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

Paula Doress-Worters helped create a new kind of health writing by co-founding the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and helping to produce the booklet Women and Their Bodies, which later appeared as Our Bodies, Ourselves. Initially issued in 1970 as a staplebound newsprint edition, the work was revised nine times, translated into 34 languages, and ultimately sold more than four million copies worldwide, a reach that altered public conversations about sex, reproduction, and mental health.

Her own experience with severe postpartum illness, including a month-long hospitalization after the birth of her daughter in 1966, informed the chapter she co-wrote with Esther Rome on postpartum depression; that chapter combined medical facts with women’s stories and urged supports such as group counseling, telephone services, parental leave and workplace childcare. These proposals were notable because they named social as well as medical solutions.

Born Paula Brown on August 27, 1938, in Boston, she pursued higher education while working and later earned a PhD in social psychology in 1992. Over decades she taught, organized, and wrote about aging and caregiving, co-authoring Ourselves Growing Older and taking part in efforts to keep OBOS material available online and in archival collections at the Harvard Radcliffe Schlesinger Library.

After a long illness, she died at home on February 21, 2026, in Redwood City, California, at age 87. In recent years she had been treated for pancreatic cancer and experienced dementia, yet she remained engaged with feminist work and campus projects that have preserved the Collective’s legacy for new readers.