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Rescue a Child and Save the Nation: The Social Construction of Adoption in the Delineator, 1907–1911
- University of Michigan Press
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Rescue a Child and Save the Nation The Social Construction of Adoption in the Delineator, 1907–1911 Every morning, George Wilder, president of Butterick Publishing Company, noticed the ragged and dirty children who milled around outside his building. Where did these children live? Who were their parents? What was to become of them? How could he help? Wilder’s concern sparked the creation of the ChildRescue Campaign in the Delineator, the country’s third-largest women’s magazine , with close to a million subscribers. The campaign hoped to match up the nation’s childless homes and homeless children and end the practice of caring for dependent children in institutions. Although Wilder wanted to help, he also feared that American homes would not open their doors to poor, homeless waifs. He was wrong. Hundreds of readers wrote in to adopt the first two children profiled. The series was an immediate and extended success, placing more than two thousand children in adoptive homes over the course of its three-year run from late 1907 to early 1911.1 The story of the Child-Rescue Campaign is, however, more than a simple tale of a powerful man trying to help those less fortunate. The campaign marked the first time adoption was discussed in an ongoing public and popular forum; it gave a voice to the experience, demystified it, made it visible. The Delineator presented adoption as part of a woman’s civic duty and as a form of rescue. Because the campaign was so popular and reached such a large audience, these representations influenced both the way the public understood adoption and the way women experienced adoptive motherhood. The series ultimately played an important role in popularizing adoption and promoting an expanded definition of motherhood. The Delineator’s female readers responded enthusiastically to the series, but the magazine also sought to gain the respect and acclaim of national reformers and wanted to take a leading role in the larger Progressive-era child-saving movement. In its attempt to satisfy both its readers and the reformers, the De124 Julie Berebitsky lineator found itself struggling to balance the interests of two very different constituencies. Although readers fully supported getting children out of institutions and into homes, they responded to the campaign in an intensely personal way that focused on helping individual children, especially those profiled . Many readers wanted the series to emphasize their needs and concerns as adoptive mothers or prospective adoptive mothers. For this group of women, adoption was not just a solution to a social problem but also the answer to their loneliness and maternal longings. Reformers, however, saw adoption as a fairly insignificant part of the solution to the problem of child dependency and believed the campaign should move beyond finding homes for individual children . As the magazine increased its role in the national child-saving movement , a tension—even a conflict—developed between the interests of the women readers who looked at the Delineator as a type of adoption agency and the desires of the editors to further expand the magazine’s role in national reform efforts. In the end, the Delineator sacrificed the interests of these women for the allure of national influence. Historians who have looked at the Delineator’s Child-Rescue Campaign have focused on the role it played in child-welfare reform and specifically its involvement in organizing the famous 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children.2 Furthermore, scholars examining the growing acceptance of adoption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have focused on large-scale cultural factors such as changes in the value of children and in philosophies regarding child welfare and the modernization and expansion of the legal system.3 As important as these social changes were, individuals also played an important role in the growing popularity of adoption . This essay focuses on one important episode in the history of adoption when three distinct groups, each with its own interests and concerns, came together and presented to the public a new understanding of adoption. The Child-Rescue Campaign illuminates the realities of publishing a women’s magazine in a climate of fierce competition, the difficulty of a for-profit venture taking a leading role in reform, the changing definition of motherhood, and the power of a mass-circulation magazine to popularize, legitimate, and shape the culture’s understanding of a new social phenomenon. The Campaign Begins In October 1907, the Delineator published “The Child without a Home,” which told...