“Dr. Ruth” (Ruth Westheimer)
6/4/1928–Present
Dr. Ruth, an only child born half a century after Margaret Sanger, was always more outspoken about sex than Margaret ever was. Sanger wasn’t publicly explicit about birth control, yet she considered promotion of its usage her life’s mission. In her time, contraceptives were thought vulgar and too private to mention in mixed company, and many deemed it inappropriate for her to discuss with women.
By 1970, when unmarried couples could no longer be penalized for using contraceptives, Dr. Ruth was a forty-one-year-old married mother attending college and working part time for Planned Parenthood (which Sanger founded in 1916). Ruth graduated with a Doctor of Education degree. A former kindergarten teacher, she began her first adult teaching job at Lehman College (a part of the City University of New York). Her specialty was teaching teachers and prospective teachers how to teach sex education, and her classes were in great demand.
In 1938, ten-year-old Ruth’s assurance of being accepted by Christians in her home country of Germany ended during Kristallnacht. She and her family were chastised for being Jewish, and Ruth experienced the destruction of her synagogue and the end of her German schooling. Her parents, even then, couldn’t imagine the horrors in store until a week later, when the SS took her father to a detention camp.
Before all of her nuclear and extended family members were sent to the death camps, Ruth became one of 300 children voluntarily sent to Switzerland. Though safe from torture and slaughter, Ruth and her fellow German Jewish immigrants were treated as second-class citizens. They were given substandard schooling and had to spend many hours doing chores.
In 1943, Ruth’s formal Swiss education ended after the eighth grade, as it was considered unnecessary for girls to attend high school and college. Passionate for learning, Ruth taught herself French by studying a friend’s textbook. Ruth also felt passion for boys, and by age fifteen she and her girlfriend would sneak away to caves in the woods for necking sessions with their boyfriends.
Ruth was a born leader. On trains both to Switzerland, at age ten, and six years later from Switzerland to Marseilles, she organized everyone to sing. Two days after the orphans reached Marseilles, they took a train to Toulon where they boarded a ship bound for Palestine.
Their destination was arranged by the British, with each youngster placed in an Israeli kibbutz. At her first settlement, Ruth emptied trash bags and cleaned toilets for two years. It was also where she first had intercourse, which gave her great emotional satisfaction. She hadn’t used contraception, though, and was lucky not to have become pregnant.
Previous to her kibbutz experience, Ruth had been an adamant socialist. She realized her idealist view of socialism was unrealistic when she noted that too many people didn’t pull their weight. She also disapproved of the practice of mothers having to give their babies over to a collective nursery where the women could visit them for only two hours a day.
Ruth then spent two years in a second kibbutz, not as a member, but just an employee doing kitchen work to support herself so she could study to be a kindergarten teacher. She also babysat and did housework for a family that didn’t feed her enough. Babysitters in Israel were expected to clean, iron, and sew when the children slept.
In November of 1947 the UN adopted a plan whereby the British would leave Palestine and the country would be divided into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a small internationally administered zone surrounding Jerusalem. This led to guerrilla warfare between the Jews and the Arabs. Ruth joined the Jewish underground army and was trained to be proficient with guns and hand grenades. She, however, was thankful that she never had to harm anyone.
When in May 1948, the UN endorsed the State of Israel, the neighboring countries didn’t accept this and invaded Israel. On Ruth’s twentieth birthday, in June 1948, she was injured all over her body by shrapnel. As the only woman among wounded soldiers, she enjoyed the attentions of a male nurse with whom she later had a brief love affair.
Ruth completed her studies in early 1949, and began to teach kindergarten to Jewish-Yemenite children. There she met and married David, her first husband. In 1950 the couple moved to Paris, where Ruth took on three jobs: During school hours she was the director of a kindergarten for Jewish children; she taught Hebrew to older French-Jewish children; and was a camp director during summertime. Always hungry for knowledge, Ruth found time for a one-year course under the guidance of the Sorbonne, after which she entered its Institute of Psychology. By 1955 Ruth and David had divorced amicably.
To Be Continued