Alma Cecelia Haupt was born on March 19, 1893 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. She was the daughter of Charles Edgar Haupt, an Episcopal minister, and Alexandra Dougan. Her grandfather, Brigadier General Herman Haupt, was a civil engineer who had been in charge of military railroads for the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.
After receiving the Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 1915, Haupt entered the university's School of Nursing, later completing her training at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Haupt's career in public health nursing began in 1919 with the Visiting Nurse Association of Minneapolis, of which she became general superintendent in 1922. In 1924 Haupt was invited by the Commonwealth Fund to become associate director of its child health program in Vienna.
In 1927 she was named associate director of the fund's Division of Rural Hospitals; two years later she accepted a similar position with the National Organization for Public Health Nursing.
Having attained national recognition through her writings and organizational activities, Haupt became director of the Nursing Bureau of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, a pioneer in home nursing care, in October 1935. Under her seventeen-year administration this service became a model of its type for community and state agencies.
In 1941 she was granted a leave of absence to serve as nursing consultant and executive secretary of the nursing subcommittee of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services, in Washington. In this dual capacity she helped to coordinate the war-nursing activities of twelve government agencies, including the Nursing Advisory Committee of the Procurement and Assignment Service of the War Manpower Commission, the American Red Cross, and the National Nursing Council for War Service.
She returned to New York City in 1943 but remained a consulting member of these national committees until the end of the war. In June 1949 Haupt visited Great Britain with Alice Girard, superintendent of nurses, Canadian head office of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, to study the British national health service. A month later in Stockholm, at the annual meeting of the International Council of Nurses, they gave an address containing their observations on the practical aspects of home health care in America that was published in Public Health Nursing (1949).
In 1950 and 1951 Haupt taught administration in public health nursing at New York University.
Her life was dominated by devotion to the care of the needy and the determination that in the future her profession should play a more dynamic part in the health care of the general public.
She died in San Francisco, California.
Alma Cecelia Haupt played an important role in the effort to provide adequate nursing care during World War II. By exerting authority with diplomacy, she helped to unify and coordinate the resources of nursing organizations. Haupt believed firmly in continuing education for graduate nurses long before this idea became popular, and the status that the profession now enjoys may be attributed in considerable degree to her insistence on self-betterment. In 1953 she published the most important of her numerous articles, "Forty Years of Teamwork in Public Health Nursing, " in the American Journal of Nursing. She served with such distinction that she was awarded the Gold Cross of Austria.
An efficient, authoritative administrator, Haupt was described by fellow workers as large in stature, extraordinarily warm, generous, imaginative, and innovative. She loved to entertain her friends, who came from all parts of the world.
Haupt never married.
