Sex education has come a long way from being a taboo topic to being taught in schools, discussed in the media and even being aired in movies and television series. Part of this shift is thanks to people like Dr. Ruth Westheimer who helped to educate the American public on the practice of safe sex, sexual desires as well as have creative and frequent sex.
That is why she was such a sensation back in the 80s when her first, radio call in show, called “sexually speaking” debuted. Initially set to be a 15-minute show, the popularity it garnered led it to be extended to a 1-hour show. This popularity saw the show become nationally syndicated.
Many of her listeners fell for her forthrightness and her humor which was used to drive home her points on the topic of sexual education. She did it in what many call a grandmotherly way which made them not get offended by what she was saying, however outrageous some of it might have been at the time.
Early Life
Born Karola Ruth Siegel in Frankfurt, Germany on June 4th, 1928, Dr. Westheimer never got to fully enjoy her childhood as she was a victim of the Nazi movement in Germany. She was born into a wealthy Orthodox Jewish family and was an only child. Her mother was a housekeeper for her father’s wealthy family, and theirs was an unplanned and out of wedlock pregnancy. However, they got married after she became pregnant.
After watching her father get taken away by the Gestapo at the age of 10 years, and at the height of the holocaust movement, her mother and grandmother spirited her away to the safety of an orphanage in Heiden, a village in Switzerland. Here, she was supposed to go and wait to reunite with her family either in the United States or in Palestine. While at the camp, she was made to undergo a hard life as German Jews like her, young as she was, were forced to do house chores and take care of Swiss children.
However, letters to her family kept her going until one day when she was 13, they stopped all together, making her hard life even harder as she did not hear from them again. She would later learn that they died at the hands of the Nazis and she never saw them again either. Dr. Westheimer credits her parents with giving her life twice, saying that one was when she was given birth, and the second one was when she was sent to Switzerland to escape the Nazis. She would continue living and working in Switzerland until the age of 16 when she emigrated to Palestine and joined Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization.
At the paramilitary organization, she was taught how to assemble guns and could do it with her eyes closed according to her. She was trained to be a sniper, but she said she was grateful that she never had to use her skills. She never killed anyone.
On her 20th birthday, she got injured in a blast that nearly led to her feet being amputated. However, she soldiered on and made a full recovery.
Married Life
In 1950, Dr. Westheimer agreed to marry an Israeli soldier, and she accompanied him to France where he went to study medicine. While there, she got an opportunity to study Psychology at the Sorbonne School in Paris. Her love for her studies soured her marriage as her husband wanted to return home to Israel while she wanted to remain and continue with her studies. This led to their divorce.
She would go on to have another relationship with a Frenchman, Dan Bommer. She got pregnant with his child, and they got married before they emigrated to New York. However, her union with the Frenchman was short-lived as they divorced shortly after they landed in the United States.
In what shows the real character of the diminutive sex therapist, she juggled a divorce, raising a young daughter, working, studying and learning a new language (English) all at the same time.
During a ski trip, she met the consequential third husband and had what she termed as her real marriage. She met Manfred Westheimer, himself a holocaust survivor, and they not only got married, but they stayed married for almost 40 years until he died of complications from a stroke in 1997. They had one child together.
Rise to Fame
Unlike those who got their fame in their younger years, Dr. Westheimer got hers later in life. She was in her 50s when WYNY- FM came calling. Betty Elam, community manager for the radio station, needed to fill some radio airtime and she went to Cornell Medical Centre where she met Dr. Westheimer, who at the time was working with noted Cornell Psychiatrist Helen Singer Kaplan. That is how her show “sexually speaking” came about.
However, it was not smooth sailing for her and for the show as the top executives at the radio station were not comfortable with the topic being discussed as well as the backlash they anticipated. That is why they chose to schedule the taped show for Sunday night at midnight.
It is said that nothing can stop an idea whose time has come and that is what happened with her show as people loved her content and her delivery. That is how it turned from a 15-minute show and became a one hour show and went on to be nationally syndicated. In 1983, before it was nationally syndicated, it boasted having 250,000 listeners.
Her newfound fame did not stop there as she became a darling of many TV hosts and was featured in many of their shows. She eventually had her own show called “Good Sex” that ran on Lifetime. In addition to that, she even got featured on the big screen when she co-starred in a French romantic comedy called “One Woman or Two”.
Besides that, she was an astute author, and she wrote more than 60 books. One of them was a children’s picture book called “Crocodile, You’re Beautiful”. The book came out after she turned 90, a testament to her hard-working nature as she continued to work long after her show ended in 1990. A good sex board game is among the things that can be credited to Dr. Westheimer.
As is typical of celebrities, she had a platform. And she chose to use hers to advocate for empathy and compassion towards the LGBTQ community. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis.
Conclusion
The 4-foot 7-inch sex therapist did not please everyone with her work. Conservatives were outraged about what she was doing, and one local politician even went as far as trying to make a citizen’s arrest on her as she delivered a lecture at Oklahoma State University in 1985. He was however stopped by school officials.
In November 2023, she was appointed as New York’s first ambassador of loneliness, by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, to help combat the isolation due to the Covid pandemic.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer died on July 12th, 2024 at her home in New York city, and she is survived by her children Joel and Miriam as well as four grandchildren.