Elizabeth Monroe (née Kortright; June 30, 1768 – September 23, 1830) was the first lady of the United States from 1817 to 1825, as the wife of James Monroe, fifth president of the United States. Due to the fragile condition of Monroe's health, many of her duties as the official White House hostess were assumed by her eldest daughter, Eliza Monroe Hay.

Monroe was born in New York City on June 30, 1768, the youngest daughter of Lawrence Kortright, a wealthy merchant, and Hannah (née Aspinwall) Kortright. Elizabeth Monroe's paternal second great grandfather, Cornelius Jansen Kortright, was born in Holland, Netherlands, in 1645, and immigrated to New York in the year of 1663. His father, Jan Bastiaenson Van Kortrijk, was also born in Holland, Netherlands in 1618 and immigrated with his son to New York. Jan Bastiaenson's father, Bastiaen Van Kortrijk, was born in the city of Kortrijk in Flanders, Spanish Netherlands, in 1586, and immigrated to Holland, Netherlands, in 1615. Monroe's father was one of the founders of the New York Chamber of Commerce. During the American Revolutionary War, he was part owner of several privateers fitted out at New York, and it has also been documented that he enslaved at least four Black people. He purchased land tracts in what is now Delaware County, New York, and from the sale of this land the town of Kortright, New York, was formed.

Monroe grew up in a household with four older siblings: Sarah, Hester, John and Mary. According to the parish records of Trinity Church, New York, Monroe's mother, Hannah, died on September 6 or 7, 1777, at the age of 39. The cause of death was recorded as resulting from childbed. An unidentified sibling of Monroe's, aged 13 months, succumbed to flux and fever a few days later. Hannah and the infant were both buried at St. George's Chapel in New York. At the time of their deaths, Monroe was nine years old. Her father never remarried.

On August 3, 1778, almost a year after the death of Monroe's mother, the home of the Lawrence Kortright family was nearly destroyed by fire during a blaze which caused damage and destruction to fifty homes near Cruger's Wharf in lower Manhattan. A historian later wrote that this blaze was due to the mismanagement of British troops while directing the firefighters. Monroe, age 10, with her father and siblings, survived the fire unscathed.

Kortright first caught the attention of James Monroe in 1785 while he was in New York City serving as a member of the Continental Congress. William Grayson, James Monroe's cousin and fellow Congressman from Virginia, described Elizabeth and her sisters as having "made so brilliant and lovely an appearance" at a theater one evening, "as to depopulate all the other boxes of all the genteel male people therein."

James Monroe, then 27 years old, married Elizabeth, then 17 years old, on February 16, 1786, at her father's home in New York City. The marriage was performed by Reverend Benjamin Moore, and recorded in the parish records of Trinity Church, New York. After a brief honeymoon on Long Island, the newlyweds returned to New York City to live with her father until Congress adjourned. Their first child, whom they named Eliza Kortright Monroe, was born in December, 1786, in Virginia.

In 1794, George Washington appointed James as United States Minister to France. In Paris, as wife of the American Minister during the Reign of Terror, she helped secure the release of Madame La Fayette, wife of the Marquis de Lafayette, when she learned she was imprisoned and scheduled to be executed by guillotine. The Monroes also provided support and shelter to the American citizen Thomas Paine in Paris, after he was arrested for his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI. While in France, the Monroes' daughter Eliza became a friend of Hortense de Beauharnais, step-daughter of Napoleon, and both girls received their education in the school of Madame Jeanne Campan. James was recalled from his Ambassadorship in 1796, due in part to his support of France in the opposition of the Jay Treaty.

The Monroes returned to Virginia, where James became governor, and Elizabeth became First Lady of Virginia. The couple's son, James Spence, was born in 1799 but died in 1800. During this time, Elizabeth suffered the first of a series of seizures and collapses that were possibly a product of epilepsy, which plagued her for the rest of her life and gradually caused her to restrict her social activities. The Monroe's third child, a daughter they named Maria Hester, was born in Virginia in early 1802.