After the war, he stayed in the military, and the small-town family traveled with him, including two years in China after peace was declared.

"It blew open my mind to the possibility of other cultures," Dunn says. "I was a kid from Wisconsin who was suddenly exposed to a much wider world."

After they returned to the United States, Dunn enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where she studied history.

Going to school in the segregated South, she says her understanding of racial discrimination grew gradually, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

"You had to learn what it meant," Dunn says. "People accepted segregation very unthinkingly... My interest and engagement in the civil rights movement came in the '60s, but my understanding began in the '50s."

As a self-described member of "the campus left wing," Dunn cheered the decision on Brown. But even as her consciousness of racism grew, sexism remained more difficult to see, especially since Dunn grew up in the all-male world of the Army.

"[The] gender relations might seem odd to you, but it was normal for the 1950s," she said. "There was a 'dean of women,' women had parietal rules that were different from parietal rules for men."