She began making portrait busts of family members in about 1855. At the time that Whitney began to study art, women had limited educational opportunities. Unlike male students, women could not take life drawing classes. Visits to art galleries required that sculptures of nude men needed to have the genitalia covered before the women could enter the gallery. Plaster casts of the human form could not be used in co-educational classrooms. Whitney moved to New York so that she could study anatomy at a Brooklyn hospital from 1859 and into 1860, and then studied drawing and modeling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.