Frances Carpenter was born in Washington, D.C. on April 30, 1890 to Joanna Condict and Frank G. Carpenter. She graduated from Smith College in 1912. Her father was a foreign correspondent and travelled extensively. Frances accompanied him on many of his travels as secretary and photographer. They co-authored several books including The Foods We Eat (1925), The Clothes We Wear (1926), and The Houses We Live In (1926). She also wrote Ourselves and Our City (1928), The Ways We Travel (1929), Tales of a Basque Grandmother (1930) Our Little Friends of Eskimo Land (1931) Our Neighbors Near and Far, An Elementary Geography (1932), and other books. In 1960 she edited a book of articles her father had written in the 1880s about life in Washington, D.C. entitled Carp's Washington (1960). She married W. Chapin Huntington, commercial attaché at the American Embassy in Paris. She was Vice President of the International Society of Woman Geographers, a Fellow of the Royal Geography Society of London, and President of the Smith College Alumnae Association and on the Smith College Board of Trustees. She died November 2, 1972.

The Frances Carpenter Papers include correspondence (primarily with publishers); original manuscripts of The Story of East Africa and South American Wonder Tales; radio talk transcripts on topics such as children's books and "women of the arts"; and five scrapbooks consisting of photographs, clippings, illustrations, bibliographies, reviews, and book jackets.