Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was born in Hastings, Sussex, England, to a devout Evangelical family.
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was born on 21 January 1840 in Hastings, Sussex, England, the youngest of six children of Thomas Jex-Blake, a retired proctor of Doctors' Commons, and Mary Cubitt Jex-Blake. Her family was comfortably wealthy and staunchly Evangelical, and she was raised with the expectation that a woman's proper sphere was domestic and philanthropic rather than professional.
Despite her family's conservatism, Sophia displayed early intellectual ambition and a strong will that would characterize her entire life. She was educated privately and then at Queen's College, London, one of the earliest institutions to offer women a rigorous academic education, where she later became a mathematics tutor herself, against her father's wishes that she not accept payment for work.
Her birth in this era of strict Victorian gender roles set the stage for a lifelong battle against the era's assumptions about women's intellectual and professional capacities. She would go on to become one of the most consequential figures in the history of women's entry into the medical profession in Britain, co-founding medical schools for women and fighting tenaciously, through the courts and the press, for women's right to be licensed physicians.