 Hazlett was born in Cincinnati, Ohio but grew up in Boston, Massachusetts where she attended public school.In 1912 she received her bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College.She then attended the University of Chicago for her master's degree (1913) and Ph.D. (1915), for which she wrote a thesis titled "On the Classification and Invariantive Characterization of Nilpotent Algebras" with L. E. Dickson as thesis advisor.