Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption

6. Illegitimacy, Traumatic Neurosis, and the Problem of Affliction

87 6 Illegitimacy,Traumatic Neurosis, and the Problem of Affliction Illegitimacy colors all adoption practice. —Jean Paton, 1966 During these years of intellectual ferment—the late 1950s—the concept of illegitimacy and the issue of single motherhood became an increasingly important thread, weaving in and out of Jean Paton’s research, advocacy, poetry, and search for her birth father and his family. By 1961, failing to see any concrete results of her program for adoption reform, Paton discontinued her Life History Study Center Releases, suspended sales of her second publication,“Three Trips Home,” and concentrated on making sculpture and fixing up her house. This temporary hiatus was followed by an intense period of intellectual study and creativity, which laid the foundation for Paton’s belief in American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner’s theory of traumatic neurosis and French philosopher Simone Weil’s concept of “affliction.” Paton considered both concepts fundamental to understanding adult adoptees. But instead of immediately opening up a new chapter in Paton’s efforts to communicate with adult adoptees and the larger culture, these ideas remained dormant. In the place of adoption reform , Paton created a new program, in late 1961, which she called“FOCUS,” in an effort to communicate with the“illegitimate” and relieve the burden of grief carried by unmarried mothers.The shift in the Life History Study Center’s program from adoption reform to fighting the stigma of illegitimacy and helping unmarried mothers was a slow process; at bottom, Paton saw illegitimacy as the root problem afflicting adult adoptees. 88 jean paton and the struggle to reform american adoption Paton had lived with the idea of illegitimacy for a long time. Given her religious upbringing and frequent Bible study, she must have been familiar with the story in the Book of Genesis of Ishmael, the bastard son of Abraham and his slave maid,Hagar.An angel predicted that Ishmael“will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of brethren.”1 Other biblical passages copied the harsh treatment of Genesis on illegitimacy. Deuteronomy, speaking of bastards, provided that “even to the tenth generation none of his descendents shall enter the assembly of the Lord.”2 Nor did the sins of the mothers of illegitimates escape condemnation . The Book of Sirach stated that an adulteress “herself will be brought before the assembly, and punishment will fall on her children. Her children will not take root, and her branches will not bear fruit. She will leave her memory for a curse, and her disgrace will not be blotted out.”3 St. Paul in the New Testament echoed these attitudes, laying the groundwork for later Christian views on illegitimacy.4 Paton rejected these biblical admonitions, which were cruel and unjust on their face and contradicted her empathetic feelings for single mothers that had been forged out of the emotionally brutal experience of taking infants for adoption as a social worker. In 1949, as we have seen, while working as a supervisor for the Baltimore Department of Public Welfare, Paton sent to Good Housekeeping Magazine an article on adoption in which she denounced the treatment of unmarried mothers and illegitimacy.5 Six years later, she followed up this rejected article with a 1,500-word letter to the editor in the Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, criticizing social workers’ unfeeling conduct with unmarried mothers and society’s indifference to the topic of illegitimacy. Paton decried the toxic consequences of the cultural silence, which resulted in adopted persons becoming invisible, timid, and alienated from society.6 There was very little direct testimony from single mothers in the public realm. Although numerous studies of illegitimacy by Progressive Era reformers had been published thirty years earlier and some states had even enacted an American version of Norway’s 1915 Castberg law, which recognized the inheritance rights between an illegitimate child and his father, unmarried mothers , fearing the stigma of illegitimacy, avoided public exposure. In 1957 Paton remarked to one correspondent that unmarried mothers were“even more silent, if possible, than the adopted.” She could think of only one book that treated the subject, Nan Britton’s The President’s Daughter, a best seller from the late 1920s that told the story of Britton’s long affair with a married senator from Ohio who would become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. In 1919, Nan Britton had a child, Elizabeth Ann, by...