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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472119103 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2014 |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
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Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption
By E. Wayne Carp
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11910-3
CHAPTER 1
The Search for Identity
I think of my adolescent years. ... Those near me, in relationship with me, who might have helped, simply did not know what I was saying. Wants to know her mother? She has a mother.
— JEAN PATON, 1990
Of all of Jean's Paton's childhood memories, the happiest were of riding in the car with her handsome Scottish-born father, Thomas Woodburn Paton, a prominent Ypsilanti, Michigan, general practitioner, when he called on his patients. She looked forward to these rides with her father and treasured their companionship. Jean would usually remain outside the sick person's house on warm days but would go into the farmhouse if it was cold and wait in the kitchen while her father disappeared into the bedroom. Jean also spent many hours in her father's office, familiarizing herself with medical instruments, reading magazines, and "looking at the peculiar pictures" in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In this way, she acquired at a young age a sense of what doctors did, though she later admitted, "I didn't see the hard aspects of it." She recalled many decades later that she spent so much time with her father that it was bound to give her a conviction about what to do when people were in trouble. Jean would follow in her father's footsteps, by making "house calls" either in person or by mail to assist troubled members of the adoption triad (adult adoptees, birth mothers, and adoptive parents). As she said, "you just get in your car and go out to help them, which, of course, is what I eventually did in my work."
In both private and public statements, such as the one above, Paton projected a consistent self-image that made it appear that she was almost predestined to be the mother of the adoption reform movement. In Paton's telling, she had acquired from her earliest days a hatred of human suffering, initially from watching her first adoptive father die of liver cancer and later from accompanying her second adoptive physician father on his medical rounds. In this way, Jean developed a deeply ingrained duty to help others. Moreover, Paton's "own experience in orphanhood," she wrote, gave her a "special advantage" because she "knew the special language" of both the foster children in boarding homes and babies who were expected to be placed in adoptive homes, thus making employment in social work a logical, if not an inevitable, career choice. In 1951, Paton related, she left social work for graduate work in science at the University of Pennsylvania, and two years later in 1953, established the Life History Study Center in Philadelphia to explore the world of the adult adoptee and to offer her findings to her chosen profession.
These infrequent accounts that Paton told others about her past personal experience, from childhood into her adolescent and young adult years, form what developmental psychologists refer to as a person's narrative identity. It is the story that "people construct and tell about themselves to define who they are for themselves and for others." They organize, unify, make coherent, and give purpose to a life that might otherwise feel splintered and diffuse. Paton's narrative identity presented an integrated and unified purpose to her life that stressed empathy for the ill, service to others, and a special talent for self-sacrifice for her adopted brothers and sisters. Paton's narrative identity — the facts that made up the story of herself — was not false. But the road Paton traveled to that point was far more convoluted and uncertain than she suggested. And it omitted much. That she accomplished so much makes the story all that more remarkable.
Jean Paton was born Ruth Edwina Emerson on December 27, 1908, at 3:45 p.m. in Detroit's Women's Hospital. Her twenty-three-year-old unwed mother Emma Cutting chose Jean's middle name to honor her "favorite lady doctor" in the maternity home. Emma was born of English stock, the oldest girl in a family of eight. She was a serious-looking young woman, with piercing eyes, thick eyebrows, and a high forehead, graced with a generous mop of thick, dark hair. And, like Jean, her mother was short, just 4 feet 9 inches. Like most young women in the first decade of the twentieth century, Emma was not well educated, having quit school in the fifth grade. At age twenty-three, deeply in love with James Kittson, a man seven years her senior, later described by Paton as "rootless, good-natured and restless," Emma became pregnant for the first and only time, by the alleged bastard son of James Jerome Hill, and builder of the Great Northern Railroad. Approached by Emma's father to rectify this blot on the Cutting name, Kittson agreed to marry Emma, but refused to live with her and settle down. Unwilling to agree to such an arrangement, her father sent Emma to the Women's Hospital in Detroit, where she nursed Jean for four months. They were lonely months for Emma: the father of her baby did not visit her, nor did members of her sturdy English Methodist family except for her younger, independent sister, Viola. Emma nursed and loved Jean intensely as only a mother who had been rejected by both her lover and her family could. Several months before, the Cutting family had already made these decisions for her. Emma was to come home without the baby, tend house, and help raise the younger children. A bastard child was not welcome in the Cutting home. Giving up Jean for adoption was a painful emotional experience for Emma, but she had no choice. In addition to the burden of parental disapproval, Emma had no financial support. Years later, after she had married, Emma asked her mother what had happened to her baby. Her reply was, "She's dead."
The Women's Hospital did not place children for adoption. Baby Ruth was placed in a temporary home by the Children's Home Society of Michigan until she was adopted on May 10, 1909, by Harry and Millie Dean, a housepainter and his wife, who lived in Detroit. The Deans renamed the baby Madeline Viola Dean. Baby Madeline lived with the Deans for only two years. At age forty-four, Harry Dean contracted liver cancer and died on May 6, 1911. The last six months that Madeline lived under the Deans' roof were filled with illness and the smell of death. Some seventy years later, Paton believed that her first adoptive father's death had left her with "an undying and fierce hatred of the spectacle of human suffering." Impoverished by her husband's death, Millie Dean was unable to support Madeline. She returned the child to the Children's Home Society of Michigan, which again placed Madeline in a foster home in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a small city of 15,000 people thirty miles west of Detroit.
Madeline stayed in that foster home for seven and a half months. During that time, she was displayed to a prospective adoptive couple, who rejected her because they wanted a boy, a surprising decision because little girls were favored by most adoptive parents. This latest rejection, though unintended and undertaken with some delicacy, was doubtless not lost on the child and must have served to intensify her insecurity and sense of abandonment. Sometime after the visit of that couple, however, a woman noticed Madeline playing in the yard, discovered she could be adopted, and said, "I'll take her." On December 11, 1911, Thomas Woodburn Paton, age forty-two, and Mary M. Paton, neé Picket, of Ypsilanti, adopted Madeline and renamed her Jean Madeline Paton.
Jean thrived in her new home. The Patons were solidly middle class and were much better off than the Deans had been. They lived in a large, imposing, Victorian house, located on 122 Normal Street, and at the time of Jean's adoption had just purchased a new EMF automobile for Dr. Paton to use in making house calls over the muddy, rutted roads in and out of Ypsilanti. Mary Paton had been a teacher, and probably had been made to quit her job as a condition of her adopting Jean, a common adoption agency practice during the first half of the twentieth century. Mary taught Jean to read, and at an early age Jean became a precocious reader. When she went to kindergarten, the teacher called upon her to instruct the other children how to read. Although she read a lot, however, Jean was hardly a bookworm. She climbed trees and houses under construction and had many playmates. She roller-skated and bicycled all over town. In July 1921, at age twelve, Jean went to Camp Arbutus in Mayfield, Michigan, where she enjoyed swimming, canoeing, and, like all summer campers, pleaded with her parents for more "dough" and more letters from home. Back home that fall, a car struck Jean while she was racing a playmate to school. Her father ran to the scene and carried her home. It was not a serious accident, but as a result Jean forever had a scar on the back of her head and a little bump on the side of her forehead.
Overshadowing the myriad events of an active twelve-year old was Jean's abrupt discovery that she had been adopted. The Patons, like most adoptive parents during the first half of the twentieth century, were reluctant to tell Jean of her adoptive status. Probably, they feared that they would lose her love. Knowing that someone would eventually find out that Jean was adopted and possibly of illegitimate birth — it was impossible to keep such a secret in a small town like Ypsilanti — Mary put out her own positive story first: Jean's mother, Emma, was a member of Detroit's high society; her father, James, was a musician in the Detroit symphony orchestra. But she never volunteered the information of the adoption to Jean. That was left to a female playmate, who taunted Jean one day across the street from her house with the comment "You're adopted, ya know?" Jean ran home and asked her mother if it was true. Although visibly upset by the sudden turn of events, Mary forthrightly admitted it. And although Jean was able to glean some information about both her first adoptive and her birth parents now and then, the Patons were reluctant to speak directly or at length of these matters to her ever again.
Angry, Jean did not allow the incident to rest there. She marched over to the home of the girl who had taunted her and complained to her mother. Looking back almost eighty years a more mature Jean Paton reflected that it "didn't particularly help ... but that's the way I reacted then." She believed that the way she handled it was "sort of silly." But the incident was significant. Although Jean claimed that finding out about her adoption in such an abrupt fashion did not surprise her and denied going into a state of shock over the sudden revelation of her adoption status, she was aware "that something had happened." Exactly what that "something" was is open to differing interpretations. Some medical experts would later call it "genealogical bewilderment" — lifelong feelings of rejection, confusion, abandonment, and low self-esteem as a result of not knowing one's genetic parents. This might explain Jean's intermittent lack of self-confidence and inability to stay on task even as she thrived in her adoptive home. But just as likely, Jean was experiencing Erik Erikson's "identity crisis," manifesting itself in what he identified as a "confusion of values." These feelings had repeatedly tugged at Jean's subconscious and would manifest themselves in various ways throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. Earlier in life, having just learned the letters of the alphabet and connected them to her new home, Jean went out to the back step, took a hammer and a nail, and pounded the letters "JEAN PATON" to that back step. She also built in her imagination a fantasy world, "a very big world, which of course supplemented the certainty that I felt in this home."
Paton's feelings of emotional confusion intensified as she entered adolescence and young adulthood, a product of her precocity and her adoption. A child prodigy, she skipped several grades, graduating from the Ypsilanti school system in 1924 at age sixteen. As a result of her multiple promotions, Jean had few friends her own age and became a loner. She also began to manifest behavioral problems in school and at home. In her senior year of high school, she was unable to turn in her final history project. Only a threat from the teacher to withhold Jean's diploma compelled her to hand in the assignment. Around this time, questions about her adoption, never answered satisfactorily by her adoptive mother, which had been gnawing silently at the back of Jean's mind, suddenly burst forth. Jean ran away one night "to find out who I am." Then, just as suddenly, Jean's restlessness about her birth origins went underground again when she came home the next day. Jean's erratic and errant behavior worried the family.
After her high school graduation, Jean chose to commute by trolley to the University of Michigan rather than live away from the family and attend Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she had been accepted. But by the end of the first year of college, "the old avoidance thing raised its head again." Jean found herself having trouble getting her papers in on time and unable to finish courses. As a result, Jean believed that her "social development ... was retarded."
Paton's parents decided that a change of environment might help. In 1926, eighteen-year-old Jean finally went off to Mount Holyoke College, but instead of performing better, she found herself "completely blocked, unable to attend classes." Paton lasted at Mount Holyoke only until Christmas. Jean returned home "terrified at the prospect of life ahead of me." She remembered her time at the college there as "pure hell." Her father got Jean a job in a local library, where she was content. But, of course, her college career had been interrupted. During the Christmas season, Jean received a card from Ann Young, her Mount Holyoke astronomy professor, encouraging her to make something of her life. Jean took to heart this advice from such an august authority figure. She "read everything in the EncyBrit in my home, never before having bothered with it," thus beginning her lifelong autodidacticism. She then proceeded to devour the nonfiction books at the library where she was employed, working her way through the disciplines of sociology, psychology, history, biography, and literature. (About all the reading she did at that time, she admitted later, "it's a little hard to believe, but it is the truth.") But even as Jean voraciously devoured whole disciplines in her reading, she was emotionally miserable and had no understanding why.
Aware of his daughter's problems, Dr. Paton became persuaded that Jean needed to know more about her natal parents and began on his own to make inquiries about them. He asked a local minister to help, but when the minster got close to locating them, Thomas Paton ordered him to desist. Jean was of aware of her father's actions, including his calling off the search. She later characterized her family's failure to carry through on the search for her natal parents, especially her birth mother, as one of the "only two things that went wrong" with her life. Thomas Paton's decision not to search profoundly alienated Jean from her father. She never mentioned him again in her correspondence, not even when he died, approximately twenty years later.
Next year when Jean returned to Mount Holyoke, her resistance to going to classes and finishing assignments resurfaced. Instead of attending to her studies, Jean spent much time on the athletic field, playing baseball and soccer, captaining one or both teams. Counseling for her attendance problems failed, and Jean again dropped out of school. Much later in life, with greater perspective, Paton characterized her difficulties at Mount Holyoke as those of a "bewildered adopted person" brought on by "inhibition of the normal growth of the brain, and failure of a strong sense of identity."
With the financial support of her father, Jean made yet another try at college, heading for the University of Wisconsin in 1928 to study economics and sociology. But her difficulties followed her there. Again she found that her inner demons prevented her from engaging in the vigorous life of the mind that her professors demanded. In 1929, at the end of the academic year, she traveled to Pennsylvania to work at the Children's Aid Society of Philadelphia. This position was, Paton said later, "my port of entry into social work ... after a miserable failure at college." Jean had just turned twenty-one, and she was "utterly inadequate to the task" of functioning as a social worker. She received quite a bit of help from Elizabeth DeSchweinitz, her first supervisor, who also broached the idea of therapy. When DeSchweinitz asked Jean if she could afford professional treatment, Jean lied and said no, thus postponing it, as she intended. After floundering as a social worker for several months, Jean decided to return to the University of Wisconsin. Three years later, in 1932 she received her bachelor's degree cum laude. Looking back, Paton blamed the extraordinary length of time she spent at college on an unidentifiable "psychological blockage to get myself to classes," which resulted in her failing some courses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption by E. Wayne Carp. Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Search for Identity 8
2 The Birth of a Reformer 18
3 The Life History Study Center 35
4 On the Road 56
5 Religion and Reunion 75
6 Illegitimacy, Traumatic Neurosis, and the Problem of Affliction 87
7 Orphan Voyage 114
8 Orphan Voyage Moves South 128
9 The New Adoption Reform Movement 152
10 Organizing the Movement 178
11 Sealed Adoption Records 198
12 Ombudsman 212
13 The American Adoption Congress 228
14 Straight Ahead 259
15 The Great American Tragedy 278
Epilogue 305
Notes 313
Index 391