Madeleine Zabriskie Doty was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, August 24, 1877. She received a B.L. from Smith College in 1900 and an L.L.B. from New York University in 1902.

After practicing law for five years in New York City, her interest turned to children's courts and delinquency and for three years she was secretary of the Russell Sage Foundation Children's Court Committee. As a member of New York's Prison Reform Commission in 1913, she voluntarily spent a week in prison to investigate conditions. Out of this experience she published Society's Misfits (1916) about juvenile and women's prison reform.

Madeleine Z. Doty in Russia, circa 1917-18

Doty's pacifist principles placed her among an international circle of pacifist women who believed that women's exclusion from warmaking councils gave them an objective view which made them more natural peacemakers than men. In 1915, with Jane Addams and forty-three other women from the U.S., she attended the Women's Peace Congress at The Hague. She then became a correspondent for the New York Tribune and Good Housekeeping. For the latter she traveled around the world and was in Russia during the 1917-1918 revolution. She published Short Rations: An American Woman In Germany in 1917 and Behind The Battle Line in 1918.

In 1919 she married pacifist, Roger Baldwin, who later founded the ACLU. They were divorced in 1925. Doty continued to play a part in the peace movement first as International Secretary for the WILPF in Geneva, then as editor of Pax International for the League of Nations. In 1936, foreseeing the collapse of the League, Doty decided that the only way to secure world peace was through education of the young. She created and organized the first Geneva Junior Year Abroad program for the University of Delaware, 1938-1939. Because it was impossible to continue during World War II, she studied at the University of Geneva, receiving a Ph.D in International Relations in 1934 at the age of 66. After the war she returned to the U.S. and between 1946 and 1949 she organized and ran another Geneva Junior Year Abroad program for Smith College.

Beginning in 1950 Doty taught history at Miss Harris's School in Florida. She retired at the age of 75. She returned to Geneva and lectured on American history at the University of Geneva until 1962 when she moved to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where she died October 14, 1963.