By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS on Labor Day

Dona Kahn has no plans to quit practicing law. “Why should I?” she says. She’s still full of energy and still enjoys the work at age 93.

Kahn moved into a retirement apartment at The Carlisle earlier this year, coming from the east coast to be near her son Andrew. She’ll keep practicing law, often with a human rights focus, as she’s done since receiving her law degree from Rutgers University in 1957. Born in New Jersey, Kahn won a scholarship to Brandeis University and went from there to Rutgers for law school. She married fellow attorney Arthur Kahn, soon after his graduation, while she was still in law school.

There were few rights for women or minorities when the young family moved to the Washington, D.C., area for her husband’s job. The first of their three sons was three years old, and she went looking for her own job. One governmental agency after another dismissed her application, even though she had graduated at the top of her class at Rutgers. “We’re not hiring girls,” she was told again and again. At the Securities and Exchange Commission, she was told they would hire her if there were an opening in the briefs department, since females couldn’t be expected to deal with the likes of corporate leaders.

Eventually Kahn went to work for the Department of Agriculture. Once she traveled to Kansas City, Kansas, to meet with the U.S. Attorney on government business. Thanks to “blue laws” then strictly limiting the sale and consumption of alcohol, hotels and other public accommodations often featured “key clubs” to store one’s own alcohol; so she was invited to meet the attorney at the key club. Seated next to him, she was stunned to realize, as they began to work, that his hand was working its way under her skirt. She solved that problem with the immediate positioning of her sizable handbag. The groundwork for a lifetime commitment to human rights was set. 

In a recent talk on sexual harassment to her fellow Carlisle residents, Kahn told these stories, along with another that led to the introduction of the term “sexual harassment” itself. That goes back to a 1970 case involving a Cornell University employee who resigned after suffering repeated instances of inappropriate and unwanted touch by her boss. Denied unemployment benefits because her departure was termed voluntary, the woman sued — and won — and the term “sexual harassment” entered the law and the lexicon.

It was with passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964, with its 11 titles, that the long work of fighting discrimination began, Kahn explains. The law’s segments include voting rights (Title I, now seriously under attack more than 60 years later), school desegregation (Title IV) and employment (Title VII) providing protection against discrimination on the basis of sex, race, gender, national origin, religion and color. That last one, Kahn says, was inserted because darker-skinned black people were being subjected to even greater discrimination than lighter-skinned blacks.

Kahn moved with her husband and their growing family from New Jersey to Philadelphia for many years. Eventually they moved to Manhattan in 1995 after her husband joined the Central and Eastern European Law Initiative, a nonprofit formed after the fall of the Berlin wall to help newly free states write new constitutions and develop judicial systems.

The law firm she joined in 1990, Anderson Kill, is headquartered in New York. Her husband died in January 2001, but Kahn says she did not mind living alone. “I could eat standing up at the kitchen counter if I wanted,” she says.

Kahn moved to California in November 2025, living near a son in Marin County before settling into The Carlisle. Two other sons live on the east coast. While living in Marin, she acquired a new family member, Ginger, a spaniel-chihuahua mix. Ginger is a rescue dog of indeterminate age — “We think about 8,” she says — that goes for walks along one of four different routes four times a day. Ginger has a growing fan club at the Carlisle.

Kahn enjoys those walks around Japantown and Fillmore. She has also found time for a book club and an exercise group. But she is mostly at work until early afternoon, when the work day ends back east. She still works with Anderson Kill. “I would take on more if I could,” she says. “I get bored easily.”

PODCAST: “As long as my brain keeps working“