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Books|Paula Doress-Worters, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies astatine 87
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/books/paula-doress-worters-dead.html
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She wrote astir postpartum slump erstwhile it was an unmentionable similar termination oregon commencement control, and her probe connected her ain suffering helped countless women.
Published March 15, 2026Updated March 16, 2026
Paula Doress-Worters was successful her mid-20s, and inactive known arsenic Paula Brown, erstwhile she near a occupation successful accounting to go a assemblage organizer. It was the aboriginal 1960s, and she was appalled by the racism she had been seeing astir her since increasing up successful Roxbury, Mass., erstwhile Black families had started to determination into her neighborhood.
She began by moving for a Black legislature candidate, helping women connected payment get the services they needed. Soon, she was canvassing to mobilize absorption to the Vietnam War.
By the extremity of the decade, she had added feminism and women’s wellness to her activism. She joined a radical of young women, immoderate of them caller mothers similar herself, who were confounded by the sexism of the wellness attraction strategy — successful 1960, lone 6 percent of incoming aesculapian students were women — and however it was failing them, and however small they knew astir their ain bodies.
They acceptable astir figuring retired for themselves however to code the issues that were uniquely theirs, and began to compile an encyclopedia of women’s health, by women and for women.
They called themselves the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and successful 1970, erstwhile the New England Free Press published the archetypal unsmooth mentation of what would go “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they had nary thought that they were creating what would go a planetary champion seller and taste touchstone for generations of woman.
In the years that followed, assemblage students would walk astir dog-eared copies of the publication similar samizdat. Mothers would springiness it to their daughters successful lieu of having “the talk.” The activistic writer Barbara Ehrenreich proclaimed it a manifesto of aesculapian populism. The Moral Majority, the Christian close enactment founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, declared it obscene.
English (US) ·