Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex therapist who became a pop culture icon, has died. She was 96.
Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family, according to publicist Pierre Lehu.
Westheimer was in her 50s when she started answering listeners questions about sex and relationship on New York radio station WYNY. The show called “Sexually Speaking” was only a 15-minute program which aired after midnight on Sundays but was so popular that she became a household name. Her show ended up being extended into a two-hour program such was her popularity.
She then launched her own TV program, The Dr. Ruth Show, which by 1985 attracted 2 million viewers a week.
“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.”
Her grandmotherly appearance, 4’7″ stature, and nonjudgemental manner helped Americans feel comfortable opening up to Westheimer about a once-taboo topic.
She was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany and survived the Holocaust at a Swiss orphanage where her parents sent her before they were killed in a concentration camp.
She immigrated to the United States in 1956 and worked as a maid to put herself through graduate school, earning a degree in sociology from The New School in 1959 and a doctorate at 42 years of age from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Westheimer was married three times, the first two times only briefly. She married an Israeli who she said was “the first guy who offered to marry me”. But they split not long after they moved to Paris. She then married her second husband, a Frenchman, to legalize a pregnancy. However, she said after moving to New York with him and their daughter that the relationship was not working. “Intellectually, it was just not tenable,” she told People in 1985.
After two failed marriages she met fellow Holocaust survivor Manfred ‘Fred’ Westheimer at the age of 32 while skiing in the Catskills. Their marriage lasted 36 years, until his death in 1997. Her two children, Miriam Yael Westheimer and Joel Westheimer, both have doctorates and she had four grandchildren.
Westheimer was the author of 45 books on sex and sexuality.
