Aging women and sexually active older couples lost a champion when Myrna Lewis, a psychotherapist and social worker, died of brain cancer Tuesday in New York at the age of 67.

"People were always a little surprised that couples could write together and get along, but we did," said her husband, Dr. Robert Butler, a geriatrics specialist. "She and I were intellectually close."

Their 1976 bestseller, "Love and Sex after 60," was revised in a fifth edition in 2002 as "The New Love and Sex after 60," which Time magazine called a classic.

"They were pioneers in addressing this issue," said Eli Coleman, a University of Minnesota professor and director of its Program in Human Sexuality.

The current cultural mindset about sex and aging is fueled by the advent of male-impotence drugs such as Viagra and the desire of aging baby boomers to maintain their vitality, Coleman said, but Lewis and her husband have focused more on the emotional and expressive aspect of sex after 60.

Butler credits Lewis with the idea for the book. She was concerned about the social belief "that older people are not capable of lovemaking," he said.

In researching clinical studies, they found that people in their 80s were having intercourse. The couple's book includes discussions of activity such as touching and body contact "that Myrna and I felt were sexual," Butler said.

Lewis, who grew up in a farm family and graduated from Wykoff (Minn.) High School, received her undergraduate degree in 1960 at the University of Minnesota. She worked on a family-centered pilot project for Ramsey County in 1962 and 1963, and the next year did social work for Hennepin County.

She received her master's degree in 1965 from the Columbia University School of Social Work, and her doctorate in 2000. She was a member of the clinical faculty at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Department of Community and Preventive Medicine.

Lewis and Butler, who married in 1975, co-wrote their first classic in 1973, "Aging and Mental Health," the first comprehensive textbook on mental illness in old age.

Lewis, who helped develop the concept of life-review therapy, had long focused on the problems of caregiving women whose money doesn't outlive their husbands.

"Women need to look ahead and make plans for the rest of their lives," she wrote in her last research paper, "A Proactive Approach to Women's Concerns: Women's Longevity Groups and Funds."

She hoped to develop not-for-fee groups nationally where women could get reliable information to prepare themselves financially and socially for their old age, he said.

After the terrorist attacks on New York on Sept. 11, 2001, she worked with the Red Cross to help thousands of older people who were left behind in lower Manhattan.

"I remember she used a phrase, 'sturdy older Americans,' " in describing parts of the experience, said Ruth Hayden, a St. Paul financial consultant who focuses on the finances of women and couples. "That's a really empowering phrase."

In addition to her husband, survivors include a daughter, Alexandra, of New York City; stepdaughters Ann Christine of Washington, D.C.; Carole Hall of Oklahoma, and Cynthia Butler of Davidsonville, Md.; a sister, Diane Barnhart of Kansas City, Mo., and brothers Donald Eickhoff and Virgil Eickhoff of Wykoff.

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