Betsy McCaughey (born Elizabeth Helen Peterken, October 20, 1948, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was the Lieutenant Governor of the State of New York from 1995 to 1998, during the first term of Republican Governor George Pataki. She has provided commentary, sometimes controversial, on United States constitutional law and healthcare policy.

Elizabeth Helen, who prefers to be called Betsy, and her twin brother William, were born on October 20, 1948 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter and son of Albert Peterken, a maintenance man in a fingernail-clipper factory, and his wife, Ramona. The family moved around the Northeast before settling in Westport, Connecticut when Betsy was six years old, where she attended public schools through the 10th grade. For 11th and 12th grades, Betsy attended the Mary A. Burnham School, a college preparatory boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts ninety miles away from home, on a scholarship, graduating in 1966.

Betsy then went on another scholarship to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she majored in history, wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, won Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Lehman Fellowships, and graduated with a B.A. with distinction in 1970. Betsy's father, Albert, died at age 60 in August 1970, and her mother, Ramona, an alcoholic, died at age 42 a few months later of liver disease. Betsy went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City to study history, earning a M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in U.S. constitutional history in 1976. Her Ph.D. dissertation on William Samuel Johnson was awarded the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Bancroft Dissertation Award for outstanding dissertation in American History (including biography), diplomacy, or international affairs, in 1976. It was published as a book, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson, by Columbia University Press in 1980.