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18 2 The Birth of a Reformer It seems possible that by getting some material from adopted people I might make an original contribution to the field. —Jean Paton, 1953 The overt rejection of professional social work would take another ten years. In 1945, Paton finally earned her MSW from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work and qualified as a psychiatric social worker.1 Two years later, she was employed at the New Hampshire Children’s Aid Society.2 During her year there, Paton made another meaningful decision that would have far-reaching consequences. Acting upon Taft’s earlier suggestion to pursue artistic endeavors, Paton took lessons in sculpture from Maria Kostyshak,“a very interesting young woman of Russian extraction, a painter herself ” at the Museum School in Manchester, and discovered that sculpture“was natural for me. It came like water flowing out of my hands.”3 From then on, creating art from clay became a lifelong passion, never a hobby; Paton’s art work always serving the cause of adoption reform. After her time in New Hampshire, Paton took a job at the Department of Public Welfare in Baltimore, Maryland. Paton’s experiences as a social worker during the 1940s made a lifelong impression on her. It had always been clear to Paton that she“did not fully understand the emotions of the normal family,” but during her time at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic,she wrote Louise Whitfield,chief psychiatric social worker at South Carolina’s Greenville Mental Health Clinic, she came to realize that her“best work was with persons whose families were‘fringe.’”4 During four of those years, Paton focused on the identity needs of children in boarding care. She talked with the children about their past, their families, and the reasons The Birth of a Reformer 19 why they had been separated from their parents.In every case,Paton recollected several decades later, the child was comforted, and“their presenting symptoms, as one says, cleared up.”5 Paton felt she knew how to talk to foster children. She “rejoiced,”she wrote,“when I gave them enough background information to take a lot of the worry out of their faces.”Her joy stemmed both from compassion for her young charges and from the“great happiness to find my place in the scheme of things.”6 Late in life, Paton remembered an incident that took place during her work in New Hampshire with a four-year-old foster child who wet her bed. Each Thursday, Paton took the child to the visiting psychiatrist. After a few weeks the child quit the habit. The psychiatrist, realizing that the change in the girl’s behavior had little to do with him and the brief time he had spent with her, asked Paton,“What did you do?” Paton instinctively understood that the child was worried about being separated from her parents and told the psychiatrist that she told the girl that she had a family and that “someday you will be in touch with them.” Paton believed that“it helped her stop wetting the bed.”7 She also recounted another case, that of a foster child who, Paton discovered, had an aunt. She was determined that the little girl meet her aunt, even though the boarding mother objected to the idea. Paton won out and arranged the meeting; afterward the boarding mother confided to Paton,“I am glad she went. She is so much happier.”8 Such incidents reinforced Paton’s belief that she had a special connection with foster children and orphans. Arranging the surrender of infants from birth mothers, however, Paton found gut-wrenching; it made her miserable and filled her with guilt. She managed two of these surrenders during her years in social work, and she never forgot them, asserting that“the nature of that experience is a social death.” One of the surrenders occurred at the New Hampshire Children’s Home Society. The unmarried mother had freely relinquished her daughter. In Paton’s office, after she had signed the papers, the mother asked her, “Would I ever know if anything happened to her?” Paton answered in the customary way, according to agency policy, which was to say,“No.”As she recalled years later, however, The moment the words were out of my mouth, I said to myself,“What is going on here? We are playing funeral, and no one is dying.” Perhaps if I said it out loud, my whole life would...

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