Genevieve Knupfer, M.D., Ph.D, psychiatrist, sociologist and civil rights and peace activist, died August 27 at Stanford Hospital, in Stanford, California.
Born on March 19, 1914 in Dusseldorf, Germany to American parents, her family returned to the U.S. shortly after her birth. They returned to Europe after World War I, settling in Brussels, where Dr. Knupfer was raised.
She graduated from Wellesley College in 1935, and continued her study of sociology at Columbia University with the eminent sociologist, Paul Lazersfeld She received her M.A. in 1938 and was awarded the Ph.D. degree in 1946. A chapter from her dissertation, "The Portrait of the Underdog," was published in 1947 in Public Opinion Quarterly.
Dr. Knupfer felt the academic life was not for her - she wanted to help people, so she decided to become a physician. She studied Medicine at the University of Rochester and received her M.D. in 1951. She moved to the Bay Area, where her daughter was born in 1952. Dr. Knupfer completed a medical residency at Franklin Hospital in San Francisco, followed by a residency in psychiatry at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Medical Center, Menlo Park Campus. Her strong and continued commitment to public health led her, in 1955, to participate in the first mass polio immunization program.
She opened a private practice in psychiatry in Redwood City, while continuing her interest in sociology. In 1959 she was appointed the director of the California Drinking Practices Study (later the Alcohol Research Group of Berkeley), an epidemiological study of alcohol use among California adults. Dr. Knupfer was also an advisor to the World Health Organization's alcoholism program for many years.
The original survey questionnaire used by the DPS included many items designed to measure mental health, and Dr. Knupfer added a question: "Overall, how happy would you say you are these days?" Out of curiosity - a quality she had no shortage of - she tabulated the results by gender and marital status to come up with a startling finding: The happiest people were single women and married men; the unhappiest were married women and single men. Her findings were published in a 1966 paper (co-authored by Walt Clark and Robin Room), "The Mental Health of the Unmarried." The paper, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, received wide media coverage, as her conclusion ran counter to the prevailing stereotype of unhappy spinsters in desperate pursuit of marriage with men who preferred the joys of being single to the proverbial "ball and chain." Dr. Knupfer was immediately and vigorously pilloried by S.F. Chronicle columnist "Count Marco," who reviled her and all "lady psychiatrists," and the Chronicle noted the controversy with a front-page banner.
During the 1950's, 60's and 70's, Dr. Knupfer was an active participant in the movements for fair housing, civil rights, and peace, taking part in many vigils and protests. She traveled to Mississippi to work as a physician in a Head Start program, and picketed the Woolworth's in Stanford Shopping Center to protest segregation at lunch counters in the South. She was a member of the Palo Alto Friends' Meeting and deeply committed to non-violence. In October, 1967, she was arrested, along with singer Joan Baez and dozens of others, at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration at the Oakland Induction Center.
Until her retirement in 1986, Dr. Knupfer continued to work as a psychiatrist in private practice, and also at several county and community psychiatric hospitals and clinics in Redwood City, Menlo Park, and San Francisco. She continued her research on a variety of topics in sociology, with a particular interest in gender bias, publishing papers on diverse subjects including gender differences among psychiatric patients undergoing lobotomies, and a study of the husbands of alcoholic wives. She continued to write and publish academic papers; her most recent, in the September, 1991 issue of the British Journal of Addictions, was "Abstaining for foetal health: the fiction that even light drinking is dangerous."
She is survived by her daughter, Katherine McClellan, of East Palo Alto, CA; two nieces, Lucinda Murphy of Baltimore, MD., and Victoria Williams of Media, PA; and a nephew, Charles Riggs, of San Lorenzo, CA. Donations in her honor may be sent to the Palo Alto Friends' Meeting, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or Planned Parenthood.
