In the days and weeks after she gave birth to her first child, a healthy, much-loved baby named Hannah, Paula Doress-Worters found herself painfully, inexplicably depressed.
“I felt terrible,” she recalled years later, “because she was a wanted child. She was lovely. But sometimes I just couldn’t get out of bed.”
The neighbors grew worried. Her husband called the obstetrician. And when doctors arrived at their home in the Boston suburbs, Ms. Doress-Worters ran from the room. She was chased, sedated and hospitalized for a month.
Ms. Doress-Worters had given birth in late 1966, at a time when postpartum depression — experienced by an estimated 1 in 8 women after childbirth — hardly had a name.
“The doctors didn’t say anything that was much more intelligent than what you would read in the women’s magazines, like Redbook,” Ms. Doress-Worters said in an interview for “The Movement,” author Clara Bingham’s oral history of the women’s liberation movement. “They said, ‘It’s just baby blues, you’ll get over it.’”
With time and medication, she did, returning to the advocacy efforts that had been central to her life for years. While still in the hospital, she put up a sign demanding better pay for the nurses. Months later, she went door to door with baby Hannah strapped to her back, enlisting their neighbors in Arlington, Massachusetts, to sign a petition against the Vietnam War.
Yet for years, Ms. Doress-Worters remained haunted by postpartum depression, frustrated by what she called “a black hole” of information. The subject was treated with condescension, or ignored altogether, by the doctors she consulted and the books she read.
In 1970, she helped fill the information gap as a co-author of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” a groundbreaking health book written for women, by women — specifically, a group of more than a dozen young, married women called the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.
Originally distributed in a staplebound, 193-page newsprint edition, the book was denounced by conservatives (evangelical leader Jerry Falwell called it “obscene trash”) but grew to become a best-selling reference work, hailed by JAMA, the influential medical journal, as “a mother lode of information and resources.”
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” offered humane, judgment-free guidance on subjects that were long considered taboo, from women’s anatomy and sexuality to birth control and abortion, which was then illegal in most states. The postpartum chapter was written by Ms. Doress-Worters and a colleague, Esther Rome. Like other chapters, it included no-nonsense medical information alongside stories from ordinary women, who recounted their postpartum struggles with sleepless nights and, in some cases, thoughts of suicide.
The book had a political edge. Ms. Doress-Worters and Rome quoted philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a favorite of the New Left, and called on women “to fight those aspects of our society which make childrearing a stressful rather than a fulfilling experience.” Their recommendations included the creation of group counseling and telephone services for pregnant and postpartum women, parental leave, “as provided in Sweden,” and workplace-provided day care.
“We are all human beings, all one species,” they concluded. “Our reproductive organs determine complementary roles in reproduction. They need not and should not determine our roles in society.”
By highlighting the postpartum experience at a time when women’s health was dominated by discussions of childbirth and reproductive rights — and when some of the collective’s own members feared that an exploration of the subject might frighten off some readers — Ms. Doress-Worters “really did do something new,” said historian Rachel Louise Moran, who interviewed her for the 2024 book “Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America.”
Ms. Doress-Worters was 87 when she died Feb. 21 in Redwood City, California, where she lived with her daughter, Hannah Doress, and daughter-in-law, Emily Bender.
She had pancreatic cancer and dementia, her daughter said, but had continued to participate in protests and demonstrations, most recently at a “No Kings” event in October, where she brandished a sign reading, “My Body, My Self, Hands Off.”
In a life bridging activism and academia, Ms. Doress-Worters taught women’s history and Jewish studies courses; obtained a PhD in social psychology; co-wrote another groundbreaking health book, 1987’s “Ourselves, Growing Older: Women Aging With Knowledge and Power”; and helped revive interest in the work of Ernestine Rose, a 19th-century Jewish feminist and abolitionist, with whom she felt a profound kinship.
Throughout, Ms. Doress-Worters remained closely involved with the collective she co-founded, which is now known as Our Bodies Ourselves, or OBOS, and based out of Suffolk University in Boston.
When the group got started, “there was no information for women about their bodies, their sexuality, reproduction and mental health,” said Executive Director Amy Agigian, who grew up reading a copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” that her mother kept in the bathroom.
“There was nothing that was just written and available. You couldn’t even find information about your basic anatomy, much less how orgasms happened or what was postpartum depression.”
The collective was born out of a 1969 conference on women’s liberation, improbably held at Emmanuel College, a Catholic school in Boston. There, Ms. Doress-Worters’s friend Nancy Miriam Hawley led a workshop encouraging participants to talk freely about childbirth, sexuality, abortion and their bodies.
For many of the women, the session reinforced how difficult it was to get reliable information from their doctors, at a time when the medical establishment was overwhelmingly male.
Many of the participants continued to meet over the coming year, swapping stories and conducting research that led to “Women and Their Bodies,” as the first version of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was known.
Published by the left-wing New England Free Press, the book went on to sell more than 220,000 copies before getting a commercial release by Simon & Schuster in 1973. In all, it sold more than 4 million copies, was translated into 34 languages and was revised nine times, most recently in 2011. That year, Time magazine named“Our Bodies, Ourselves” one of the 100 best and most influential English-language nonfiction books published since the magazine’s founding.
“We just had a feeling,” Ms. Doress-Worters told Moran, looking back on a book that she continued to help edit and revise over the years, “that we could somehow improve society.”
A daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, she was born Paula Brown in Boston on Aug. 27, 1938. Her father ran a corner store, and her mother worked in a curtain factory and later started a children’s clothing shop.
Ms. Doress-Worters lost her grandmother, uncles and cousins in the Holocaust, an experience that left her with an abiding interest in social justice. In high school, when she was assigned to write a paper about her last name, she gave herself an honorary forebear and wrote about John Brown, the radical abolitionist.
Although she dreamed of becoming a lawyer, Ms. Doress-Worters concluded that as a woman, the profession was closed to her. She turned instead to accounting, and graduated from a two-year program at what was then the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance.
While holding down a job, she continued her studies at Suffolk University, taking courses at night and at lunchtime en route to earning a bachelor’s in political science in 1962. She later received a master’s in women’s studies from Goddard College and got her PhD in 1992 from Boston College, with a dissertation on caregiving.
Before turning to women’s health, Ms. Doress-Worters worked as a community organizer in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, immersing herself in housing, welfare and education issues. She and her first husband, Irvin Doress, briefly lived with their two children in a commune on Mission Hill, throwing parties and doing yoga with other like-minded families.
Their marriage ended in divorce. In 1986, Ms. Doress-Worters married Allen J. Worters, an engineer and pianist. They settled in the nearby city of Newton, where they hosted a lively, music-filled Passover seder each year, using a feminist Haggadah that Ms. Doress-Worters co-wrote with two of her fellow OBOS leaders.
Her husband died in 2005. In addition to her daughter, survivors include a son, Ben Zion; two stepchildren, David Worters and Susan Reel; a brother; and five grandchildren.
Long after the first edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was published, Ms. Doress-Worters continued to meet each week with the collective’s other leaders, alternating business discussion with consciousness-raising sessions. Discussions of their book, and its many updates, could be tense.
“I saw so many conflicts in our group — it was only because we loved each other so much that we stayed together,” said Judy Norsigian, one of the co-founders. Ms. Doress-Worters was a peacemaker in the group, she said, blending practicality and good humor while asking key questions: “How is this going to benefit women of color?” “How can we do something that avoids being elitist?”
Once, during a television appearance at which Ms. Doress-Worters was supposed to be discussing various methods of birth control, a physician started “droning on” about the pill, Norsigian recalled. Ms. Doress-Worters had soon heard enough.
“She just whipped out a diaphragm, pointed it at the camera and said, ‘This is a diaphragm.’ It brought things back to the issues we were supposed to be talking about,” Norsigian said.
“Only Paula had that kind of spunk.”
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