The legendarily frank sex therapist and cultural icon Dr Ruth Westheimer, known simply as Dr Ruth, has died at the age of 96, according to her publicist.
Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family.
Her training and expertise and her humorous, accepting manner contrasted with her high-pitched German accent and diminutive frame (she was 4ft 7in), a juxtaposition that helped to catapult her local radio program, Sexually Speaking, into the national spotlight in the early 1980s.
She later parlayed its success into a television career that was even more successful. The Dr Ruth Show attracted more than 2 million viewers a week by 1985. On the show, Westheimer used humor, warmth and occasional seriousness in her attempts to explore sex and to break various taboos, including on contraception and abortion.
She recalled her rise to the public spotlight in a 2016 interview with Harvard Business Review, explaining that simply asking her radio listeners to send in questions was the beginning of the spark.
“After a while we had thousands of letters, and the station gave me two hours, 10 PM to 12 AM every Sunday – and I did that for 10 years.”
“Get some” quickly became Westheimer’s catchphrase. She had a nonjudgmental attitude and advocated safe sexual practices. What she wanted was for audiences to talk about sex, particularly issues that were previously too embarrassing or politically risky to discuss.
“I still hold old-fashioned values and I’m a bit of a square,” she told students at Michigan City high school in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about.”
In addition to radio appearances, Westheimer appeared on various talk shows including the Howard Stern Radio Show, Nightline, The Tonight Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Late Night With David Letterman.
In 2019, a Hulu documentary called Ask Dr Ruth aired. The film, which has the same name as Westheimer’s 1987 late-night syndicated TV series, features Westheimer’s reflections on her life and career.
Throughout her life, Westheimer also published more than 40 books, including the bestsellers Sex for Dummies, Dr Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex and her memoir, All in a Lifetime.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2012, Westheimer said her introduction to sex was from a book called The Ideal Marriage by Theodor Hendrick van de Velde.
“My parents had hidden it in a bookcase and I knew where the key was. I was short – I’m only 4ft 7in now – so I climbed up and found the book, but at that point I didn’t know that I was going to end up working in family planning or make 450 television programmes talking about sex,” she said.
Born in 1928, Westheimer grew up as a German Jew in Frankfurt. In 1939, Westheimer was separated from her family at 10 years old when Nazis raided her home and took her father away. A few weeks later, Westheimer’s mother sent her to an orphanage in Switzerland.
“I will never know how come my name was on the list for Switzerland because if I had been sent to Holland, Belgium or France I would be one of the statistics of one and half million Jewish children who perished. Instead I was in Switzerland with all of the uncertainties of not knowing where my parents were and what was happening,” Westheimer told the Guardian.
Speaking about her time at the orphanage, Westheimer said: “I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis – because I survived – I had an obligation to make a dent in the world.
“What I didn’t know was that that dent would end up being me talking about sex from morning to night.”
Westheimer was 16 when she went on to join the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, in Jerusalem. During her training, she said she learned to shoot by imagining Adolf Hitler as her target.
She was wounded in the legs during a bombing and was only able to walk and ski again through the work of a “superb” surgeon, the Associated Press reported.
“I learned to assemble a rifle in the dark and was trained as a sniper so that I could hit the center of the target time after time,” she wrote in a 2010 New York Times op-ed that advocated for women in combat.
In 1950, Westheimer met her first husband and together they moved to Paris, where she studied psychology at Sorbonne University. In 1955, the couple divorced and a year later Westheimer moved to New York with a French man with whom she had a daughter, Miriam.
Following her divorce from her second husband, Westheimer met her third husband, Manfred Westheimer, in 1961. Together, they had a son called Joel and stayed married for 36 years until he died in 1997 from heart failure.
Over the years, Westheimer taught at multiple universities including Lehman College in the Bronx, Columbia University’s Teachers College and Yale University.
At one point, Westheimer worked at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem, where she collected data on 2,000 women’s histories surrounding contraception and abortion, the Wall Street Journal reported. She went on to use the research to write her dissertation at Columbia University in 1970.
Recalling her time at the clinic, Westheimer told the outlet: “I thought these people are crazy … They talk only about sex. They don’t talk about literature, not about the weather, not about philosophy – nothing! But very fast, I said ‘Oops! That’s a very interesting subject matter.’”
“People are not Siamese twins,” she told the Guardian in 2019. “They don’t want to have sex, or the same amount of sex, at the same time. The important thing is that a couple adjusts to it.”
