abstract:This article is part memoir of my writing about the adoption reform movement, part history of the movement itself, and part history of the evolution of adoption studies. It describes the rise, and sometimes the fall, of those adoption and childhood organizations, conferences, publications, and journals with which I have had a personal relationship. These organizations include the American Adoption Congress, the National Committee for Adoption, Bastard Nation, the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, the International Conference on Adoption Research, the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, and the journals Adoption Quarterly and Adoption & Culture. When appropriate, I identify the many activists and scholars with whom, in one form or another, I have had a personal or professional relationship.

ABSTRACT:Part memoir, part advocacy, and part original scholarship, this essay tells the story of my experience in 1995 as a legal consultant to prominent New York City law firm Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts. It is adapted from the affidavit I wrote affirming that James Buchanan Duke, the American tobacco tycoon, would have viewed Chandi Duke Heffner, an adopted adult, as a "lineal descendent," within the meaning of the Doris Duke Trust set up by Duke, and thus she was entitled to a fortune estimated at $177 million. James B. Duke (1856–1925) belonged to a class of entrepreneurs who pursued great wealth, steadfast devotion to philanthropy, and the founding of adoption agencies for infants. Beginning in the 1850s, state legislatures enacted adult adoption laws most likely to accommodate the fact that adolescents were often placed in farm families and adopted years later when they had attained adulthood. By the Progressive era, members of the wealthy business class practiced adult adoption to bequeath inheritance, show devotion to young friends, reward service, and continue their philanthropic pursuits after they had died. Adult adoption was treated in the press and among industrialists and upper-class Americans as a normal, acceptable activity, in part because American society was accustomed to adoptions at a late age and in part because adult adoptions fit this class's unique social and financial needs. Duke, like others of his class and era, would have approved of adoption in general and adult adoption in particular.

7 The Sentimentalization of Adoption: A Critical Note on Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child by E. Wayne Carp To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children,1 Brigette Soland, an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and Emily Bruce, a graduate student in the department of History at the University of Minnesota, organized a symposium to celebrate and honor Zelizer’s book at the annual meeting of the 2011 Social Science History Association. The short, informal symposium papers, enthusiastically praising the book, have recently been published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Paula S. Fass, Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, described Zelizer’s study as one of two “foundational” books in the field of Childhood and Children’s History (457).2 Daniel Thomas Cook, an associate professor of childhood studies and sociology at Rutgers University, called Pricing the Priceless Child “a must-read for anyone interested in grasping the emergence of what some may call ‘modern childhood’” (468). Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a research associate in the Populations Study Center at the University of Pennsylvania, proclaimed the book’s archival research base “deep, thorough, and imaginative” (462). Barrie Thorne, Professor Emerita of sociology and gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, like several of the other symposium contributors, “routinely assigned Pricing” in her university sociology courses, where “‘Viviana Zelizer’ has become a household name” (474). It is almost unprecedented that any book, even a classic, can still be held in such high regard and deemed relevant to contemporary readers nearly thirty years after its publication. In stark contrast to Pricing the Priceless Child, Patrick J. Ryan, Associate Professor of Childhood and Social Institutions at King’s University College (Western), has maintained that PhilippeAriès’s Centuries of Childhood, the other book Fass described as foundational, “is the most harshly critiqued work in the historiography of childhood” (566; for more information, see Heywood 343–65). What historical interpretation could prompt such passionate endorsement from so many distinguished scholars? The thesis of Pricing the Priceless Child is that in the United States, “a profound transformation” in the social value of children occurred during the period 1870–1930, when the nineteenthcentury useful child was displaced by the twentieth-century economically Adoption & Culture Vol. 5 (2017) 8 useless but emotionally priceless child (209). It was during this period, Zelizer argues, that regardless of social class, the sentimentalization of childhood intensified until “the new sacred child occupied a special and separate world” (209). She supports this interpretation in six chapters examining the economic and sentimental value of children. Topics include, inter alia, changing attitudes toward the death of a child, the struggle over child labor legislation, the controversy over children’s life insurance, the changing criteria for compensation for the accidental death of children, and the transformation in adoption and the creation of a black market in children. In chapter six, which treats the sentimentalization of adoption, Zelizer contextualizes her thesis by stating that nineteenth-century children who were placed out with Midwestern farm families were “valued” for their economic contribution to the family’s well-being. By midcentury, she argues,arevolutionarytransformationin“value”beganrenderingchildren’s contribution to the family economically valueless but sentimentally “priceless,” resulting in an upturn in adoptions. This sentimentalization of adoption, according to Zelizer, created “an unprecedented demand for children under three, especially infants” (192). Babies who could not be given away in the late nineteenth century were, by the first decades of the twentieth century, preferred by adoptive parents. Zelizer asserts that a paradoxical consequence of the advent of the sentimentalization of adoption was the growth of a black market in babies and the charging of fees by adoption agencies. As a result, there was a “greater commercialization and monetization of child life” (201). By the 1930s, the priceless child displaced the useful child. This essay reexamines Zelizer’s thesis by challenging her chronology about changing social attitudes toward and practices in adoption, the concomitant advent of adoption fees, and an...

The History of Orphans and Orphanages in the United States By E. Wayne Carp During the American colonial period (1607–1763), local poor-law officials “placed out” or removed five- to six-year-old children from destitute and motherless homes and placed them with other families. They also indentured or apprenticed children over the age of seven by contract to work for other families in return for board, clothing, training, and education. Responding to the inadequacy and expense of outdoor relief and the hostility to the poor, town officials built almshouses and committed families, paupers, the infirm, and the mentally ill, as well as law-breakers and alcoholics. During the 1850s and 1860s, investigation of almshouses by child welfare reformers revealed children living in overcrowded, mismanaged, and squalid conditions. As a result of these observations, reformers’ preference for the care of dependent children shifted from almshouses to private, sectarian (the vast majority), and public orphan asylums. Orphan asylums grew from thirty-three before 1833 to nearly two hundred by 1860; six hundred by 1890; 972 by 1910; and 1,321 by 1933. The vast majority of the children were not orphans; ninety percent had one parent living and most were white and poor. Thenextgenerationofchildwelfarereformerswouldlaterinaccurately accuse orphanages of removing children from their families, placing them in large congregate institutions, a practice that they claimed resulted in regimented routines that turned the youngsters into robots. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, however, many orphan asylum managers, “downsized” and turned to the “cottage system”: small groups of children who lived together in family-like settings run by their own matrons. Nevertheless, in spite of the criticism and the reforms, orphanages continued to thrive through the 1930s when more than 1,600 orphanages existed nationwide, housing approximately 144,000 children; not until the 1950s did foster care and adoption become the dominant form of care for dependent children in the United States. The suitability of the orphanage for dependent children continues to attract attention. In the mid-1990s, political controversy Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 44 erupted, instigated by Senator Newt Gingrich (R-GA),when he advocated a social policy to “bring back the orphanage.” The following bibliography represents published historical sources that reflect this social welfare history of orphans and orphanages in the United States. Over the past twenty years, I have collected these readings from a variety of sources: book reviews, book catalogs, books for sale at history or socialworkconferences,adsinhistoricalandsocialworkjournals,articlesand monographs from the bibliographies appended to monographs, footnotes in articles, and historical databases such as JSTOR. I have not included “outcome studies” of institutionalized orphans simply because there are so many; these studies are quite numerous because the vast majority focus on internationally adopted orphans. Pacific Lutheran University Allen, Barton S., and James S. Vacca. “Bring Back Orphanages—An Alternative to Foster Care?” Children and Youth Services Review 33.7 (July 2011): 1067–72. Print. Ananbaum, Susan L. “Childcare Dilemmas: Religious Discourse and Services Among Jewish and Christian ‘Orphanages.’” Jewish Culture and History 12.1/2 (Summer/Autumn 2011): 159–74. Print. Ashby, LeRoy. Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History. New York: Twayne, 1997. Print. ---. Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890–1917. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984. Print. Bair, Sarah D. “Making Good on a Promise: The Education of Civil War Orphans in Pennsylvania, 1863–1893.” History of Education Quarterly 51.4 (Nov. 2011): 460–85. Print. Barber, E. Susan. “Anxious Care and Constant Struggle: The Female Humane Association and Richmond’s White Civil War Orphans.” Before the New Deal: Social Welfare in the South, 1830–1930. Ed. Elna C. Green. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999. 20–137. Print Bogen, Hyman. The Luckiest Orphans: A History of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. Print. Brown, Dorothy M., and Elizabeth McKeown. The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Carp, “Orphans” 45 Callahan, Kathryn. “Sisters of the Holy Cross and Kearns-St. Ann’s Orphanage.” Utah Historical Quarterly 78.3 (Summer 2010): 254– 74. Print. Carp, E. Wayne. “Orphanages: The Strength and Weakness of a Macroscopic View.” Reviews in American History 27.1...

The History of the Law of Adoption in the United States By E. Wayne Carp Adoption—the legal process that establishes a parent/child relationship between individuals who are not related by blood—is a relatively modern concept. The United States pioneered the institution in 1851 when Massachusetts enacted the first modern adoption statute because the English common law did not recognize the institution of adoption—it contradicted the rules of inheritance and property rights. Consequently, for the next 125 years, it fell to the states, through strict judicial scrutiny, to oversee adoptions. Not until the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 did the Federal government pass the first major piece of national legislation affecting adoption. The sub-field of the history of the law of adoption, like adoption itself, developed slowly, too, and before the 1970s, few legal scholars or social workers, and even fewer historians published in this field. Reflecting the historical development of adoption in the United States, this bibliography of published works is divided into two sections. The first reflects scholarly interest in the history of the origins and subsequent development of legal adoption in the individual states of America. Using LexisNexis and historical databases, I have tried to include all known published sources on this neglected topic. The second section reflects the outburst of adoption studies by legal scholars, adoption reform activists, and social historians as a result of the early 1970s adoption reform movement. It concentrates on the legal studies of the sealed adoption records controversy and the rights of triad members to access information about their first families and their children relinquished for adoption in the United States. The majority of published sources in this section have also been found located through LexisNexis and historical databases. Pacific Lutheran University The Law of Adoption in the United States Ben-Or, Joseph. “The Law of Adoption in the United States: Its Massachusetts Origins and the Statute of 1851.” New England History and Genealogical Registry 130 (1976): 259–72. Print. Carp, “Law” 33 Bodenheimer, Brigitte M. “NewTrends and Requirements in Adoption Law and Proposals for Legislative Change.” Southern California Law Review 49 (1975): 10–109. Print. Brosnan, John Francis. “The Law of Adoption.” Columbia Law Review 22 (March 1922): 332–42. Print. Colby, Mary Ruth. Problems and Procedures in Adoption. U. S. Children’s Bureau pub. 262 Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1941. Print. Freundlich, Madelyn, and Lisa Peterson. Wrongful Adoption: Law, Policy, and Practice. Washington, D. C.: Child Welfare League of America, 2008. Print. Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985. Print. Haertle, Eugene M. “Wisconsin Adoption Law and Procedure.” Marquette Law Review 33 (1949): 37–46. Print. Heisterman, Carl A. “A Summary of Legislation on Adoption.” Social Service Review 9 (June 1935): 269–77. Print. Hill, Kim Quaile, and Patricia A. Hurley. “Uniform State Law Adoptions in the American States: An Explanatory Analysis.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 18.1 (Winter 1988): 117–26. Print. Howe, Ruth-Arlene W. “Adoption Laws and Practices in 2000: Serving Whose Interests?” Family Law Quarterly 33.3 (Fall 1999): 677–89. Print. Hoyt, Edward A. “Adoption and the Law in Vermont, 1804–1863: An Introductory Essay.” Vermont History 64.3 (Summer 1996): 159–73. Print. Huard, Leo Albert. “The Law of Adoption: Ancient and Modern.” Vanderbilt Law Review 9 (1956): 743–63. Print. Jasper, Margaret C. The Law of Adoption. New York: Oceana, 2008. Print. Katz, Sanford N. “Dual Systems of Adoption in The United States.” Cross Currents: Family Law and Policy in the United States and England. Ed. Sanford N. Katz, John Eekelaar, and Mavis Maclean. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Kawashima, Yasuhide. “Adoption in Early America.” Journal of Family Law 20 (1981–1982): 677–96. Print. Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 34 Leavy, Morton L. Law of Adoption Simplified. New York: Oceana, 1948. Print. Long, Wm. Ellison, “Adoption in South Carolina.” South Carolina Law Quarterly 9 (winter 1957): 210–231. Mabry, Cynthia R., and Lisa Kelly. Adoption Law: Theory, Policy and Practice. Buffalo: Hein, 2006. Print. McCauliff, C. M. A., “The First English Adoption Law and Its American...

A Revolutionary in the Making: Jean Paton and the Early Decades of Sealed Adoption Records, 1949–19771 By E. Wayne Carp Introduction Jean M. Paton is the mother of the adoption reform movement. Beginning in 1950, Paton, a twice-adopted, middle-aged ex-social worker, dedicated herself to explaining the adoption experience to a wider public, providing a healthy self-image for adoptees, and facilitating meetings between adult adoptees and their families of origin. In 1953 she founded the Life History Study Center and in 1961 Orphan Voyage, which she referred to as a “communications center” (“‘Reunion’ Resources”). The Center’s initial goals were to make adult adoptees visible, give them a social identity, and overturn the belief that adult adoptees had nothing to say. Most important for twenty years afterward, when thousands of adult adoptees and birthmothers had nowhere else to turn, Paton personally counseled them by mail, phone, and in person on the best ways to begin to search for their birth families and the children they had relinquished for adoption. She promoted these goals with the publication of two groundbreaking books, The Adopted Break Silence and Orphan Voyage, as well as through a newsletter, The LOG of Orphan Voyage, which was, in its day, an Internet-like bulletin board or blog that kept subscribers up to date with the latest news in the world of the adopted and of Paton’s personal life. She was keenly interested in building permanent institutions for aiding birthparents and adult adoptees. In pursuit of this agenda in 1976, she encouraged the founders of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), the first national organization for birthmothers, and was instrumental in founding the American Adoption Congress, the first national organization for adult adoptees, in 1979. Until her death of a heart attack on March 27, 2002, at the age of ninety-three, Paton continued doing what she did best, fighting on a multitude of fronts for the rights of adult adoptees and birthmothers (Carp, Family 138– 42; Carp, Jean). Although Paton left voluminous records attesting to her activism regarding adoption reform, we know surprisingly little about her Adoption & Culture 3 (2012) 34 position on the issue of sealed records. Later in life she was hailed by adoption activists as pioneering “our national movement to open sealed adoption records” (Americans). But in fact her views on this subject evolved and changed over time. In the first decades of her activism between 1949 and 1970, Paton’s beliefs reflected the era of her own upbringing. Because adoption records were open before the 1950s, her correspondents were unconcerned with gaining access to them. Consequently, Paton concentrated on the psychological healing of adult adoptees through the mechanism of her own national, mutual-consent, voluntary adoption registry, the Reunion File. In the 1970s, her thinking evolved in accord with the fresh leadership and concerns of the newly energized adoption search movement. Though still skeptical of the beneficial results of open records, Paton promoted others’ efforts to open adoption records, and eventually added her own voice to theirs. By the early 1980s, she had wholeheartedly embraced the notion of opening adoption records unconditionally. This essay explores Jean Paton’s evolving position on the opening of adoption records prior to 1980, an aspect of her adoption activism that is still largely unknown. First Phase (1949–1970): The Reformer Preoccupied Between 1949 and 1970, Paton seldom expressed opposition to sealed adoption records. However, on occasion, as in 1963 in St. Paul, Minnesota when she spoke to a convention of 100 “alumni” at the third annual convention of the New York Foundling Hospital, she did. A newspaper account of the event quoted her as saying, “The sealed record almost completely prohibits a person from finding out his real background. He is turned away and feels resentful. As soon as the record is sealed, society has entered into the situation. And the adopted person feels he can’t fight society by himself—he becomes an outsider” (Germann). Her solution to the problem of sealed adoption records was not to take political action, but to help people locate relatives “lost to them by adoption, divorce, or to other social separations” through use of her Reunion File...

Journal of The Historical SocietyVolume 12, Issue 2 p. 205-227 The Atheist and the Christian: Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Jean Paton, and the Stigma of Illegitimacy in the 1950s E. Wayne Carp, E. Wayne CarpSearch for more papers by this author E. Wayne Carp, E. Wayne CarpSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 June 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5923.2012.00363.x An initial draft of this essay was presented in a much-shortened form at the Society for the History of Children and Youth, 6th Biennial Conference, Teachers College and Columbia University in June 2011. I benefitted greatly from the insightful comments of my co-panelists Ann Fessler, Ellen Herman, and Elizabeth Samuels, and from members of the audience. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume12, Issue2June 2012Pages 205-227 RelatedInformation

Journal Article A Child for Keeps: The History of Adoption in England, 1918–45. By Jenny Keating (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ix plus 276 pp. $80.00) Get access E. Wayne Carp E. Wayne Carp Pacific Lutheran University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 44, Issue 2, Winter 2010, Pages 635–637, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2010.0047 Published: 01 December 2010

This chapter will first demonstrate that in the United States, England and New Zealand, adoption records were open during the first half of the twentieth century or, if sealed, that a majority of adopted adults were able to access them fairly easily; and second, reveal when, why and how adoption records came to be sealed.

April 01 2007 Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. By Steven Mintz (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2004) 445 pp. $29.95 E. Wayne Carp E. Wayne Carp Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information E. Wayne Carp Online ISSN: 1530-9169 Print ISSN: 0022-1953 © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2007 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2007) 37 (4): 633–634. https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.633 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation E. Wayne Carp; Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. By Steven Mintz (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2004) 445 pp. $29.95. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2007; 37 (4): 633–634. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.633 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This study provides an international history of the adoption reform movement in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia from 1953 to 2007. It empirically tests how safe birth parents and adopted adults are in countries that have opened their adoption records, usually birth registration records, using contact preference forms and contact vetoes. The results of this investigation reveal that a vast gap exists between the fear by birth parents and adopted adults that their privacy will be invaded and their family disrupted and the reality that few or no offenses are committed. It follows that opening adoption records with contact preference forms or contact vetoes provides a balanced adoption disclosure system and is a viable alternative to the sealed adoption policies currently used in the vast majority of American states and Canadian provinces.

Peace & ChangeVolume 32, Issue 2 p. 235-237 Dear Dr. Spock: Letters about the Vietnam War to America's Favorite Baby Doctor - by Michael S. Foley E. Wayne Carp, E. Wayne Carp Pacific Lutheran UniversitySearch for more papers by this author E. Wayne Carp, E. Wayne Carp Pacific Lutheran UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 March 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0130.2007.00433.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume32, Issue2April 2007Pages 235-237 RelatedInformation

Journal Article Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. By Barbara Melosh (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. x + 326pp. $29.95) Get access E. Wayne Carp E. Wayne Carp Pacific Lutheran University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 37, Issue 3, Spring 2004, Pages 792–794, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2004.0005 Published: 01 March 2004