Barbara Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on 6 April 1927 as the second child of Isaac Barnett "Barney" Mailer and his wife Fanny Schneider Mailer. Barbara's only sibling was the future author Norman Mailer, four years her senior. In 1928, the Mailer family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where both children attended public schools. By the time Barbara graduated from high school and was admitted to Radcliffe College in 1943, the United States was engaged in the Second World War. Radcliffe was, due to its relationship to Harvard, on an accelerated wartime scholastic program, permitting Barbara to graduate in January 1947.

By the summer of 1947 Norman was, as an army veteran, attending the Sorbonne in Paris with the assistance of the G.I. Bill; his parents were also in Paris, Barney working for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on behalf of war-displaced European Jews. By 1948 Barbara was also in Paris, and at the urging of Norman became part of a successful one-time effort to assist several anti-Franco Spaniards trying to enter France illegally.

Back in Brooklyn by 1949, Barbara worked to ease herself out of her mother’s benevolent control, using for a time a visit to her good friends Adeline and Mark "Lucky" Naiman in Chicago. There she initially worked as a waitress in a hotel coffee shop and later as a Bureau of Labor Statistics interviewer. After returning to New York she obtained an office job at the Yardney Electric Corporation, one byproduct of which was her humorous essay "Mr. Yardney and Mr. Bodkin."

While continuing with her plans to distance herself from her mother, Barbara met Larry Alson at a party in early 1950. After dating for some time, the two classical music buffs jumped at the opportunity to go to France to attend the first Pablo Casals Bach Festival. By July, still in France, the couple decided (almost offhandedly as Barbara describes it) on marrying, with the ceremony taking place in Nice on the first of August.

Barbara Alson's first long-term salaried employment was in 1952 with CBS-TV's Public Affairs Department, as secretary to Irving Gitlin. The department had been created to answer CBS's "public service obligation" and its first documentary series, , had gotten off to a rocky start. This led the network to bring in Gitlin with enough authority to appoint people who he felt could work to his vision and deliver quality programming in a timely manner.

Barbara worked for CBS through 1954, handling much of the research and writing for , leaving before the birth of her son, Peter Alson, in April 1955. Once Peter arrived, Barbara cut back on her work hours to spend more time with her son.

For most of the 1960s Barbara Alson divided her work time between freelancing for Irving Gitlin Productions and part-time work for Jerry Cooke Inc. In a curriculum vitae she described her work for Gitlin as "reading and evaluating scripts and books as potential film properties, researching and writing presentations." For "journalistic photographer" Cooke she served as in-office executive assistant, maintaining picture files, indexing photographs, and conducting sales. Other similar projects are to be found in the CV for this period.

As busy as the decade of the 1960s was for Barbara she found time to assemble , a selection of contemporary feminist writing that was published by Fawcett in 1966, and reissued in a "revised [and enlarged] edition" in 1970 by the same publisher.

In the early 1960s the marriage of Larry and Barbara Alson was nearing its end and for her the immediate need for employment became more pressing, hence the work, both ongoing and catch-as-catch-can, became the norm. In 1963, after her divorce from Larry was final she began seeing Al Wasserman, whom she had known in the Gitlin crew at CBS-TV and who was now with NBC.

Wasserman was a significant figure in American documentary filmmaking, having won an Oscar in 1947 for his , a film study in physical therapy for children with disabilities, as well as two personal Emmys for his work on NBC’s series in the Sixties. Barbara continued with her freelancing plus managing Jerry Cooke's shop until she and Wasserman were married in 1968, followed by Al's leaving NBC and establishing Wasserman Productions, Inc. in 1969.

Al had founded Wasserman Productions with the intention of moving into the production of feature films, Barbara having closed out her freelance work in order to work with Al in (mostly) script writing and research. The work in industrial and other documentary films had been well supported, but two major projects in producing feature films hadn't worked out and by 1974 Wasserman closed out the venture. In 1976, he joined CBS’s , from which he retired in 1986.

After working with her husband on Wasserman Productions, Barbara went to Simon & Schuster in 1974, where she became an editor, reviewing and selecting manuscripts for publication. She retired from S&S in 1985, allowing the Wassermans a retirement of entertaining family and friends in New York and on Cape Cod. Other interests for the couple in these years included a return to still photography for Al and family history research for Barbara. Retirement also presented Barbara with the time to assemble a group of personal memories, , published by Arbitrary Press in 2021.