Appealing to a Mother's Instinct, A Citizen's Duty:  
Adoption in the United States, 1890-1920  

Julie Berebitsky 
Temple University  
Dept. of History 
Philadelphia, PA 19122 
email: jberebitQastro.ocis.temple.edu 

To be presented at the annual convention of the  Organization of American Historians, April 1997, 
San Francisco, CA 

Do not cite without written permission from the author 


In 1909, an adoptive mother wrote to a popular women's magazine describing her adoption experience. Ralph, her adopted son, was "a beautiful child, with so much temperament and character that no one else had succeeded in handling him until I got him...He was a waif, and has it in him to make a fine man, but could easily become a poor one under the wrong circumstances....I never really lived until Ralph came to be my little boy" (1). This woman's representation of adoption reflected the popular understanding of adoption as "rescuing" a child and the culture's idealization of a mother's love and belief that it was a mother's duty to raise productive citizens. 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some reformers, journalists, and concerned citizens urged middle class, native-born women to take the ever-growing number of dependent children into their homes where they could raise them into productive citizens. These appeals played to women's "maternal instinct," but emphasized women's civic duty; if the image of an innocent child languishing in a sterile institution failed to stir a woman's emotions, then her fears could be aroused by the specter of a society terrorized by the same child who, raised without maternal guidance, lacked a sense of honor or patriotism. As mothers, women had the future of society in their hands: they would determine whether these poor children grew up to be worthy and useful citizens or to fill the jails and almshouses (2). 

Women answered these appeals and opened their homes to children both as adoptive and foster mothers. Their responses, however, emphasized their desire to nurture and love a child. Ultimately, for most adoptive mothers, a motherhood undertaken primarily as a citizen's obligation proved incompatible with their understanding of motherhood as an heartfelt emotion. For these women, an identity as a "real" mother ranked higher than one as an ideal citizen. 

This paper considers representations of adoption as they appeared in popular magazines targeted at women audiences. By examining the construction of adoption as duty and adoptive mothers' response, we can gain a glimpse into women's private understanding of their role as a mother and their responsibility as a citizen. We can also see how an ideology of motherhood which equates mothering with a woman's civic duty can be turned to conservative and exclusionary ends. 

Society has always been concerned with transforming poor, dependent children into hard-working, obedient citizens. By the late nineteenth century, many social reformers believed that placement in family homes provided better training for citizenship than orphanages or other institutions. Although the affections of a family might increase a child's happiness, the main objective was to train the child for ultimate self-sufficiency. Advocates of placing-out (what we refer to today as foster care) argued that only as a member of a family could children learn the skills to deal with the problems they would face as adults, especially in regard to finances (3). Early advocates of adoption also emphasized the civilizing aspects of home life. In 1852, The Temporary Home for the Destitute in Boston, one of the first institutions in the country to place children for adoption, stated that adoption opened to children, "...Honorable pursuits, dignified employments, respectable alliances...They become a valid and productive element in the structure of our republican civilization (4). 

By the turn-of-the-century, a number of factors combined to focus even more attention on the care of dependent children. The rapid influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe contributed to a general fear of foreigners and a concern over maintaining the cultural dominance of Anglo-Saxons. Meanwhile, the birth rate among middle-class, American-born women declined dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century. Many believed that these women actively avoided pregnancy simply because they did not want to be inconvenienced. At the same time, immigrants were reproducing at double the rate of their native-born counterparts. While eugenicists, sociologists and psychologists studied and lamented, Theodore Roosevelt succinctly summed up what many feared: America's "best stock" was committing "race suicide." Passionately urging his listeners to procreate, Roosevelt referred to motherhood as woman's "duty," comparable to a man's military service. Popular magazines were filled with articles calling on women to bear children for the national good. As the panic over race-suicide escalated, childless married women found themselves portrayed more and more as selfish women who had "shirked" their duty. And, in an era in which infertility was not openly discussed, involuntarily childless women received largely the same public censure as women who had consciously decided to forego childbearing or to limit their families (5). 

If native-born, white, middle-class women were not going to have more children, some commentators believed they at least could help by raising the masses of dependent, largely immigrant children into solid American citizens. Since the American Revolution, the ideology of motherhood held that women best fulfilled their duty to the nation by training their children to be productive and moral citizens. "Republican Motherhood," as this construction of woman's role was called, justified women's access to education, provided women with a political identity, and invested mothering with a power which transcended the four walls of her home. The connection between motherhood and women's civic duty appeared in varying emphases and in a variety of manifestations throughout the nineteenth century. In the case of adoption at the turn of this century, a woman's maternal influence was extended to include motherless children or children whose mothers were not up to the task. It also altered the nature of a mother's relationship to the state; whereas a republican mother met her civic obligations in private service to the men of her household, these mothers lost the intermediary of their husbands and entered into a more public and direct service to the country yet still remained in their homes. Articles on adoption before 1920 emphasized the redemptive aspect of adoption and encouraged women -- especially childless women -- to see adoption as part of their civic duty to society (6). 

The most extended adoption appeal that emphasized women's civic obligation appeared in a popular women's magazine, The Delineator, in its "Child-Rescue Campaign" which ran from late 1907 to early 1911. The series hoped to match up the nation's childless homes and homeless children and bring an end to the practice of caring for dependent children in institutions (7). In October of 1907, The Delineator published an article, "The Child without a Home," which told of the 25,000 poor, primarily immigrant children who lived without a mother's love in institutions throughout New York. Although the article sympathetically portrayed the plight of these children, it also underscored the potential threat they posed to society. The series officially began the next month in an issue featuring "The Home without a Child," written by Lydia Kingsmill Commander. Commander, author of numerous articles on social problems and a book on race-suicide, exposed the thousands of well-to-do childless homes in New York City in which women played with teddy-bears instead of babies. She went on to urge the nation's women, especially childless married women, to adopt homeless children (8). 

This issue also contained the first installment of the "Child-Rescue Campaign." Each month the campaign featured the photos and life stories of dependent children who were available to any interested reader who wanted to take them out of an institution and into their home. Although the initial issue stated that the children could be taken by the placing-out system, indenture, or adoption, readers showed an overwhelming willingness to adopt the children legally and the subsequent children profiled were offered for adoption. The series was an immediate success. "The Child without a Home" received more responses than any other story in that issue and well-over three hundred readers wrote in requesting the first two children profiled (9). 

In addition to the children's profiles, each issue generally contained a story related to the series' goals of pairing up childless homes and homeless children and ending institutional care. Some warned of the dangers of institutional life and the threat children raised without a mother's love and guidance posed to society. "Where 100,000 Children Wait," the most famous of this type, was reprinted in pamphlet form and distributed without cost. Published on the first anniversary of the series, the article included a description of the effects of institutional life on a young boy that highlighted the potential cost to society. "At first, when nobody cares for him, he is only sad. Later, when he cares for nobody, he is unsafe" (10). 

The Delineator also emphasized the importance of children's environment in their ultimate development which helped women overcome any lingering fears about taking a child with a questionable background. The "Child-Rescue Campaign" coincided with strong eugenics and temperance movements which warned of the evils of the hereditary taint. Eugenicists were among the most vocal in their efforts to get the country's "better stock" to procreate, but they did not advocate adoption. One well-known eugenicist stated publicly that any offspring of adopted children "would be degenerates" (11). The Delineator countered by offering the opinions of both adoptive mothers and reformers such as Jacob Riis, who maintained they had witnessed first hand that "heredity is much, but environment is more." The Delineator maintained that a good mother could overcome any child's "evil heredity" and raise "manly and womanly, honorable citizens" (12). The respected women on the advisory committee agreed. Mrs. Harry Hastings, founder of the Society for Study of Child Nature and a member of the New York School Board, stated that the campaign was "really patriotic" and "of the highest value to the social fabric." Mrs. Frederick Dent Grant believed the campaign was "vital in that it supplies God-fearing citizens for the coming generation" (13). 

Again and again, The Delineator appealed to women's sense of their civic duty, a duty that they could fulfill best through their role as mother. Again and again, The Delineator painted the stark contrast between a child raised with a mother's love and one raised without: "upright men and women" or a "burden on the commonwealth," vagabonds, paupers and criminals or honest, hard-working citizens, a "potential addition to the productive capacity...of the nation" or to the "destructive forces of the community" (14). In looking back on the first year of the series, The Delineator's publisher summed up the progress thus: "we found for them [the profiled children] good influences upon whom no one can tell what other influences might have come and through them on down the ages to the end of earthly things good shall be where evil might have been" (15). 

The Delineator's editors emphatically and unquestionably trusted that placing these children with Christian, American-born, middle-class mothers was the way to save society and improve the citizenry. This belief mirrored the ideology behind the larger movement to "Americanize" new immigrants and suggested a fear of ethnic difference (16). In 1918, James West, who had been one of the leading forces behind the Child-Rescue Campaign and was now Chief Executive of the Boy Scouts of America, wrote Theodore Dreiser, The Delineator's editor at the time of the Campaign, regarding one of the young boys profiled in the series. The boy, John, was now 14. His adoptive mother had written West because her son had accidentally lost his Scout Medal and she hoped he could replace it. The mother, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, knew of West's role in the series and took two pages to update him on the boy's progress in school and in the Scouts. She assured West that "no own son was ever more lovable, more trustworthy, more obedient...." She also mentioned the child's German ancestry. West was so pleased with this "definite evidence" of the success of the Campaign that he sent a copy of the mother's letter to Dreiser. 

In his cover letter, West mentions the child's success and the joy he brings to his adoptive mother, but he especially focuses on the redemptive quality of adoption. As he tells Dreiser, in addition to the boy's progress in school, "there is the dramatic feature that the boy is of German parentage but in spite of this fact, is developing into a fine patriotic loyal American citizen." West's focus on the child's ethnicity could be understand within the context of the anti-German hysteria which had swept the nation at the outbreak of World War I. It also reflects his (and The Delineator's) understanding of adoption as social conservation and a means to protect and save society (17). 

Others also saw adoption as a way to enhance the nation's citizenry. Mrs. Charles Judson, a physician's wife who privately placed children for adoption out of her home in Philadelphia, stressed that adoption was a means to provide the country with better citizens. Judson believed adoption gave "to our country more of the best class of American citizens. Our forebears, 

through toil and struggle, often gained ideals, culture, refinement, and beliefs which have built up this nation. So many families where such inheritance obtains are childless. If a child is adopted and these ideals and beliefs passed down to it, we create another American citizen, guided by the same uplifting faiths as held and helped our forefathers (18). 

Women were urged to adopt as part of their civic duty, but, the question remains, did women actually adopt because they thought it was their duty? Did adoptive mothers really believe they were "rescuing" children and thereby saving society? Or, were they motivated by a personal desire to mother a child? It is difficult to untangle the web of motivations especially since rescuing a child and sincerely loving a child are not mutually exclusive (19). I am arguing that the primary motivation for the majority of women who adopted was the desire to mother, to give care and love to a child -- an understandable desire given the culture's glorification of mothers and valuation of women primarily as mothers -- especially for involuntarily childless married women in the middle of a race-suicide panic (20). At the same time, however, their experience of adoption was shaped by the portrayal of adoption as rescue, as women's duty. To understand adoption at this point in history, it is crucial to examine women's individual experiences within the context of the prevailing narratives about adoption at that time. 

Stories about adoption which emphasized adopting dependent children as a woman's duty occurred in a time when adoption was not yet completely accepted. The complete social acceptance of "sentimental adoptions," that is, taking a child solely to create a family, had not yet occurred. These articles, and especially the on-going campaign in The Delineator, represent the first time adoption was publicly discussed in a sustained way. The construction of adoption as rescue might have helped women who wanted to adopt but previously had not because they feared the sting of disapproving words. These articles gave women a context within which to understand their experience and explain it to others. Hence, a desire to mother was not incompatible with a duty to rescue (21). 

On the few occasions when adoptive mothers had the opportunity to describe their experience, they sometimes did so in ways that reflected both the values of civic duty and their intensely personal feelings. As one adoptive mother described her experience, "At first we thought we would do it as a duty, now duty is no longer the thought, it is the pleasure love brings." Still another explained that "We are not offering to take a child solely because we want a child in our childless home, but we feel deeply that it is God's will that we should take one in the discharge of our duty in the rescuing of helpless orphans from miserable lives and disgrace (22). These narratives allowed adoptive mothers to present their experience in such a way that their decision to adopt could not be challenged -- they were fulfilling their civic duty -- and their sincere desire for a child and genuine mother's love could be expressed. 

An article entitled "A Plea for Adoption" which appeared in 1911 in Good Housekeeping Magazine sheds light on the way adoptive mothers, as opposed to social commentators, understood adoption. The article was actually a lengthy letter to the editor written by an adoptive mother from Kentucky that described her motivation to adopt as grounded in a desire to mother, not a duty to save. This woman's only biological child had died and she was unable to have any others. When she could not suffer her "loneliness" and "sorrow" anymore, she adopted a child to whom she could give her mother's love. It was only towards the end of the letter, as the woman attempted to convince readers who might be hesitant to adopt that the social aspect of adoption was mentioned. As the author states, "...the chance that one may make a splendid man of a boy who otherwise would remain a charge upon charity is surely sufficient incentive to induce one to brave the responsibility." Good Housekeeping, however, choose to emphasize this aspect by head-lining the letter, "The Large Opportunity, Not to Say Duty, Which Confronts Childless Couples (23). 

Many women completely avoided the issue of duty in their descriptions of adoptive motherhood -- their purpose was to lay claim to an identity as a "real" mother. As one adoptive mother stated, "They say that I can never know the feeling of a real mother, of the woman whose mortal frame has endured the martyrdom of a physical maternity, but nevertheless he is my son, the son of my spiritual self, of all that is best in me." Another adoptive mother asserted that "the shrill piping cry" of her adopted daughter filled her "with a wonder that could not have been greater had [she] brought forth the little one with anguish (24). 

For adoptive mothers who wanted an identity as real mothers, the construction of adoption as rescue created a huge distinction between their experience and that of a biological mother. The popular understanding of a mother's-love encompassed feelings far stronger, far more ethereal than fulfilling your civic obligations. The culture's belief that women had a duty to civilize society propelled women into careers as reformers, educators, and health professionals -- if the society believed adoption was a woman's duty, then adoptive mothers merely occupied a place on the continuum of ways non-mothers expressed their maternal feelings (25). 

The experience of adoptive mothers suggests that for many women an identity as a mother was more important than an identity as a citizen. Adoptive mothers who had biological children might have viewed their adoptions as a sign of their commitment to the state, but for childless women living in a society which stigmatized and condemned them, adoption was a way to join the community of mothers. These women wanted acceptance as real mothers, not praise for raising derelict children. They understood their primary duty as loving a child, not raising a citizen. 

Their story also highlights how the ideology of republican motherhood could be turned to conservative ends. some of the appeals to women to adopt or foster children can be seen as sincere attempts to act in the best interests of the child. Others, however, clearly reflect efforts to maintain the moral and cultural hegemony of the "best stock." Appeals to women to adopt as an expression of their civic obligation assumed a specific type of mother and mothering. The motivations of many women who did adopt, however, were not so clear-cut and reflected the larger cultural pressure on all women to be mothers as well as the immediate pressures of this moment in history. 

ENDNOTES 

1. The Delineator 74 (August, 1909), 134. 

2. Most reformers were for placing children in foster homes instead of in institutions if their parent(s) could not keep them, but they did not advocate adoption unless there was no chance the child ever could be returned to her/his parent(s). Many reformers, in fact, worked for things like mother's pensions which would help keep biological families together. However, discussions about adoption occurred most often in the context of placing-out (foster care); that is, adoption was not yet seen as completely distinct from temporary foster care, but was understood as just a permanent version of placing out. Consequently, the rhetoric surrounding foster care which often focused on the need to raise dependent children (i.e. poor, often immigrant children) into good citizens reflected on adoption. 

Other commentators, however, such as The Delineator series discussed in this paper, took a less sympathetic view about keeping poor families together and seemed to believe children, not to mention society, would be much better off if dependent children were adopted into middle-class homes. 

3. For a through discussion of the history of the placing-out movement, see Susan Tiffen, In Whose Best Interest? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), Chapter 4. 

4. Annual Report, 1852, Temporary Home for the Destitute, Boston, MA, p. 5, as quoted in Jamil Zainaldin, "The Origins of Modern Legal Adoption: Child Exchange in Boston, 1851-93," Ph.D. dies., The University of Chicago, 1976. 

5. Two recent works have done an excellent job of describing what it would have been like to have been childless in such a pronatalist society. See Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land (New York: Basic Books, 1995), especially Chapter Two. 

6. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980) and "The Obligations of Citizenship," in Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women's Historv (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 

Catharine Beecher in the mid-nineteenth century was one of the first women to argue that motherhood was a social, not biological role and that women who did not have children of their own should find other ways, such as teaching, to help society in a maternal way. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973). 

7. By 1912, The Delineator had a mail circulation of almost one million. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1865-1885 Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 481-90. 

The "Child-Rescue Campaign" generated a tremendous amount of reader response, fully 20% of all the correspondence the Editorial Department received. The Papers of Theodore Dreiser, Special Collections, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, University of Pennsylvania, Folder 1465, The Delineator Correspondence, December 24, 1910. 

8. Mabel Potter Daggett, "The Child Without a Home," The Delineator 70 (October 1907), 505-510; Lydia Kingsmill Commander, "The Home Without a Child," The Delineator 70 (November, 1907), 720-723, 830. 

Childless, married couples were not the only people to adopt. At this point in history, married couples with children, especially those whose children were grown or dead or who only had one child, often adopted. Single women of means also adopted. 

9. The Delineator 71 (March, 1908), 337, 425. 

10. Mabel Potter Daggett, "Where 100,000 Children Wait," The Delineator 75 (November, 1908), 860; 75 (January, 1910), 54, 68. 



11. Mark Haller, Eugenics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 170-171; Henry Goddard, "Wanted: A Child to Adopt," Survey 27 (October 14, 1911): 1004. 

12. The Delineator 74 (August, 1909), 134; The Delineator 70 (November, 1907), 719; The Delineator 72 (July, 1908), 113; Jacob Riis, "God's Children, Give Them a Chance: A Comparison of the Influence of Heredity and Environment," The Delineator 71 (May, 1908), 809; Lucy Huffaker, "Waifs Who Have Become Famous," The Delineator 71 (June, 1908), 1005. 

13. The Delineator 70 (November, 1907), 719; Jambor, 35, footnote 

14. The Delineator 72 (October, 1908), 576, 578;73 (May, 1909), 696. 

15. Dreiser papers, Folder 882, George Wilder to Dreiser, cat October, 1908. 

16. For fears of ethnic difference see, for example, The Delineator (April, 1908), 611. For the movement to "Americanize" immigrants during the Progressive Era, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism. 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J. 1955). 

17. Dreiser papers, Folder 6585, James West correspondence, April 27, 1918. John had been abandoned by his birth parents at the age of 11 months. He was 4 years old when The Delineator profiled him in the January, 1908 issue. He was adopted by a couple whose only son had died. 

18. "Training Babies for the 'Golden Spoon,"' Literary Digest 52 (April 8, 1916), 1020. 

19. Judith Modell, Kinship with Strangers (Berkeley: University of California Press), 21, 45. 

20. As a feminist historian, one of my aims is to explore how at various times the culture enforced/encouraged motherhood or, in other words, how maternal desire can be culturally constructed. However, I also want to accept and respect as truthful, any woman's expressed desire to mother -- regardless of the social mandate to mother. 

21. For a discussion of the move towards "sentimental adoptions" see Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 169-207; Marsh and Ronner, The Empty Cradle, 106110, 126-128. 

22. The Delineator 76 (December, 1910), 515.The Delineator 71 (May, 1908), 808. 

23. Anonymous, "A Plea for Adoption," Good Housekeeping Magazine 53 (July 1911), 132. 

24.The Delineator 72 (August 1908), 263; The Delineator 74 (August 1909), 134. 

25. For Progressive Era reformers see, Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).