Flo graduated from high school in Lewiston, Maine, in 1943. She obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of Maine in Orono in 1947, the first woman in the state to earn a degree in Chemistry. In Orono she met her future husband, John F. Butler, who studied engineering at the University of Maine in 1944 and 1945 while serving in the Army. Flo earned a Master's degree in Chemistry from Smith College in 1949, and they married a few days later. They then moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where John worked on a graduate degree at Brown University.