Paula Doress-Worters was in her mid-20s, and still known as Paula Brown, when she left a job in accounting to become a community organizer. It was the early 1960s, and she was appalled by the racism she had been seeing around her since growing up in Roxbury, Mass., when Black families had started to move into her neighborhood.
She began by working for a Black congressional candidate, helping women on welfare get the services they needed. Soon, she was canvassing to mobilize opposition to the Vietnam War.
By the end of the decade, she had added feminism and women’s health to her activism. She joined a group of young women, some of them new mothers like herself, who were confounded by the sexism of the health care system — in 1960, only 6 percent of incoming medical students were women — and how it was failing them, and how little they knew about their own bodies.
They set about figuring out for themselves how to address 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 in 1970, when the New England Free Press published the first rough version of what would become “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they had no idea that they were creating what would become a global best seller and cultural touchstone for generations of woman.
In the years that followed, college students would pass around dog-eared copies of the book like samizdat. Mothers would give it to their daughters in lieu of having “the talk.” The activist author Barbara Ehrenreich proclaimed it a manifesto of medical populism. The Moral Majority, the Christian right organization founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, declared it obscene.
Ms. Doress-Worters, a founding member of the collective, died on Feb. 21 at her home in Redwood City, Calif. She was 87.
The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, her daughter, Hannah Doress, said.
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” tackled all sorts of unmentionables, like masturbation, birth control and abortion, which was illegal in many states in 1970. There were helpful diagrams and images — among them, illustrations of six variations of hymens — as well as instructions on how to view one’s vagina with a mirror.
The women divvied up subjects. Ms. Brown — who was now Ms. Doress, having married Irvin Doress, a like-minded psychologist, in 1964 — and Esther Rome took on postpartum depression, a harrowing condition that obstetricians of the era downplayed.
“It’s just the baby blues,” Ms. Doress’s doctor told her after the birth of her daughter. “You’ll get over it.”
She did not. She had prepared for natural childbirth, but was given Darvon, an opioid, during labor, which caused her to hallucinate, an effect it had on many women.
Back home with her new baby, she became severely depressed, with periods of mania. She was medicated, against her will again — she was proud that it took two doctors to subdue her and inject a sedative — and hospitalized for three weeks. She had few memories of her time in the hospital, though she did recall demanding better pay for the nurses, using mini-placards she made out of tongue depressors and index cards.
She could find no substantive popular books on her condition, and no professional guidance. But from her own research, she discovered studies that suggested that postpartum depression was brought on by a combination of factors: physical stress, isolation, hormonal imbalance and, crucially, social stress — a reaction to the shibboleth of the blissed-out mother, the myth of maternal attachment and the burden of gender roles. One study compared postpartum depression to combat fatigue.
The chapter that she and Ms. Rome first crafted was a scant 10 pages, “but it packed a punch,” Rachel Louise Moran wrote in “Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America” (2024).
In subsequent editions of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they expanded the section to include more testimonies from women who had suffered as Ms. Doress had, and proposed solutions all the way up to the policy level, including free child care and parental leave.
In her book, Ms. Moran described how, in postwar America, the pain of new mothers was considered frivolous — and so it was met with frivolous solutions, trumpeted by women’s magazines: losing weight, buying a hat, making an effort to be cheerful.
Feminists like Ms. Doress sought to legitimize and support women’s suffering by taking the baby blues seriously.
Paula Brown was born on Aug. 27, 1938, in Boston, to Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her mother, Ethel (Krauthamer) Brown, owned a children’s clothing store. Her father, Abraham Brown, had his own business as well: a corner store called Lindy’s Spa that sold groceries and sundries.
Paula and her younger brother grew up in a railroad flat in Roxbury, in a household of four adults that included her aunt and uncle, Jewish refugees from Vienna who had moved in with the Browns the year she was born, a month after Kristallnacht. The home was a stopover for many Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the run-up to World War II.
After high school, Paula worked as an accountant, contributing her pay to the household while attending night classes at Suffolk University in Boston, where she studied political science. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1962. In 1981, she earned a master’s degree in women’s studies at Goddard College in Vermont, and in 1993, a Ph.D. in social psychology from Boston College.
In 1971, a few years after she married Dr. Doress, they spent a year living in a mini-commune: Along with three other heterosexual couples and a singleton, they occupied a three-decker — a distinctive Boston-area multifamily house — with all the babies bunked together in one room.
The goal was to upend traditional gender roles, with the men working in pairs to make dinner, for example. How well they succeeded is lost in the mists of time.
Her marriage to Dr. Doress ended in divorce in 1979. She met Allen Worters, an engineer, at a singles event in the early 1980s. It was T-shirt night, and he was wearing one that read, “Single Dad.” Hers said, “Don’t Ban Our Bodies.” Mr. Worters was smitten. They married in 1986. Mr. Worters died in 2005.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Doress-Worters is survived by a son, Ben Zion; two stepchildren, Susan Worters Reel and David Worters; four grandchildren; and her brother, Mendy Brown.
Ms. Doress-Worters taught women’s studies courses at Emerson and Boston Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Boston, and published “Mistress of Herself,” a compilation of writing by the 19th-century women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose, in 2008.
The nonprofit organization Our Bodies Ourselves, founded after the book was published, continues to provide health resources and information to women; it is now based at Suffolk University, Ms. Doress-Worters’s alma mater. The book, which was last updated in 2011, has sold more than four million copies and has been translated into 34 languages.
In later editions, Ms. Doress-Worters contributed chapters on sexual relationships, parenting and women after midlife. This led to a spinoff, “Ourselves, Growing Older” (with two editions, in 1987 and 1994), which she wrote with Diana Laskin Siegal.
“Paula was not confrontational in the way some activists are,” Judy Norsigian, another “Our Bodies, Ourselves” founder, said. “But she would speak up when necessary. And she was always raising concerns about how something might impact those who were most vulnerable: women of color, women of lower income. She had the sensibility of a feminist even before I think she knew the word.”
In “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973” (2024), an oral history of second-wave feminism by Clara Bingham, Ms. Doress-Worters recalled the collective’s first meetings, held in a building at Emmanuel College in Boston, which was run by Catholic nuns.
“They thought we were just these nice girls,” she said of the nuns who had graciously donated their space. “They had no idea.”
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