Paula Brown Doress-Worters—our sister co-founder of Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS)—was an extraordinarily accomplished author, activist, and public intellectual and our beloved friend for more than half a century. 

The daughter of Ethel and Abraham (Abie) Brown, Jewish immigrants from Poland, Paula grew up in a Roxbury, MA, triple-decker with her immediate family and, after their escape from Austria, her aunt Tobey and uncle Leo. After Paula graduated from Roxbury Memorial High School, she secured an accounting degree at Bentley University. Working as an accountant, she contributed to her parents’ household and saved money to attend Suffolk University. As Paula later recounted, "My first significant second chance in life as an adult was an opportunity from Suffolk University to reach for my dream, a liberal arts college education. I yearned to learn more about the world, to better understand the times I lived in, the causes of war, race relations, history, and politics. I began to take evening courses at Suffolk after work, and occasional lunchtime classes…. I satisfied my intellectual curiosity but only fanned my dissatisfaction with a life of adding up other people’s numbers. After two years of night classes, I applied to Suffolk as a day student and found they were willing to accept my business credits as ‘electives’ so I was able, with two more years of study, to attain my BA cum laude with the class of 1962. Thank you, Suffolk!"  

In 1964, Paula married Irvin Doress, with whom she shared activism, movement work, and extended family. After giving birth to their daughter Hannah in 1966, Paula experienced serious postpartum depression and hospitalization, which shaped her later commitment to improving the mental and physical wellbeing of women after childbirth. In 1969, their son Ben Zion was born. 

Miriam Nancy Hawley: In the late 1960s, our children were small. We created a cooperative playgroup, each family taking a morning. We pooled our time and raised them together. I am so grateful for those mornings. They were busy and imperfect and full of possibility.

I had met Paula through activist circles. She was working [in a neighborhood organization in Roxbury] helping mothers who were using welfare programs access the services they needed. We were young mothers trying to build families and a more just world at the same time. I am grateful we found each other in that season of our lives.

In the spring of 1969, Paula, as well as several authors of this piece, attended Miriam’s workshop on "Women and the Control of Our Bodies" at a Female Liberation Conference at Emmanuel College. In the workshop, we zeroed in on childbirth, sexuality, and abortion, which was illegal in Massachusetts at that time. Thrilled by what we were learning from each other, we kept meeting, seeking to arm ourselves with the information we needed to successfully confront our male ob/gyns and other providers. Soon, we offered a course for women in an MIT lounge. Over the next few years, the group researched, taught, and wrote the papers that would become Our Bodies, Ourselves, a ground-breaking book on women’s health and sexuality that amplified clearly worded information with astute political analysis and diverse personal experiences. Transforming her own painful experience into lasting change, Paula co-authored the chapter on "Postpartum." The book became a best-seller in 1973 and grew through ten subsequent editions and 34 adaptations worldwide. 

Working collectively for decades as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and then as Our Bodies, Ourselves, we found our way, often through struggle, to do the work that we believed could improve the lives of women.

Judy Norsigian: Working with Paula was always a joy. She was witty, hard-working, playful, and always so thoughtful. I continue to admire how she helped so many better understand the injustices we all face by drawing from her own and others’ lived experiences. Paula was not confrontational in the way some activists are, but she would speak up when necessary. Paula was a peacemaker in the group, blending practicality and good humor. And she was always raising concerns about how something might impact those who were most vulnerable: women of color, women of lower income. She had the sensibility of a feminist even before I think she knew the word.

Miriam:  I loved how everything became more peaceful when Paula was there. The room would settle. People felt steadier. She carried that gift so naturally.

Joan Ditzion: I had enormous fun and satisfaction working with Paula on chapters, projects, workshops and speaking—always laughing together along the way. Paula had a precious blend of qualities: loyalty, integrity, strength of character, intelligence, kindness and most of all a great sense of humor. Paula and I shared enduring Jewish values and a deep concern about the impact of social, political, historical, and cultural factors on all people’s lives.

Miriam: Most of us in that circle were Jewish. Not necessarily religious, but culturally Jewish. One summer, Paula, Vilunya (Diskin), and I sat on Vilunya’s porch on Putnam Avenue in Cambridge and wrote a Haggadah together. We wove feminism into Passover and asked what liberation meant in our own lives. I am grateful for that porch, for that shared creation, and for the tradition we built together. Every Passover after that, Paula and I made matzah ball soup together. Not casually. Intentionally. We debated texture. We adjusted the broth. We carried recipes from our families. The kitchen filled with steam and conversation. Some of those Seders had four generations at the table, newborns in arms and Holocaust survivors telling their stories. Ancient grief and brand-new life in the same room.  

In one of our favorite stories, Paula and a male physician were put together during a television appearance to discuss various methods of birth control. The physician started "droning on and on" about the pill. Suddenly, Paula snatched the diaphragm from the display before them and waved it in the air in front of the camera. "This is a diaphragm," she announced, and proceeded to highlight every salient point about its use. 

Paula’s marriage to Irv ended in 1979. In 1983, Paula met Allen J. Worters, who was wearing a "single dad" t-shirt when they met at a singles get-together.

Susan Reel, Allen’s daughter and gifter of the "single dad" t-shirt, wrote, "After their marriage in 1986, Paula considered my brother, David Worters, and myself, as her children, not as her step-children. They were the loves of each other’s lives. It was wonderful to see our father so blissfully in love, and we will cherish her memory."

Joining Temple Hillel B’nai Torah, Paula and Allen became actively engaged in community and learning. Achieving Paula’s long denied wish for a Bat Mitzvah, they celebrated a group B’nai Mitzvah. Paula also endowed the Allen J. Worters Memorial Lecture there after his death in 2005.  

One of Paula’s biggest projects was to expand her ground-breaking OBOS chapter on "Women Growing Older" into the book Ourselves Growing Older (1986, 1994), which she developed in her 40s and 50s with Diana Laskin Siegal, her friend and role model for how to manage hot flashes. For this extraordinary collaboration, they reached out to many midlife and older women to gather their experiences of aging and ageism, asking "What kind of older woman do you want to be?" 

Judy: We all know what an impressive accomplishment Ourselves Growing Older was. Although Paula and Diana revised it only once, there have been women across the country over the past few decades who have clamored for a new version.

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As accomplished as Paula was in the public sphere, her deepest commitment and love went to her family and friends. Paula loved preparing Shabbat dinner with her adult son Ben and spoke with him every day in the last years of her life. With Hannah, she shared a brilliant and iconoclastic feminism, activism for peace and justice, hilarious laughter, and singing together, everything from activist anthems to schmaltzy croons.

Jane Pincus: When I think of Paula, the image, the shine, the movement of water in clear pools come to mind. As others have said, she was such a peaceful presence. Our friendship too was low-key, deep, no deceptive hollows, just ease. How rare. Laughter, too, here and there. Not "political" in any way I recognize, though for half a century we were part of a powerful political movement much bigger than ourselves. 

After a long illness, during much of which she lived in California under the faithful, loving, and creative care of Hannah and her spouse, Emily Bender, Paula died peacefully at home on February 21, 2026—only a few months after showing up at her last political demonstration.

You can learn more about Paula and see a timeline of her life at her website.