Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives

When in Doubt, Count: World War II as a Watershed in the History of Adoption

When in Doubt, Count World War II as a Watershed in the History of Adoption The title of this essay was inspired by English historian G. Kitson Clark, who advised anyone venturing a generalization, “do not guess, try to count, and if you cannot count, admit you are guessing.”1 Clark’s advice has been almost impossible to follow in writing the history of adoption. In addition to historians’ difficulty in gaining access to adoption agencies’ confidential case records, in 1975 the federal government’s National Center for Social Statistics ceased collecting data on adoptions.2 As a result, there are no historical longitudinal statistical studies of adoption triad members—birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents—or of adoption agencies’ policies. Instead, we have snapshot studies, frozen in time, of triad members. But even the best of these, like Benson Jaffee and David Fanshel’s How They Fared in Adoption: A Follow-up Study, omit birth parents.3 By sampling one out of every ten case records of the Children ’s Home Society of Washington (CHSW) from 1895 to 1973, this essay hopes to fill this gap in our knowledge of adoption agencies’ constituencies and practices, with preliminary findings that can be tested by future historical studies of adoption agencies.4 Another goal of this essay is to use statistical data to test the thesis that World War II marked a third watershed in the history of adoption, following the Massachusetts Adoption Act of 1851 and the beginnings of adoption reform and the sentimentalization of adoption during the Progressive era.5 Historians have documented how World War II was a transforming event in the nation’s economy , political system, and foreign policy; in Americans’ social values and expectations ; and in the U.S. global role.6 Other historians, however, see important continuities before and after the war and claim that the idea of World War II as a watershed is exaggerated or oversimplified.7 For example, the war had little direct impact on many communities, the distribution of wealth and power remained unchanged, domestic policy remained substantially the same, and 181 E. Wayne Carp and Anna Leon-Guerrero important social changes often did not occur until a decade or more after the war. These historians maintain that if significant changes did occur during World War II—new roles for women, civil rights activism, integration of the suburbs, increase in the size of the national government, and growth of the military-industrial complex—the war might have accelerated or reinforced these long-term changes but did not produce them.8 However, in the history of adoption, our data reveal that in many respects, World War II brought dramatic changes in the lives of the CHSW’s constituents and in the CHSW’s policies. Method The CHSW adoption case records are extremely rich both in qualitative and quantitative information relating to the history of adoption. In this essay, we use the CHSW’s case records, supplemented by CHSW staff minutes and annual reports, to provide a quantitative social profile of the agency’s constituency and how it changed over time. Where possible, we use the records of the Child Welfare League of America and the U.S. Children’s Bureau and social work journals to place the CHSW data in a comparative framework for representative purposes. Our empirical basis was the 21,500 CHSW case records, which we then subjected to systematic random sampling, reading one of every ten records. The resulting database of 2,150 adoption files was then transferred into Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 8.0 format. We analyzed these data to detect trends regarding what kinds of people relinquished children (birth parents’ marital status, age, occupation, education, and motivation), what sort of children were placed in the CHSW (sex, race, legitimacy status, length of stay, age at placement, and age at adoption) and why, and what types of families adopted children (adoptive parents’ marital status, age, occupation, motivation for adopting, and child preference). The analysis presented here is descriptive in nature, consisting primarily of frequency summaries, valid percentages , or calculation of means for selected variables. Table summaries are presented in either five- or ten-year collapsed time intervals.9 Historical Background of the CHSW The CHSW is a private, statewide, voluntary, nonprofit organization founded in 1895 by a Methodist minister, Harrison D. Brown, and his wife, Libbie Beach Brown, the former superintendent of a Lincoln, Nebraska, orphanage, the Home for the Friendless. The CHSW’s mission was...