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.
During her years as a faculty member at Michigan, she received funding from state, federal (NIH), and private sources and served as a member of federal NIH and state review and advisory panels. Her research at the U-M’s School of Nursing focused on women’s health and included ground-breaking tracking of contraceptive behaviors and institutional effects on women’s health in the U.S. and China, evaluation of delivery care by certified midwives (as compared with obstetricians), documentation of nurse-managed centers in the U.S. and China, and women’s health behaviors in Iran.
She was known as a knowledgeable and dedicated mentor to colleagues and students in her own School of Nursing, elsewhere in the university, and other countries. Debby collaborated extensively with colleagues from multiple universities and was grateful for her long-time collaborator, the late Meiyu Yu, MD, PhD. Together they established an educational and research partnership with Peking Medical University School of Nursing (as it is now known), with support from the Kellogg Foundation and the Robert DeVries Scholars. She also served on the Board of 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.
Married for more than 66 years, she traveled the world with her husband and spent time in Mexico reviving his childhood memories and making new friends. Their 20+ years of retirement together were lovingly productive. Debby was especially proud of her children and promoted their international interests: Ingrid’s two years teaching with the Peace Corps in Lesotho (Africa), and Brian’s two years with the JET program teaching in Hokkaido, Japan.
To assuage the empty nest syndrome, she worked with Chelsea teachers to develop a Sister-City program with Shimizu-cho, Hokkaido that lasted for 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 U-M’s Clements Library. Her parents and her brother, David Willson Hacker, all now gone, were great influences.
Survivors include her patient and talented husband; her precious and beloved children and grandchildren, Ingrid (Michael) and their children Olivia and Yost; 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 will be held at the Chelsea Depot this fall. Cremation has taken place.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Planned Parenthood or National Public Radio (NPR).
Arrangements by Staffan-Mitchell Funeral Home, Chelsea, MI,
