Paula Doress-Worters and the Book That Changed Women's Health

Paula Doress-Worters was a co-founder and long-time leader of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the group that created Our Bodies, Ourselves. First published in 1970 as a small newsprint booklet, the work was later released commercially and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. Although the book faced harsh criticism at first, it changed public talk about birth control, abortion, and mental health. Paula wrote the chapter on postpartum depression with Esther Rome after she struggled with the condition herself, and she drew on that experience to make medical information easier to find.

She was born on August 27, 1938, and after a life of activism and teaching she died on February 21, 2026, at age 87 in Redwood City, California. Over decades she also wrote about aging and co-authored Ourselves Growing Older. Suffolk University has hosted an online project called Our Bodies, Ourselves Today to keep the material available for new readers. Her papers are held at the Harvard Radcliffe Schlesinger Library.