Corazon Cojoangco Aquino was born on January 25, 1933, the sixth of eight children born to Jose Cojoangco of Tarlac, a prosperous province 65 miles northwest of Manila, the Philippines capital. The Cojoangcos were members of a wealthy landowning family prominent in politics. Aquino attended an exclusive Catholic school for girls in Manila before travelling to America to attend Philadelphia's Raven Hill Academy. After earning a degree in French and mathematics from New York's Mount Saint Vincent College in 1953, she returned to the Philippines and enrolled in a Manila law school.
While at law school she met her future husband, Benigno Aquino and married him in 1954. The marriage united two of Tarlac's most prominent families. Aquino's husband belonged to a family whose involvement in politics went as far back as the last century. One year after they were married, Aquino's husband was elected mayor of the city of Concepcion at the age of 22. Her husband was considered one of the Philippines' brightest political hopes.
Moving up in politics, Aquino's husband became the youngest territorial governor and later the youngest senator in the Philippines. Through out all her husband's political successes, Aquino stayed in the background, preferring to concentrate her energies on raising their four daughters and a son. As her husband rose in prominence, he became an outspoken critic of the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos. When Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972, Aquino's husband was one of the first persons arrested and put in jail. During the long years of her husband's incarceration from 1972 to 1980, Aquino's role as a quiet wife slowly changed.
Becoming her husband's main link to the outside world, she was instrumental in having his statements passed along to the press and to activists outside the prison walls. From inside his cell, Aquino's husband even ran for a seat in Parliament, with his wife conducting a large portion of the campaign. In 1980, Aquino's husband was released from jail in order to undergo heart surgery in the United States. Aquino's husband worked as a research fellow at Harvard University for the next three years. His family lived with him in the Boston area and his wife described the time as the best years of her life.
In 1983 supporters of the anti-Marcos factions persuaded Aquino's husband to return to the Philippines and to lead their cause. When his plane landed on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport on August 21, 1983, Aquino's husband was assassinated. A commission formed to investigate the murder indicted the military men assigned to escort him as well as their military superiors. However, the court which eventually tried them for the murder acquitted all 26 defendants. Her husband's assassination served as the turning point of Aquino's life. As her dead husband became the rallying focus of anti-Marcos groups she, as his widow, became the unifying figure for the different factions of the opposition. Aquino was catapulted into the role of keeping the unity alive.