The Displaced Child: Eighty Years of U.S. Adoption and Foster Care

In Little Strangers (winner of the Children's Literature Association's 2003 Book Award), Claudia Nelson—Professor of English at Texas A&M and herself an adoptive mother—researches, reviews, and interprets the portrayal of adoption and foster care in writings from the period 1850 to 1929. In conducting such a survey of existing literature, Nelson is looking not at real children in the way social scientists might review interviews with orphans or otherwise collate data about their experiences, but instead is diagramming the cultural representations of orphaned children. What is especially interesting about Little Strangers is Nelson's choice to maximize the texts available on the orphan condition by not only analyzing orphan-centered literary works (as many an English scholar might have done), but also reviewing "stories and articles in women's magazines; legal writings; articles and conference presentations aimed primarily at social workers; and discussions of heredity and child psychology" (5). In other words, Nelson takes a broad cultural studies approach—rather than an exclusively literary one—in assessing the representations of the orphan condition in the writings of 1850–1929.

Organized into six chapters, Little Strangers begins with two case studies of the portrayal of orphans in American writings: Susan Warner's 1850 orphan novel The Wide, Wide World on the one hand, and publications from and about the New York Children's Aid Society, which began its operation in 1853, on the other. Nelson chose The Wide, Wide World and the New York Children's Aid Society because of their influence on the mores of the mid-nineteenth century. Case in point: The Wide, Wide World was a tremendous literary success, becoming the first American book to sell more than one million copies, and it began a literary movement that highlighted the plight of orphans, particularly girls. Many readers will be familiar with the blockbusters that followed after the turn of the twentieth century, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Sara Crewe, and Pollyanna, in which protagonists change their situations to accommodate their own needs. But in 1850, Ellen Montgomery of The Wide, Wide World does not possess such authority over her conditions; instead, as she moves from house to house, with much unpleasantness, she "succeeds by learning to bear what is unpleasant, repressing her strong feelings and accepting a series of new settings in order to discover her spiritual home" (12).

At that same time, the New York Children's Aid Society, a major adoptive agency that went on to place 100,000 children over the next seventy-five years, was circulating writings that drew attention to the plight of immigrant children, both those who were lacking the actual presence of parents and those who had effectively "lost" parents to the long hours they worked in factories in order to make ends meet. These orphaned children were portrayed as hooligans—amoral delinquents who were having a contaminating influence on Victorian society. By allowing them to run wild in the streets, society was risking its very existence, but by contributing to the cause of the New York Children's Aid Society and taking in orphaned children, those young hoodlums could be saved and, by extension, so, too, could the fabric of American life.

Thus, the message in 1850 was that orphans were by nature deviant; that the condition of being a rescued orphan, even when placed in an unhappy home, could bring spiritual redemption to the orphaned child; and that integrating orphans into stable homes, regardless of whether those homes were happy, safe, or fulfilling arenas for the children, would bring cultural stability.

Nelson's second chapter focuses on the period 1860 to 1885, when two vastly differing views of the motivation for adoption polarized the issue further: the idea of "sentimental adoption" (64) on the one hand, and the need for "orphan labor" (64) on the other. Some, including John N. Foster, superintendent of Michigan State Public Schools, which operated a large orphanage, found a middle ground between...