Kickass Women in History: Dr. Ruth Westheimer

Here on Kickass Women, I like to focus on women who aren’t already well-known. But sometimes I write about women who are well-known – just not for everything they’ve actually done. One such woman is Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist, radio and television celebrity, and sniper. Yeah, that was a thing.

One of the interesting things I discovered in my research (which was all conducted online) is that Dr. Ruth is almost always referred to as “Dr. Ruth.” Her birth name was Karola Ruth Siegel, but she changed it to “Ruth” when she moved to Israel, and she always goes by “Dr. Ruth.” So I’ll be referring to her as “Dr. Ruth,” since this seems to be her preference, even when referring to times in her life when she had not yet earned her doctorate.

She was born in 1928, in Germany. Her parents were Orthodox Jews. In 1939, her father was arrested by the Nazis. Dr. Ruth’s mother was able to send her to Switzerland as part of the Kindertransport, a massive effort to get Jewish children in Nazi occupied territory to safety. As far as she knows, the rest of her family died in the Holocaust.

An aside: The Kindertransport was an amazing and in many ways harrowing program (or rather, a series of programs, some coordinated, some not) that attempted to get at-risk children out of Nazi occupied territories. For more about Kindertransport check out the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The Kindertransport Association.

As a teen, Dr. Ruth emigrated to what was then known as Mandatory Palestine. She became a Zionist and  joined a paramilitary group called Haganah and was trained as a sniper because of her small size (she was never more that four foot seven inches tall). Dr. Ruth claims that she was an excellent shot, but that she never ended up killing anybody. She was almost killed when a bomb went off in her barracks – it took her months to re-learn how to walk. In a Washington Post interview she said:

As a four-foot-seven woman, I would have been turned away by any self-respecting army anywhere else in the world, but I had other qualities that made me a valuable guerrilla. Among them, a knack for putting bullets exactly where I want them to go.

In an interview with Esquire (quoted in Mic.com) she points out the unexpected benefits of sniper training:

Yes, I was trained as a sniper in the Israeli armed forces. This was after the Holocaust. I was a very good shooter. I once went with my grandson to a county fair where you shoot a water pistol at the clown’s mouth. We came home with twelve stuffed animals and a goldfish.

Dr. Ruth has been married three times. According to Biography.com, she felt inadequate because of her size and feared no one would ever want to marry her. It turned out that her size was not off-putting to men, at least not all men, and she married an Israeli man. They moved to Paris in 1950 but divorced. Dr. Ruth became pregnant by a French man whom she married so that the baby would be legitimate, and they divorced after the baby was born. She moved to New York and in 1961, she met her third and last husband, Manfred Westheimer. They had one son.

Dr. Ruth still lives in the first New York City apartment that she and her late husband first lived in. You can read a very sweet interview with her and decorator Nate Berkus, who helped her tidy up her enormous collection of books, papers, and knickknacks, at The New York Times. In the interview, she talks about how much she loves her collectibles and her home after having fled Germany with nothing but a washcloth and a doll, which she gave away to another girl on the train out of Germany.

In the early days of her university career, Dr. Ruth was a single mom who worked her way through school as a maid. She now has an M.A. in Sociology and a Doctorate in Education. She worked for Planned Parenthood in the 1960s and learned to feel very comfortable talking frankly about sex. Her media career was born when she was asked to do a fifteen minute long Q&A segment on air on a local radio station. The show became an hour long show called Sexually Speaking. She also had a TV show of the same name, made countless appearances on other shows, and wrote several books. Today Dr. Ruth is in her late 80s but she still runs a Twitter account and YouTube channel and does speaking engagements across the US.

Dr. Ruth was revolutionary in speaking publicly about sex in explicit ways. She was also revolutionary in insisting that women had a right to sexual pleasure and that they should seek sexual pleasure. She was instrumental in educating and advocating for birth control.

Now at the age of 88, Dr. Ruth says that some of her views are “old-fashioned”. She does not approve of casual sex and in 2015 she found herself in hot water for suggesting that once two people are in bed together naked, they have crossed a line of no return and can’t revoke consent (Oh, Dr. Ruth, you were doing so well and now I’m appalled). Other than that rather horrifying comment, Dr. Ruth has promoted mutual respect between partners of any gender, body positivity for men and women of every body type (she famously told men that “The most important six inches are the ones between the ears”), and personal responsibility in advocating for one’s own sexual health and pleasure.

Dr. Ruth has stated several times in various ways that she feels her escape from the Holocaust imbued her with a need to make a difference, although she never guessed it would be in the form of being a sexual educator.

I am what you call bold because the one thing that I’ve learned coming out of Nazi Germany is that I have to stand up and be counted for what I believe. And that’s how people are listening to me, because they know it’s not a put-on.

Want to see Dr. Ruth in action? Here she is reviewing Fifty Shades of Gray:

In addition to the links above, my sources were:

“Life’s Work: An Interview with Ruth Wertheimer”, by Alison Beard for Harvard Business Review

“Dr. Ruth: Sex Sage and Ex-Sniper on Global Sexuality” by Tom Foreman for National Geographic News