Social psychologist Margaret Fiske Lowenthal was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts on June 25, 1914. She received her B.A. from Mt. Holyoke College in 1935 and M.A. from Columbia University in 1938. The first six years of her career following graduate school were spent in New York City. From 1949-1953 she was deputy director of the evaluation staff of the State Department's International Broadcasting Service (Voice of America). In 1953-1954 she served as the executive director of the Ford Foundation's national planning committee on research in television. From 1953-1955 she also served as research director for Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research.

In 1955 she came to California, serving as a lecturer in the sociology department of the University of California at Berkeley from 1955-1956, and from 1956-1958 she directed a book selection and censorship study and also lectured in social research at that institution's school of librarianship. In 1958 she came to the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco, first as a lecturer in the psychiatry department (1958-1965) and later as professor of social psychology (1966-1983; emerita, 1983-1992).

At UCSF, she chaired the graduate group in human development, was founder and director of a pre-and post-doctoral training program in adult development and aging, and directed a closely related research program on social, psychological and cultural factors associated with adaptation at critical periods of adulthood and old age. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, the Gerontological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she also served as president of the Psychological and Social Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society, and in 1973 was the recipient of that society's Kleemeier Award for outstanding and meritorious contributions to reserch in aging. A frequent contributor of articles to professional journals, she authored or co-authored a number of books, most notably Mass Persuasion (1946), Book Selection and Censorship(1959), Lives in Distress (1964), Aging and Mental Disorder in San Francisco (1967), Four Stages of Life: A Comparative Study of Women and Men Facing Transitions (1975) and Middle Age: The Prime of Life?(1979).

Margaret Fiske Lowenthal died on February 11, 1992.