Margaret Madeline Chase was born in Skowhegan, Maine, the eldest of six children in a working-class family.
Margaret Madeline Chase was born on December 14, 1897, in the small mill town of Skowhegan, Maine, to James and Carrie Chase. Her father worked as a barber and her mother held various jobs, including as a waitress and shoe factory worker, instilling in young Margaret a strong work ethic from an early age.
As the eldest of six children in a family of modest means, Margaret took on jobs throughout her youth, working at a five-and-dime store, in a mill, and as a telephone operator to help support her family while attending local schools. She graduated from Skowhegan High School in 1916, an achievement not universally available to working-class girls of her era.
These early experiences of labor and self-reliance would shape her later political identity as a pragmatic, independent-minded legislator unbeholden to party machinery. Her Maine roots and small-town upbringing became central to her public persona throughout her extraordinary career, which would eventually see her become one of the most consequential women in American political history, serving in both houses of Congress and mounting the first serious campaign by a woman for a major party's presidential nomination.