Dr Ruth aimed to shake America out of its puritan ways

Not many people like to boast how short they are, but Ruth Westheimer did. She was all of four foot seven or, in rough metric, a metre and a half. To reach the shelf of the cabinet in her parents’ bedroom where they kept a book all about sex, with a juicy chapter called “The Ideal Marriage”, she had to climb on a chair. When she went to lectures in psychology at the Sorbonne as a young woman, she had to find a strong, handsome guy who could pop her up on a window sill to see the teacher. Her third husband, Fred, first appealed to her because he was short too, as well as good at skiing. On late-night talk shows, when she took a chair beside the host to lay a confiding hand on his arm and chat about genitalia, her little feet swung inches above the ground.