Pioneering, pint-sized sex therapist Ruth Westheimer, whose frank public discussions about once-taboo subjects made her a pop icon during the 1980s, died Friday at 96.
Westheimer was surrounded by relatives when she died in her New York City home, the Associated Press reported Saturday, citing publicist and friend Pierre Lehu.
Know as "Dr. Ruth," the 4-foot, 7-inch German native hosted a local radio program, "Sexually Speaking, that was syndicated in 1984, and she starred in TV's award-winning "The Dr. Ruth Show" the following year.
Westheimer also authored more than 40 books, wrote a syndicated newspaper advice column, appeared in videos produced by Playboy and was a regular on late-night TV shows.
"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 giggly, accented voice led the the Wall Street Journal to liken it to a "cross between Henry Kissinger and Minnie Mouse" as she normalized the use of words like "penis" and "vagina" on radio and TV.
People magazine named her one of the "Most Intriguing People of the Century" and country singer Shania Twain name-checked her in a 2000 song with lyrics that said, "Not even Dr. Ruth is gonna tell me how I feel."
Westheimer was born in Frankfurt in 1928 and was sent to Switzerland at 10 by her parents to escape the looming Holocaust.
She moved to Palestine at 16 and joined the Haganah, an outlawed Jewish militia, before marrying her first husband and moving to Paris, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne despite never having graduated high school.
Westheimer divorced her first husband in 1955 and moved to New York with a boyfriend whom she later married and divorced before meeting Manfred Westheimer, a fellow refugee from Nazi Germany.
They were married for 36 years until he died in 1997.
In New York, she earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University and taught at Lehman College in the Bronx, where she developed a specialty in instructing professors how to teach sex education.
Ruth Westheimer is survived by her two children, Joel and Miriam, and four grandchildren.
