Judging Men: Assessments of Fathers in Canadian Adoption Circles By Veronica Strong-Boag In striking contrast to mothers, fathers of every sort are often shadowy figures in accounts of adoption. Yet if women's role as parents has been regularly taken for granted as an important measure of their capacity as adults and citizens, men too have been judged by their contribution to the welfare of daughters and sons. Canadian scholars such as Cynthia Comacchio and Robert Rutherdale, along with a host of international colleagues, are now charting the critical outlines of the general history of fathers, which, as with so much else, is marked by the frequent fault lines of difference.1 Interest is also growing among scholars of adoption, who were long similarly preoccupied with maternal actors. Canadian social scientists such as Charlene Miall and Karen March now provide important documentation of adoption's contemporary paternal stories. This article contributes to the process of recovery by considering historical attitudes to biological and social fathers revealed in Canada's popular, child welfare, and legal records. On the one hand, many representations have been essentially negative, stressing failure to accommodate to normative ideals of respectability and discipline.2 Non-mainstream boys and men, such as those found in the province of Ontario's Victoria Industrial School for Boys or in Aboriginal and other negatively racialized communities, have been likely to be reckoned as lacking the requisite paternal qualities of discipline and industry.3 Despite regular negative imagery, however, there are also recurring, if less frequent, mainstream images of responsible paternity within the adoption circle, of men who endeavored to include parenting among the duties they shouldered. For the most part, positive portraits emphasized fathers' willingness and ability to provide economic support, but sometimes they embraced nurturing. Ultimately, however, mainstream commentators judged both biological and social fathers involved in adoption as breadwinners, a role that was the leitmotif of much hegemonic masculinity in the modern western world. For all intermittent 69 Adoption . Foote, A.L. "Family Organization and the Illegitimate Child." Studies in Canadian Family Law. Vol. 1. Ed. D. Mendes Da Costa. Toronto: Butterworths, 1972. 45-66. "G. (S.O.) v. G. (A.) (1991), 113 N.B.R. (2d) 158, 285 A.P.R. 158 (Q.B.)." Phillips, et al. 4-111. Gender. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002. Givener, Joan. Ma^o De LaRoche: The Hidden Ufe. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. Gray, Beryl. "The Stowaway." Chatelaine Mar. 1932: 19, 51-53. Grescoe, Paul. "A Daughter - or a Symbol?" Star Weekly 10 May 1969: 2-3, 4, 6. 94 Strong-Boag, "Judging Men" "H.(R.) v. B.T. (1991) 36 R.FL. (3d) 208, 84 D.L.R. (4th) 24 (Ont. Prov. Div)." Phillips, et al. 6-44. Hambly, Rose A. "A New Work of Mercy." MacLean's 15 Mar. 1921: 64. "Hobbs (Buck) v. Coradazzo (1984), 40 R.F.L. (2nd) 113, 54 B.C.L. R. 303 (B.C.C.A )." Phillips, et al. 4-8. Hobson, Barbara M., ed. Making Men into Fathers : Men , Masculinities, and the Social Politics of Fatherhood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Holt, Simma. Sex and the Teen-age Revolution . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967. Hogeveen, Bryan. '"You will hardly believe I turned out so well': Parole, Surveillance, Masculinity, and the Victorian Industrial School, 1896-1935." Histoire sodale/ S odai History 37.74 (2004): 201-27. Howell, Colin. "A Manly Sport: Baseball and The Social Construction of Masculinity." Northern Sandlots : A Sodai History of Maritime Baseball. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. 97-119. Iacovetta, Franca. "Making 'New Canadians': Social Workers, Women and the Reshaping of Immigrant Families." Gender Conflicts : New Essays in Women's History Ed. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 261-303. - . Such Hardworking People : Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1992. Johnson, Laura and Rona Abramovitch. "Between Jobs": Paternal Unemployment and Family Ufe. Toronto: Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1986. Johnson, Suzanne M. The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood. New York: New York UP, 2002. Kirk, H. David. Shared Fate: A Theory and a Method of Adoptive Relationships. Port Angeles, Washington, B.C.: Ben-Simon, 1984. Larossa, Ralph. The Modernisation of...