Not Merely Unspoken, But Unspeakable

Evan Swensen
March 9, 2026

Paula Doress-Worters died on February 21, 2026, at the home of her daughter Hannah in Redwood City, California. She was eighty-seven years old.

Sixty years earlier, in 1966, Hannah was born. Paula loved her. Hannah was wanted, healthy, beautiful. And in the days and weeks after Hannah’s birth, Paula found herself painfully, inexplicably depressed.

“I felt terrible,” she recalled years later, “because she was a wanted child. She was lovely. But sometimes I just couldn’t get out of bed.”

The doctors had a name for what she was feeling. They called it the “baby blues.” They dismissed it. Paula knew it was something more—something real, something caused by hormonal changes and social isolation, something millions of women had experienced and never been able to talk about.

In the spring of 1969, Paula attended a workshop at Emmanuel College in Boston called “Women and the Control of Our Bodies.” The women in the room talked about childbirth, sexuality, abortion. They shared what they had learned—and what they had never been told. Paula found others who understood what she had been through.

The women kept meeting. They researched. They wrote. In 1970, they mimeographed their findings and sold them on newsprint for seventy-five cents. The booklet was called Women and Their Bodies. It sold 250,000 copies without a single advertisement.

In 1973, Simon & Schuster published the first commercial edition under a new title: Our Bodies, Ourselves. Paula wrote about postpartum depression. She named what had gone unnamed. She gave language to what doctors had dismissed.

The book sold more than four million copies. It was translated into dozens of languages. It changed how women understood their own bodies—and how medicine understood women.

Paula Doress-Worters was buried on March 3, 2026, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her fellow founders—Joan Ditzion, Miriam Hawley, Judy Norsigian, Jane Pincus, Wendy Sanford—survive her.

Adrienne Rich understood what Paula Doress-Worters did. Rich was an American poet and essayist who spent her career writing about women’s lives—the truths they carried, the silences they were forced to keep.

In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Rich wrote:

“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”

Unspeakable.

Before Paula Doress-Worters wrote about postpartum depression, it was unspeakable. Women suffered alone. Doctors waved it away. Families did not understand. The experience existed, but there were no words for it—no names, no recognition, no path toward help.

Rich also wrote: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”

Paula told the truth. And the truth spread.

This is what writers do. They name what has no name. They give language to experiences buried in silence. They make the unspeakable, speakable.

The Power of Authors calls writers to this work. Not only the dramatic truths—the wars, the revolutions, the great upheavals—but the quiet ones. The ones dismissed as trivial. The ones suffered alone in bedrooms and kitchens while the world looks away.

Somewhere right now, someone is experiencing something real, something that matters, something that has no name yet. Someone is being told it is nothing. Someone is being told to get over it.

A writer could change that. A writer could give it words. A writer could make it possible for the next person to say: This happened to me, too.

Paula Doress-Worters could not get out of bed. Sixty years later, because she wrote it down, millions of women know they are not alone.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the writer who speaks to one reader with conviction reaches further than the writer who speaks to everyone with caution.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.