Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption by E. Wayne Carp

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption by E. Wayne Carp Daniel Rivers Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption. By E. Wayne Carp. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 422 pp. Cloth $60.00. E. Wayne Carp chronicles the life of Jean Paton, who he convincingly portrays as the foremother of the adoption reform movement in the United States. Carp, the author of several other books on the history of adoption reform, shows Paton as a trailblazing individualist who criticized the structure of American postwar adoption and the social condemnation of “illegitimacy” while forging networks of support for adult adoptees. Carp’s book adds valuably to our understanding of how notions of the family and childhood operated and were challenged in the postwar era. Biography is an historical project with unique challenges, and Carp negotiates these adeptly. He honestly portrays Paton as a complex, contradictory figure who does not fit easily into the categories “liberal” or “conservative” and who harbored deep misgivings about the involvement of non-adopted people in the adoption reform movement. Working from an incredibly extensive collection of correspondence, as well as oral histories with Paton, her life partner June Schwantes, and adoption reformers who knew of Paton and her work, Carp shows that Paton had a lifelong distrust of social work and “experts” who purported to know what was best for adult adoptees. This led her to write and publish her groundbreaking first book, The Adopted Break Silence (1954), about the experiences of adult adoptees and to resist reform efforts that would mandate institutional involvement in adult adoptees’ search for their birth parents. [End Page 345] In telling Paton’s story for the first time, Carp effectively pushes the historical narrative of adoption reform backwards in time. Instead of the better-known 1970s story, Carp presents adoption reform as a postwar movement, spearheaded by Paton. In 1953, Jean Paton developed the first adoption registry, the Life History Study Center, as a grassroots enterprise. This history adds valuably to our understanding of the family’s role in the social turbulence of the 1950s. Historians are increasingly complicating the view of this era as one of consensus, and Carp’s discussion of Paton’s life and work reveals that the veneer of complacent domesticity in popular culture masked deep tensions over cultural definitions of kinship. In Carp’s biography, Paton emerges as an exceptional reformer who challenged the vilification of “bastardy” that had consigned children born out of wedlock to second-class citizenship and a society that saw adoption as a way of erasing this stigma and placing these children in nuclear households. Jean Paton’s long career illustrates the difficulties of reforming American adoption. Carp’s careful and complex analysis resists a simple narrative and allows these difficulties to come into focus. Above all else, Carp’s respect for his subject leads him to a nuanced accounting of Paton’s political evolution. Over time, she came to be suspicious of the very act of adoption itself and by the 1990s wanted to replace it with a form of guardianship that retained the birth parent relationship in addition to the presence of new adult caregivers. This shift was the result of Paton’s increasing belief in the superiority of the biological, genetic family and her growing conviction that the trauma adoptees experienced when separated from birthparents was unavoidable, even if it was mitigated by reunion with birthparents later in adult life. As with any work as massive as Carp’s biography of Paton, there are interesting elements that could be expanded. Jean Paton’s life as a lesbian before the advent of widespread lesbian and gay liberation movements is an important area for further research. The fact that Paton was in conversation with Barbara Grier and the Daughters of Bilitis as early as 1969 means that Paton had an unusual awareness of lesbian organizing in this early period. This left me curious about how this may have related to her work on reforming adoption and whether her personal archives might reveal more about these connections. A larger issue with the book is the relative lack of discussion of June Schwantes...