Author, activist, educator, and feminist scholar Paula Brown Doress-Worters passed away on February 21. She was 87 years old.
Dr. Doress-Worters earned her bachelor’s degree from Suffolk University in her hometown of Boston. Later in life, she received her master’s degree in women’s studies from the now-closed Goddard College in Vermont and her Ph.D. in social psychology from Boston College, where her dissertation focused on caregiving.
Dr. Doress-Worters is best known as one of the eleven co-founders of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which is now known as Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS). For more than five decades, Dr. Doress-Worters wrote numerous papers and book chapters on women’s health and sexuality, menopause, parenthood, and a variety of other feminist topics. In 2025, OBOS merged with Suffolk University’s Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights.
As an academic, Dr. Doress-Worters taught women’s history at Emerson College in Boston and served as a fellow at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, where she conducted extensive research on the nineteenth-century Jewish feminist, abolitionist, and freethinker Ernestine Rose. In 2008, Dr. Doress-Worters published Mistress of Herself (Feminist Press), an edited collection of Rose’s speeches and letters.