In 1860, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson—the daughter of Quaker abolitionists—attended a public debate in her native Philadelphia titled “Women’s Rights and Wrongs.” She had not planned to speak. But when a “bristling, dictatorial man”—as she later called him—stood to insist that his daughters were equal to all men, just better suited to domestic lives than commercial pursuits, Dickinson could not resist.
Here is the foundational narrative on which I was raised: In March 1933, my great-uncle Arthur Kahn walked out of his apartment in Würzburg, Germany, for what was supposed to be a short Easter-break trip to see relatives. He was 21, training to be a doctor. He didn’t know it, but his name had been placed on a list of students suspected of Communist ties. He had none, but he was arrested in Nuremberg. A few weeks later, he was transferred to Dachau, which had just opened as a prison.