 Alice progressed through the public schools, then studied at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.She later transferred to Abbot Academy in Andover, graduating in 1868, and returning to Davenport.By 1890, she had been settled in her comfortable lifelong lesbian partnership with a widowed friend, Jane Allen Crawford (1851-1932), for close to a decade, dividing their year between their home in Davenport, Iowa, and their plantation in Arkansas.