Eunice Belgum was born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York, where she lived for ten years until her family moved to Fargo, North Dakota. She did her undergraduate work at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, spending her senior year at Oxford, after which she proceeded to graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. From 1974 until1976, she taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, until her death.