Genevieve Knupfer

Genevieve Knupfer, a member of Palo Alto Meeting for over 35 years, died August 27, 2005 at Stanford Hospital. She was a psychiatrist, sociologist and civil rights and peace activist.  Genevieve was born on March 19, 1914 in Dusseldorf, Germany to American parents.  Her family returned to the U.S. shortly after her birth. They then returned to Europe after World War I, settling in Brussels, where Genevieve was raised.

She graduated from Wellesley College in 1935, and continued her study of sociology at Columbia University. She received her M.A. in 1936 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.

Genevieve 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, Kate, was born in 1952. She 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.

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.

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. She was also an advisor to the World Health Organization’s alcoholism program for many years.

During the 1950's, 60's and 70's, Genevieve 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. 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.

She joined the Palo Alto Friends’ Meeting on January 12, 1969. She was deeply committed to non-violence. In the mid-1970’s she served on the Peace and Social Action committee. She was the Ecumenical Hunger Program representative in 1980. She served on the Nominating committee and was also an alternate Recording Clerk on several occasions. She was also the Associate Clerk for several years.

Genevieve loved music, especially opera and ballet. She and her friends would often go to San Francisco to attend operas, ballets or to listen to the Lamplighters or Chanticleer.

She is survived by her daughter, Katherine McClellan, of East Palo Alto; two nieces, Cindy Murphy of Baltimore, Md., and Victoria Williams of Media, Pa., and a nephew, Charles Riggs, of San Lorenzo.