Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives

A Nation’s Need for Adoption and Competing Realities: The Washington Children’s Home Society, 1895–1915

A Nation’s Need for Adoption and Competing Realities The Washington Children’s Home Society, 1895–1915 American society has had a vested role in adoption from the time it became an established method of saving children at the turn of the century. Although many of the specific issues surrounding adoption have changed since then, we still look to adoption to provide solutions for some of the nation’s most heartrending conditions, from child neglect, abuse, and abandonment to fulfilling the yearnings of infertile couples.1 Perceived as a problem solver for more than a century, adoption has always been a politically charged subject that can never be experienced by participants in complete isolation from social expectations, both positive and negative .2 Now, as the history of adoption and its role in society is being written, evidence from case records shows that participant experience is invaluable in balancing historical analysis based primarily on what contemporary reformers and others had to say about adoption. Case histories show that participants sought to fulfill their own desires through adoption and did not always act in accord with social expectations. Furthermore, often overdrawn social theory about nineteenth-century class relations and nationhood might also be profitably tested against evidence provided by case histories. The subjective experience of participants, which is essentially ignored by much postmodern theory as irrelevant, contests broad and inclusive theories about social intent with evidence to the contrary. Postmodern approaches that might seem applicable to understanding adoption history are often of limited utility. The social theory of Michel Foucault , published in his The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, potentially bears on the question of how and why dependent children were joined to middle-class families beginning in the nineteenth century. Foucault contends 140 Patricia S. Hart that by the end of the nineteenth century, the middle class had thoroughly embraced sexuality for itself and intensified its significance, manifesting its selfpreoccupation through endless discussion about procreation of healthy, productive , middle-class bodies ready to inherit the privileges of a healthy, expansive, vigorous body politic. Foucault posits that over the course of the late nineteenth century, as heavy industry increasingly demanded labor that could be supplied only by bodies of laboring men, sexuality was extended from the “hegemonic center” to include the lower-class populations. At that point, the sexual comportment of the poor became a subject of surveillance, pedagogy, and medical specialization.3 At the end of the nineteenth century, when adoption started to take shape as part of modern child welfare reform, Protestant reformers did indeed intend to mold illegitimate, dependent, or abused children to useful citizenship by way of adoption into Christian middle-class families. However, to follow Foucault and make the reforming the poor and nation building the sole focus of the history of adoption obscures the varied, competing experiences of adoption participants. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of adoption case histories can help establish different ways of understanding adoption within culture. The historical evidence on which this essay is based comes from a larger study of 289 case records, every tenth record from the first twenty years at the Washington Children’s Home Society (WCHS). The WCHS, founded in Seattle in 1895 as a private organization affiliated with the National Children’s Home Society (NCHS), was committed to finding permanent adoptive homes for legally relinquished children.4 As evidence from the case records shows, adoption experience defies easy generalizations about class, family, and the expectations of society as a whole. Adoption in the Nineteenth Century The sentimental family ideal, including a nurturing approach to children, had become the predominant white middle-class American model in the 1830s and 1840s. The belief that children depended on the tender quality of their nurturing families influenced judges to consider the best interest of the child when deciding custody and to increase maternal preference in child-custody cases.As the century progressed, the “best interest of the child” doctrine helped set legal precedence for biological bonds of parenthood (not just paternity) to be severed when the interests of the child were ill served, although entrenched resistance to doing so persisted. The first adoption law, passed in Massachusetts in 1851, made adoption a statutory procedure executable in state probate courts. Home placements, some leading to adoptions, were being made by charitable institutions even before 1851, and by serving as a model for most other states, the Massachusetts law legitimized and facilitated the practice. Early home A Nation’s Need for Adoption 141...