McCaughey - Early Life, Education, and Family

Early Life, Education, and Family

McCaughey and her twin brother William were born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Albert Peterken, a factory janitor, and his wife, Ramona. The family moved around the Northeastern United States for six years before settling down in Westport, Connecticut, where McCaughey's father did maintenance, and later engineering work at a nail clipper factory. McCaughey recalled her parents' difficulty in affording medical treatment, "my brother was a serious asthmatic as a child. I remember my parents sitting at the kitchen table wondering if they could afford to take to the hospital."

McCaughey attended public schools in Westport through the 10th grade, spending much of her free time at the library. After receiving a scholarship, she transferred to a private Massachusetts boarding school, the Mary A. Burnham School, for her last two years of high school, rarely visiting home, either then or during her college years.

She received a scholarship to attend Vassar College where she majored in history. She wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, won several fellowships, and received her B.A., with distinction, in 1970. McCaughey went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, earning her M.A. in 1972 and her Ph.D. in constitutional history in 1976. She won Columbia's Bancroft Dissertation Award in American History in 1976 and her dissertation was published by the prestigious Columbia University Press in 1980 under the title, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson. She also contributed a chapter about William Samuel Johnson to the 1979 book, The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives by William Fowler and Wallace Coyle.

While completing her Ph.D., McCaughey trained in the corporate banking department at Chase Manhattan Bank, and served as a loan officer in the Food, Beverage, and Tobacco Division. She also took courses in accounting at Columbia's School of Business.

In 1971, McCaughey's mother, an alcoholic, died of liver disease at the age of 42; her father had died one year earlier at the age of 60. In 1972, she married Thomas K. McCaughey, a Yale graduate she had met in college and who was then moving up as an investment banker. The McCaugheys separated in 1992 and divorced in 1994 with McCaughey and her ex-spouse sharing joint custody of their three daughters. In January 1993 she filed an affidavit in her divorce proceeding in which she said she had no annual earnings from employment during most of the 18 years of her marriage to Thomas, and had never earned more than $20,000 per year, except in 1990, when she "sold an idea to Fox television for a windfall once-in-a-lifetime sum of $75,000". She married wealthy investment banker and prominent Democratic Party fundraiser Wilbur Ross, Jr. in December 1995; he filed for divorce in November 1998.