Ruth’s first marriage ended and her husband returned to Israel, according to Biography. After receiving a restitution check from the German government, she sailed to New York with her French boyfriend; she had a scholarship waiting for her at the New School for Social Research. She and the boyfriend married, had a baby girl named Miriam, and divorced. Ruth worked as a maid during the day and took classes in English and Psychology at night, eventually graduating with a Master’s in sociology. She then worked as a research assistant at Columbia University. In 1961 she went on a ski vacation and met and fell in love with a fellow Jewish refugee, Manfred Westheimer. They married and had a son, Joel.
In the 1960s, Westheimer worked at Planned Parenthood, where she found herself participating in lots of frank discussions about sex. She simultaneously worked toward her doctorate in family and sex counseling and eventually graduated and became an associate professor of sex counseling at Lehman College. She later moved to another job at Brooklyn College, but was soon fired, which reportedly made her feel “as I did when I got kicked out of Germany. Angry, helpless, rejected.”
However, the best was about to come. A lecture that she gave to New York broadcasters about the importance of sex education programming caught the attention of a producer at WYNY-FM. Westheimer was hired at $25 per week to record a 15-minute long sex advice show, “Sexually Speaking,” that aired Sunday nights just after midnight.
