Having been very active in the high school musicals, I was often asked if I wanted to be just like Mr. Knoepfel when I grew up. What I never said out loud until many years after I graduated but what always went silently through my head was, "No, I want to be just like Mrs. Knoepfel." To me she was the living embodiment of everything I wanted to be a....female scientist. I remember every inch of her classroom, filled with preserved animals and dissection kits. I remember her blue lab coat and the microscopes. Because I was able to see a living, breathing scientist and educator in Mrs. Knoepfel, I went on to become one....earning a joint PhD in clinical psychology and neuroscience and becoming the first woman to be awarded early tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Years ago I was brought to tears by author Vivian Gornick, who capture the essence of what Mrs. Knoepfel meant to me.....
" I have been deeply moved by the resourcefulness of women in science rather than by their victimization, and amazed by the variety of their personalities, their experiences, and their activity. I discovered how passionate an enterprise science is - how like artists scientists are - and that hundreds of women who possessed the driving spirit, the pressing hunger, occupied peripheral, often humiliating positions for twenty and thirty years in order to DO science. You could not keep them out of the human enterprise, and because you could not keep them out they have created a history, left a legacy, had consequences. Together with the contemporary women's movement, they have formed a wedge, making the opening for women in science larger than ever before so that today - while the profession is still without anything that resembles parity - innumerable women in science are where they belong, in possession of grants, professorships, and laboratories, and thousands of young women think it perfectly natural that they should become scientists." VIVIAN GORNICK,, author WOMEN IN SCIENCE
For years this quote hung on my office door at the University and I never read it without tearing up a little or thinking of Mrs. Knoepfel. My own graduate and undergraduate female students have gone on to earn tenure at other universities, thanks to the example you set as a professional. Thank you for the gift Mrs. Knoepfel....one that I will never be able to repay. Give my love to Mr. K.
-Rhea Steinpreis, PhD