Born Emily Weisberg [1]inDallas, Texas, and graduated from high school there. She married stockbroker Leon Sunstein, Jr. in 1943 a year before earning a bachelor's degree in Art History in 1944 from Vassar College. The couple then moved to Elkins Park before raising three children in Wyncote.
She sat on the State Commission for Human Relations from 1970 to 1974, was the head of the state Conference on Women's Economics Issues and the head of the Philadelphia YWCA in 1975.
She and her husband built a sprawling modern cedar home overlooking Fairmount Park in the mid-1970s.[citation needed]
In 1989, her first book, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Little, Brown and Co., 1989) was published to critical acclaim. She won the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars in 1989.[citation needed]
She moved away from politics and started to enjoy other passions such as writing, collecting art, entertaining and horticulture. She remained active in Jewish causes until she became ill in the mid-1990s.[citation needed]
