Listmates,
I'm taking the liberty of cross-posting Kaye Fillmore's
email, containing an obit for Genevieve Knupfer, to this list (see below).
Genevieve headed the Social Research Group (previously, the Calif. Drinking
Practices Study) when I was first hired in the 1960s. Genevieve and her
early crew of alcohol survey researchers (comprising chiefly Ray Fink, Walt
Clark, and Robin
Room) were responsible
for pioneering many if not most of the interrogatives and scales that have been
used in such research to this day. She was a no-nonsense researcher and
scholar, suffered fools not at all, and (for me at least) was also quite
intimidating in the first couple of years. She was particularly keen on
correcting misusages of words and concepts. Her distaste for sloppy use
of the language, particularly in a scientific context, was expressed quite
nicely in her 1991 paper (see below) showing that researchers slanted vague and
open-ended concepts in order to over-emphasize the desirability of abstinence during
pregnancy. Genevieve didn't publish much. Yet the credit owed her
by the alcohol epidemiology field stretches far beyond publication. Her coauthored
Report #6 (Knupfer, G.; Fink, R.; Clark, W. B.; and Goffman, A.S. Factors Related to Amount of Drinking in an Urban
Community. California
Drinking Practices Study. Report No. 6. Berkeley: Division of Alcoholic
Rehabilitation. California State Department of Public Health), for example, contained
much of the important news that alcohol epi would repackage and repackage for
years to come. Her “The Portrait of the Underdog” was a
classic of contemporary sociology. Indeed, Genevieve was herself a
classic – her person suggested the thorough scholarship, rock-solid
character, and unflinching standards of a bygone era. She will not be
replaced.
Ron Roizen
-----Original
Message-----
From: Kettil Bruun Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Fillmore,
Kaye
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 9:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Genevieve Knupfer
Dear
Listmates, Genevieve Knupfer died August 27, 2005. Below is an
obituary written by her daughter, Kate. In my view, Genevieve was one of
the "greats" in our field. She went straight to the heart of a
problem and was fearless in doing so. Yours, Kaye
GENEVIEVE
KNUPFER, M.D., Ph.D.
Genevieve
Knupfer, M.D., Ph.D, Bay Area psychiatrist, sociologist and civil rights and
peace activist, died August 27 at Stanford
Hospital.
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; two
nieces, Lucinda Murphy of Baltimore, Md., and Victoria Williams of Media,
Pa., and a nephew, Charles Riggs, of San Lorenzo. A memorial service is planned for
2:30pm October 15 at the Friends' Meeting House in Palo Alto, 957 Colorado Ave, Palo Alto
CA 94303.
Donations may be sent to the Palo Alto Friends' Meeting, Southern Poverty Law
Center, or Planned Parenthood.
PLEASE
NOTE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: [log in to unmask]
Kaye
Fillmore
1310 Brewster Dr.
El Cerrito,
CA 94530
510
233 8368
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