When Ruth Westheimer died last July at 96, she was celebrated as a pioneering sex therapist, cultural gadfly and consummate Manhattanite — described once as a 4-foot-7 cross between Minnie Mouse and Henry Kissinger, to use a much-repeated description, who changed the way we talk about our most intimate lives.
But there was another area where Dr. Ruth, as she was known to nearly everyone, distinguished herself: the accumulation of stuff.
“My mother was a pack rat to the nth degree,” her son, Joel Westheimer, said on a recent afternoon, looking around the apartment in Washington Heights where she had lived since the early 1960s. The modest three-bedroom apartment with expansive views of the Hudson River was half-cleared, yet still somehow crammed with books, papers, photographs, awards and tchotchkes.
He pushed aside a stack of framed items. “There’s a lot to go through,” he said. “Plus, it’s just weird to be throwing away someone’s life, you know?”
But fear not: Dr. Ruth’s stuff will not all be thrown away. A few weeks earlier, a team from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, where Dr. Ruth had arranged to donate her papers, had carted away 31 boxes. And now, they were back to pack up what ended up being 35 more.
That involved extracting obvious research gold, like letters, journals and notes for her dozens of books (like “Dr. Ruth’s Guide for Married Lovers”). But there was also the question of whether to archive, say, clippings she had taped to walls, or a photo quilt signed by friends for her 80th birthday. Or any of her collection of hundreds of turtle figures — including at least one pair locked in the throes of what Dr. Ruth, with her famously rolling r’s, might have called “terrific sex.”
Rebecca Fasman, the Kinsey Institute’s curator, said the experience was not entirely unlike clearing out your own grandmother’s house.
“For anyone, what sticks around matters to them,” Fasman said. “And so even if it is a culturally or intellectually insignificant thing, the fact that they had it around them for so long makes it significant.”
Dr. Ruth’s archive, Fasman said, will be of use to scholars interested in her remarkable life. Born in Wiesenfeld, Germany, in 1928 to a prosperous Orthodox Jewish family, she left Germany at age 10, after her father was taken away by the Nazis and her mother found her a place on a train to safety in Switzerland. (She never saw her family again.) In 1947, while still a teenager, she moved to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where she trained as a sniper in the Haganah, a forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces.
She immigrated to the United States in 1956, where she earned a degree in public health, and at one point, helped run a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem. After earning a doctorate in education, she trained in sex therapy. In the early 1980s, after a radio executive heard her give a talk, she started “Sexually Speaking,” a call-in program that quickly became a word-of-mouth hit.
But the archive, Fasman said, will also open a window onto the wider culture Dr. Ruth was so enduringly — and ubiquitously — embedded in. Fasman recalled opening up one of her carefully tended daily planners from the 1990s to a random page.
“It was like ‘phone call with Oprah,’ ‘meeting with Kissinger,’ ‘go on Arsenio Hall,’” she said. “It was such a cross-section of pop culture.”
Today, there are plenty of influencers, but it’s hard to think of anyone as wholly and widely beloved. “There’s no one who didn’t like her, there was no controversy,” Fasman said. “And not just that: She was talking about sex. That’s incredible.”
These days, frank sex talk can seem omnipresent. But sex — and even scholarly study of it — can still be controversial. In 2023, Republicans in the Indiana state legislature voted to strip all state funding for the Kinsey Institute, which was founded in 1947 by Dr. Alfred Kinsey as the Institute for Sex Research. One representative even said it might be “hiding child predators.”
Last spring Indiana University’s trustees, amid calls to sever ties with the institute, approved a plan to continue its relationship with the institute. The university’s president, Pamela Whitten, defended the institute as “a beacon of intellectual inquiry.”
Justin Garcia, the institute’s executive director, said in an interview that none of its roughly $3 million annual operating budget, down to the electric bill, is paid for with state funds. But otherwise, he said, its work continues unchanged.
“The institute isn’t a political organization,” he said. “We are dedicated to research, to asking questions and finding answers.”
Dr. Ruth’s legacy, Garcia added, was “giving people permission to ask questions about their sex lives,” which could be answered both with scholarly expertise and — “to use a Ruth word,” — chutzpah.
“Her real magic,” he said, “was making people comfortable talking about something they thought they were uncomfortable talking about.”
That mixture of scholarship and whimsy is evident in the apartment. In a small study, there were bookcases mixing multiple editions of her books (including some, Joel said, he was unaware she had even written) with those of others, with titles like “Judaism on Pleasure” and “Sex as a Sublimation for Tennis: From the Secret Writings of Freud.” A tiny pink upholstered settee was heaped with items to be taken to Indiana, including a kitschy ancient-Egyptian-style statuette with an impressive erection.
Miriam Westheimer, Dr. Ruth’s daughter, recalled how her mother, when entertaining, would just throw sheets over mounds of stuff, telling guests it was “a skill hill.” (Dr. Ruth, an avid downhiller into her 80s, once said that skiers make the best lovers, since “they take a risk and they wiggle their behinds.”)
In 2011, Dr. Ruth (whose third husband, Manfred Westheimer, died in 1997) worked with the celebrity decorator Nate Berkus to declutter and update the apartment. But the stuff crept back.
In 2022, the Library of Congress acquired thousands of letters from Dr. Ruth’s readers and listeners. The following year, she started discussions about donating the rest of her papers to the Kinsey Institute, whose collections include sex-research pioneers like Masters & Johnson, along with recent additions like the medical anthropologist Helen Fisher and the artist Cynthia Albritton, better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster.
Not that Dr. Ruth wanted anything to actually leave the apartment (which the children plan to sell). Miriam recalled how she and her brother started surreptitiously removing the contents of file cabinets and drawers, for the Kinsey Institute’s team to inspect. In September 2023, after Dr. Ruth suffered a stroke and spent time in a rehabilitation center, a room that had been stacked floor to ceiling was partly cleared, to make room for a caregiver.
Her children had worried about her reaction. “But when she came back, she said, ‘Oh this is great. You didn’t throw anything out!’” Miriam recalled.
Midway through the recent sorting session, a colleague of Fasman’s arrived from Dr. Ruth’s country house with a few more boxes. They turned out to mostly include old school play programs and other memorabilia from her children.
But there were still a few unexcavated closets, and the promise of unexpected and moving artifacts, like a facsimile of a list of children in the Kindertransport (which brought roughly 10,000 Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Europe to safety between 1938 and 1940).
Dr. Ruth had transcribed the names in her own handwriting. “It was just amazing,” Fasman said. “Beautiful.”
And yes, the institute will be taking some of the turtles.
“She loved turtles because when they move, they have to stick their neck out,” Joel said. “You could stay in your shell all the time. But you would never get anywhere.”
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