Marsha Emanuel (née Smulevitz), born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, was the whip-smart, spirited daughter of union organizer Herman Smulevitz, an immigrant whose family fled pogroms targeting Jews in Eastern Europe, and sisters Esther and Shirley. She did not attend college, as her father refused permission and used her college savings for her brother Sheldon's tuition. She worked as a radiological (X-ray) technician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, where she met her future husband, Benjamin M. Emanuel (1927-2019), a Jerusalem-born pediatrician and former Irgun member; they married around 1955. Marsha later became a psychotherapist and psychiatric social worker. She was the devoted mother of four children: sons Ezekiel (b. 1957), Rahm (b. 1959), and Ari (b. 1961), and daughter Shoshana, born with cerebral palsy who had a difficult adolescence. As a young woman, she assumed nearly full authority over domestic affairs and devoted herself to raising the children. In the late 1990s, at around age 63, she was raising Shoshana's two children born out of wedlock. Amid pre-women's liberation constraints, she experienced 'emotional storms' and 'tempestuous moods' while navigating her career ambitions. A civil rights activist, she participated in marches and demonstrations in 1960s Chicago, including with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). She also defied her father-in-law and husband by voting for Republican Charles Percy against the Vietnam War, slapping her son and pulling the lever despite opposition.