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Benoit and Jeanette had two daughters and five sons, three of whom went into the family business, but only one of whom, the eldest, worked not as an optician but instead as a "traveling agent"—that was Jacob Kahn, Etta's father. Etta's mother, Julia Roth, was herself the descendant of German Jewish immigrants, and though she had been born in New York she grew up speaking German as her first language. She gave birth to Etta on January 20, 1878, nine months to the day after her marriage to Jacob; three years later the couple had a son, Chester Arthur Kahn, born just six weeks after Chester A. Arthur, another New Yorker from the East Side, became president.

Jacob died while Etta was still in school, leaving the family in straitened circumstances, and for many years afterward, Julia Roth Kahn took in boarders to help pay the rent. The Kahns lived on the top floor of a four-story walk-up apartment house on Lexington Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street, above a funeral parlor and a French restaurant. The avenue was lined with buildings like that, four or five stories of stone or brick, simply corniced at the top, housing little shops or restaurants beneath cheerful awnings on the ground floor. Here and there, on more substantial corner lots, institutional buildings looked as if they had been dropped in from Europe: dark, austere churches from Germany and Sweden, synagogues in the Moorish style, a safe-deposit bank with the crenellated towers of a medieval castle, Second Empire rounded mansard roofs adorning the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled. From the street came the constant whir and clop of horse carriages and the occasional clang of a trolley car; every few minutes the Third Avenue elevated train rumbled in the distance like thunder. Just up the avenue was the Normal College of the City of New York, a tuition-free institution that provided most of the female teachers for the public schools of the city. Bookish and unmarried, without a father and with a younger brother still at home, and living only two trolley stops away, it was natural that Etta would attend the Normal College, and she applied and was accepted to enter in 1898.

Etta was still enrolled when she met and married William Noyes Shiber, who was living seven doors south of her on the very same block of Lexington Avenue. Born in Pennsylvania, Shiber had grown up in the small town of Olean in western New York, where his father made barrels for Standard Oil; as a young man he came to New York City and found a job as a Western Union operator before getting hired in the telegraph room of William Randolph Hearst's New York newspapers, the Evening Journal and the American. By 1896, at the age of twenty-four, he had already become the manager of the telegraph room—an exceedingly responsible position for someone so young, as telegrams were the chief means by which the paper's employees communicated with far-flung correspondents, not to mention with Hearst himself, who was generally three thousand miles away in California but who took a regular interest in the workings of all his newspapers and magazines. William Shiber was highly esteemed in the trade for his ability to oversee an efficient telegraphic service, but he was also understood to be honest and politically independent and he was trusted by labor and management alike. "Shiber is one grand fellow," The Commercial Telegraphers' Journal once noted. "That's why everybody on the Journal from W. R. Hearst on down is stuck on him."

For Etta Kahn, born and raised in an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, Bill Shiber must have seemed something like America itself: large and athletic, gregarious, outdoorsy (he was an avid rower and an enthusiastic nature photographer), and with a charmingly small-town demeanor. He was also not Jewish; unconventionally for the time, Etta had married outside the faith. She had been raised in a family with little in the way of religious strictures (her brother Chester's wife, Helen, was Catholic), and though Etta herself believed in God, she didn't observe Jewish holidays nor keep kosher, and their wedding had been held not in a synagogue, nor for that matter in a church, but at the Society for Ethical Culture, which ran the progressive private school where Etta was then receiving her postgraduate training. No less a figure than Felix Adler himself had performed the ceremony.

Born in Germany in 1851, Felix Adler had immigrated to New York with his family at the age of six. He was the son of a rabbi, and was himself expected to enter the rabbinate, but in his twenties he chose a different path, founding the Society for Ethical Culture. It was an unusual sort of religious movement, one that dispensed with prayer and most ritual—and left the question of a supernatural force open to individual belief—and instead sought to cultivate a universal morality that drew from a wide range of philosophical sources and promoted the cause of social justice. The society quickly developed a strong following in New York, especially among the city's Jewish population, many of whom had fled religious oppression and who understood from their own experience how religion could be used to foment hate and division, and now wanted to shed traditions that they saw as antiquated and inadequate to the demands of the modern world.

In 1878 the society established the first free kindergarten in the United States, and two years later the school expanded to include all of the elementary grades. It was called the Workingman's School (later the name would be changed to the Ethical Culture School), and its foundational principle, that the children of the poor deserved a high-quality free education, was revolutionary. This was where Etta Shiber, in 1901, undertook her postgraduate work to become a kindergarten teacher.