Born on a farm in Boone County, Arkansas, Patricia Lee Smith grew up in the Ozarks and in Southern California, where she graduated from Downey Union High School in 1955, then attended Los Angeles Baptist College, where she met her future husband, Stanley Norman Gundry. As Patricia Gundry, she began working as a freelance writer while living with her family in the Chicago area in the 1970s, producing articles for both secular and Christian periodicals. Reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex while still a teenager had been a watershed experience for her, and the cause of equality for women in the church soon became the focus of her work as an author. She published four books on that subject that had a global impact in Evangelical circles: Woman Be Free! (Zondervan, 1977), Heirs Together (Zondervan, 1980), The Complete Woman (Doubleday, 1981), and Neither Slave Nor Free (HarperCollins, 1987). These publications led to radio, newspaper and television interviews, and speaking engagements across the United States, including a stint as a campaigner for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in Illinois.

An accomplished cook, Patricia edited The Zondervan Family Cookbook (Zondervan, 1988), for which she wrote content and tested recipes as well. She was also a skilled singer, musician, artist, seamstress and organic gardener who often sang her youngest to sleep while strumming the guitar, sewed custom-made Halloween costumes for her children, and was beloved as both a volunteer art educator and "the flower lady" among the pupils at Emerson Elementary School, which faced her beautiful front garden in Wheaton, Illinois.

Patricia was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests, and her four children benefited greatly from having a mother who readily instructed them on topics ranging from the policies of the Franco regime to the workings of the internal combustion engine. To keep her works in print she learned how to self-publish and market books, and for years hosted a popular e-mail forum for self-publishers. Later in life Patricia began work as a personal coach, accumulating a list of grateful clients throughout North America.

Patricia died peacefully on July 31 at the age of eighty-seven after having lived with cancer for six years. She is survived and will be sorely missed by her husband Stanley, her brother Dan Gordon Smith, her daughter Ann Gundry Teliczan (Mathew), sons Daniel (Carolle), David, and Jonathan (Betsy), grandchildren Paul Hudson (Erin), Ryan Teliczan (Yoko), Julien, Gabrielle, Sarah, Julia and Christopher Gundry, as well as great-grandchildren Rhianna and Noah Hudson and Kai Teliczan.