Born in Lexington, Kentucky, on April 1, 1866, Sophonisba Breckinridge was the daughter of a liberal lawyer, journalist, and later congressman who provided her ample opportunity for education. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1888. After a time as a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C., she took up the study of law in her father╒s office and in 1895 became the first woman to be admitted to the Kentucky bar. Legal practice failed to interest her, however, and she soon moved to Chicago, where she became secretary to Marion Talbot, dean of women at the University of Chicago, and enrolled in the graduate school. In 1901 she became the first woman anywhere to receive a Ph.D. in the field of political science, and three years later she was the first to graduate from the law school of the university. She had served as assistant dean of women since 1902, and in 1904 she also became an instructor in the department of household administration, advancing to assistant professor in 1909.
In 1907 Breckinridge became interested in the Women╒s Trade Union League and in Jane Addams╒s Hull-House, where she became a resident and remained until 1920. Also in 1907 she became an instructor and then dean of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, and the following year she succeeded Julia C. Lathrop as head of the school╒s research department. In 1908, with Grace Abbott and others, she organized the Immigrants╒ Protective League, of which she served a short time as director and then until 1942 as secretary. In 1911 she was a vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her championship of women╒s trade unions and of legislative regulation of wages and hours of employment helped make those questions national issues, particularly as part of the Progressive party╒s 1912 platform. Much of her work in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, where the practical training of social workers took precedence over scientific sociological research, was reflected in such books as The Delinquent Child and the Home, with Edith Abbott, 1912, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, with Abbott, 1917, and New Homes for Old, 1921. She also wrote The Modern Household, with Marion Talbot, 1912, out of her early coursework at the University of Chicago, and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, a biography of her sister-in-law, 1921.
In 1915 she joined in organizing the Woman╒s Peace party and then accompanied Jane Addams and others to the international Congress of Women at The Hague, where she helped found the Women╒s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1920 she prompted and oversaw the takeover by the University of Chicago of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, which then became the Graduate School of Social Service Administration. In that year she advanced to associate professor in that school as well as in the department of household administration (she continued also as assistant dean of women), and in 1925 she became a full professor. In 1929 she was named Samuel Deutsch Professor of Public Welfare Administration and dean of pre-professional social service students. Publications from this period included Family Welfare Work in a Metropolitan Community, 1924, Public Welfare Administration, 1927, Women in the Twentieth Century, 1931, Marriage and the Civic Rights of Women, 1931, The Family and the State, 1934, Social Work and the Courts, 1934, and The Illinois Poor Law and its Administration, 1939. She helped found the journal Social Service Review in 1927 and served thereafter on its editorial staff. She was active in international organizations, serving as a delegate to the first Child Welfare Congress in Geneva in 1925, to the First International Conference of Social Work in Paris in 1928, to the Pan-American Child Congress in Lima in 1930, and under Secretary of State Cordell Hull to the Pan-American Congress in Montevideo in 1933. In 1934 she was chosen president of the American Association of Schools of Social Work. She became professor emeritus in 1933 and continued to teach a full schedule until 1942. She died in Chicago on July 30, 1948.
