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Elizabeth Ann Seton was born Elizabeth Ann Bayley in New York City on 28 August 1774, in the British Province of New York. She was the second child of Dr. Richard Bayley, a prominent physician who became the first health officer of the Port of New York and the first professor of anatomy at Columbia College, and of Catherine Charlton, daughter of the rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church on Staten Island. Her mother died in 1777, when Elizabeth was about three years old; after her father's remarriage she was raised in a cultured Episcopal household and given an education uncommon for girls of her time. From early youth she showed a serious piety and a practical concern for the poor. On 25 January 1794 she married William Magee Seton, a member of a well-known New York mercantile family. They had five children: Anna Maria, William, Richard, Catherine, and Rebecca. In New York society she helped found, in 1797, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, one of the earliest charitable organizations of its kind in the United States.

The Seton shipping business suffered heavy losses in the late 1790s and early 1800s, in part from wartime disruption of trade, and William developed tuberculosis. In 1803 Elizabeth, William, and their eldest daughter sailed for Italy in the hope that the climate would restore his health. They were received by the Filicchi brothers, business associates in Livorno. William died at Pisa in December 1803, leaving Elizabeth a widow at twenty-nine with five young children. During her stay in Italy she was strongly drawn to Catholic belief and practice, especially the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and to the charity of the Filicchi household. She returned to New York in 1804 and, after a period of study and prayer, was received into the Catholic Church on 14 March 1805 at St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street. The conversion cost her the support of many relatives and friends in Protestant New York and left her with scant means of providing for her family.

After unsuccessful efforts to support herself by teaching in New York, she accepted in 1808 an invitation from Bishop John Carroll and the Sulpician fathers to open a school for Catholic girls in Baltimore. In 1809 she settled at Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she established a religious community, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph's, the first community of women religious founded in the United States. She and her first companions took a rule adapted from that of the French Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Known as Mother Seton, she served as superior of the community, directed St. Joseph's Academy and Free School, and thereby helped lay the foundations of the American Catholic parochial school system. The sisters also cared for the poor and the sick. Two of her daughters, Anna Maria and Rebecca, died of tuberculosis during these years; her daughter Catherine later entered the Sisters of Mercy, while her sons William and Richard followed secular careers.

Mother Seton died of tuberculosis at Emmitsburg on 4 January 1821, at the age of forty-six. The community she founded continued to grow and gave rise to several congregations of Sisters of Charity in North America; some later affiliated with the international Daughters of Charity. She was beatified by Pope John XXIII on 17 March 1963 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 14 September 1975, becoming the first person born in the territory of the present United States to be declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Her feast is observed on 4 January. She is invoked as a patron of Catholic schools, widows, and seafarers, among other causes, and her relics are enshrined at the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

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