Deborah Jane Oakley, professor emerita of nursing, was born at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital in 1937 and died at home Aug. 21, 2024.
She was the daughter of Kathryn Willson Hacker and George F. Hacker. They lived in Wyandotte, Michigan, before moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Using money she saved, she studied French at the Collège Cévenol (a center of World War II French Resistance). She graduated with high honors in political science from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1958. She married her collegiate sweetheart and moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where she received an M.A. degree in political science from Brown University.
They spent one year in Stockholm, Sweden, where Debby worked for Gunnar Myrdal and made lifelong Swedish friends. They had their first child while living in southern California and their second child in Ann Arbor.
With encouragement from the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women, Debby became part of “A Dangerous Experiment” enrolling with other married women. She received an M.P.H. followed by a Ph.D.
As a faculty member at U-M, she received funding from state, federal and private sources and served on federal National Institutes of Health and state review and advisory panels.
Her research at the School of Nursing focused on women’s health and included groundbreaking tracking of contraceptive behaviors and institutional effects on women’s health in the United States and China, evaluation of delivery care by certified midwives, documentation of nurse-managed centers in the U.S. and China, and women’s health behaviors in Iran.
She was a knowledgeable and dedicated mentor to colleagues and students in the U.S. and other countries and collaborated extensively with colleagues from multiple universities. With a longtime collaborator, she established an educational and research partnership with Peking Medical University School of Nursing supported by the Kellogg Foundation and the Robert DeVries Scholars.
She also served on the board of directors of local and national Planned Parenthood chapters. As an American Public Health Association member, she helped found and lead what is now the Section of Sexual and Reproductive Health and the 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.
As a professor emerita, she continued to peer-review for international journals, was an ESL tutor, loved time in her garden and with her family and friends, and spent countless hours to get out the vote.
Married for 66 years, she traveled the world with her husband and they spent winters in Mexico. Debby promoted her children’s international teaching interests: Ingrid’s two years with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, Africa, and Brian’s two years with the JET program in Hokkaido, Japan.
She worked with Chelsea teachers to develop a sister city program with Shimizu-cho, Hokkaido, that lasted more than 25 years. To honor her parents, Debby developed Katie’s Grove of birch trees and daffodils on their property, and an endowed George Hacker student internship at the Clements Library. Her parents and her brother, David Hacker, all now gone, were great influences.
Survivors include her husband, Bruce; daughter, Ingrid (Michael), and their children, Olivia and Yost; son, Brian (Angela), and their children, Sophia and Willson; a niece, Sarah, and her daughter Ellie; a nephew, Jonathan (Kristen), and children David and Maggie; and a great-nephew, Zachary.
A celebration of life has taken place. Donations may be made to Planned Parenthood or National Public Radio.
— Submitted by Ingrid Oakley-Girvan
