Deborah Jane Oakley was born at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital in 1937 and died at home on August 21, 2024.
She was the daughter of Kathryn Willson Hacker and George F. Hacker. They lived in Wyandotte, MI until 1945, moving to Fort Wayne, IN for the rest of her early life.
Using money saved from cleaning offices, she presaged a life of international interests by studying French at the Collège Cévenol (Haute Loire and a center of WWII French Resistance) in the summer of 1953. She graduated with high honors in political science from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1958. She married her collegiate sweetheart, Bruce Oakley, the next week and moved to Providence, RI where she received an MA degree in political science from Brown University and was the Director of Teenage and Adult Programming at the local YWCA.
The couple then spent one year in Stockholm, Sweden where Debby worked for Gunnar Myrdal and made lifelong Swedish friends. During the next two years while living in southern California, they had their first child, Ingrid (a rare native Angelino); then their second child, Brian, after settling in Ann Arbor, MI.
With encouragement from the University of Michigan’s Center for Education of Women, Debby became part of “A Dangerous Experiment” enrolling with three other married women for further study. As one of those then-considered obstreperous women, she received an MPH followed by a PhD from the U-M.
Directors of the local and national Planned Parenthood, and as an American Public Health Association member, she helped found and led what is now the Section of Sexual and Reproductive Health and APHA’s Women’s Caucus.
She attended the 1974 U.N. Conference on Population in Bucharest and represented the International Public Health Association at the 1975 United Nations meeting on women. As a delegate of the International Federation of Public Health, she attended the 1984 U.N. meeting on women in Mexico City. In her more than two decades of retirement as a Professor Emerita, she continued as a peer-reviewer for international journals, benefited from work as an ESL tutor, loved her garden, and greatly enjoyed the increased time to interact with friends. As a Political Science major, she spent countless hours working to get out the vote.
A celebration of life will be held at the Chelsea Depot Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
For the full obituary, please click here.
