The Family Nobody Wanted

by Helen Doss

  For their part, social workers, as Julie Berebitsky has shown, worried that such popular writings on adoption “were seen by many Americans as a trustworthy and authoritative voice on the subject.”47 Articles in popular magazines from Reader’s Digest to Ladies Home Journal to Ebony presented alternative views of adoption, and in many of these stories adoption professionals did not fare well. Notable was a 1948 Reader’s Digest story that disparagingly quoted the head of a large adoption agency who answered, “We don’t handle dented cans,” when asked to explain the agency’s rejection of mixed-race, older, and special-needs children.48 In The Family Nobody Wanted, social work experts also tend to be the villains of the story, first telling Doss that she and her husband have too little money to adopt, and later reacting with horror to the family’s inquiry about adopting a mixed-race child. The reliance of social workers on statistics unsupported by experience particularly comes under attack in The Family Nobody Wanted. In one humorous but pointed episode, we see a social worker, “tapping her pencil on her notes,” tell Doss, “‘the facts are here before you’” (61). By the end of the chapter, however, even the social worker recognizes that the Doss children are not abstract “facts,” but specific and unique individuals.

  Doss was not alone in challenging professional opinions through personal experience. The same year The Family Nobody Wanted hit bookstores, Jean Paton’s seminal collection, The Adopted Break Silence, was also published.49 The combination of Doss’s voice as an adoptive parent and Paton’s as an adopted person marked an interesting and rare moment of positive cultural attention to adoption. During the same period, Pearl Buck, who corresponded with Helen Doss and wrote the introduction to the Japanese edition of The Family Nobody Wanted, founded Welcome House, whose mission was to find families for children who, like the Doss children, were considered “unadoptable” because of race or physical or mental disability. Buck also used her status as a well-known author to promote transracial adoption, arguing in a 1958 Ebony magazine article that “The crucial necessity in adoption is not similarity of religion or race, but love.”50

  The rise of such popular writings on adoption coincided with, and contributed to, the growth in adoption in America. As Julie Berebitsky has noted, the postwar years of 1946–1970 marked a moment in which “adoption won widespread cultural legitimacy and there were more unrelated adoptions each year than ever before or ever since.”51 At the time of The Family Nobody Wanted’s original publication, approximately 33,000 nonrelated adoptions took place in the United States yearly. During the period in which Americans eagerly read the Doss family saga, adoption in America continued to rise, peaking in 1970, when 89,200 nonrelated adoptions were recorded.52 Helen Doss’s memoir was thus part of a growing and intense cultural interest in adoption.

  In addition to this actual increase in the number of adoptions, the reasons for adopting and the kinds of children typically adopted changed. In earlier years, children available for adoption tended to be older, either orphaned or the offspring of married couples who could not afford to raise them. Parents typically adopted for reasons other than infertility. Indeed, as Elaine Tyler May says, “The term [infertility] itself was not even used before 1940.”53 By the forties and fifties, however, adoption in its modern form emerged. Regulated by agencies, adoption became an often expensive option for infertile couples seeking healthy white infants. The children they adopted were typically born to young, unwed women.54 A variety of factors, including an increase in infertility and cultural messages about the importance of marriage and motherhood to women’s identities, led more married couples to adoption. While out-of-wedlock births increased in this period, cultural attitudes toward illegitimacy were also changing.55 This is evident in The Family Nobody Wanted when Carl Doss reassures a sympathetically portrayed unwed birth mother: “If you’ve decided to keep your baby, I’m sure you’re doing the best thing. Who has a better right to raise that child?” (27). These factors meant that, as the Dosses discovered, “each [adoption] agency had a waiting list as long as from here to the moon, and a dozen eager couples clamored for every baby needing a home” (5).

  Simultaneously, and not coincidentally, the era of The Family Nobody Wanted also marked the period in which secrecy and closed records became the norm in American adoption. As Wayne Carp has noted, between 1937 and 1939 states began to reevaluate or revise their adoption laws. By the time Helen Doss had published The Family Nobody Wanted, all states kept original birth records sealed, a departure from procedures that had been followed since the founding of the United States.56 In this context of increased secrecy around adoption, the Doss family’s story and their culture’s response are illuminating. During the fifties, adoptive parents were advised to keep the fact of their children’s adoption secret, and laws supported such secrecy. The idea was to create an illusion of a biologically created family. Thus, after an adoption, original birth records were sealed and a new birth certificate generated.

  Yet as a transracial adoptive family, the Dosses could not be part of this illusion, nor did they wish to be. To a neighbor who suggested that they “pass off” a child as “a dark Spanish child,” Carl Doss responded: “But secrets have a way of leaking out. If we lied about that one thing, could our daughter trust us about anything else?” (190). Carl Doss’s response demonstrates that the Dosses’ understanding of adoption was far more complex and advanced than their culture’s. In contrast, comments of the Dosses’ neighbors suggest the extent to which average Americans, even during the period in which adoptions reached an apex, continued to doubt, distrust, and hide this alternative method of family formation. That distrust was evident in the popular media as well. Adoption was listed under “Special Problems” in Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. A Saturday Evening Post article on adoption had the title “Babies for the Brave.” And the popular 1956 film The Bad Seed (based on the 1954 novel of the same title) depicted an adopted child with a pathological genetic disposition to evil.57

  Against a background of such negative images Helen Doss placed her family’s story. That story still resonates in part because the issues the Doss family faced in 1954 remain relevant to adoptive families today. Estimates place the number of adoptees in America at between five and six million, and a 1997 survey found that 58 percent of Americans claim a “personal experience” with adoption, in the sense that they, or a close friend or family member, have adopted, been adopted, or relinquished a child for adoption.58 In recent decades, nonrelated adoptions have hovered near 50,000 a year, with a growing number of international adoptions. During the last decade international adoption grew dramatically, from 7,093 children adopted from abroad by U.S. citizens in 1990 to 18,539 in 2000.59 Yet it is still clear that most Americans define a “real family” as one with a blood tie or, failing that, at least the appearance of one. As Wayne Carp has said, “When it comes to family matters, most Americans view blood ties as naturally superior to artificially constructed ones.”60

  Nonetheless, if we are becoming, as Adam Pertman writes, an “adoption nation,” it is in part because of the example set by Helen Doss and her family. Our culture contains many images of adoption’s problems, but few if any works have ever spoken so directly and so lovingly about the joys and wonders of adoption. Particularly for members of transracial adoptive families, The Family Nobody Wanted offers a convincing and moving counterexample to the views of those who, as Helen Doss says, “have never ventured beyond the white bars of their self-imposed social cages” (165). This is especially important given what Beth Waggenspack has called “the symbolic crisis of adoption.” Waggenspack notes the need for positive adoption symbols to counteract the powerful negative images that permeate popular culture and the mass media.61 The Family Nobody Wanted has been in the past and now can be again a much-needed validating symbol of adoptive family life.

  Yet The Family Nobody Wanted is relevant not only to what my daughter calls “families like ours.” In asserting and showing that her family “was meant
to be this way,” Helen Doss’s still-compelling story forces us to reconsider fundamentally held beliefs about the American family. Just as it did in 1954, the family today occupies a peculiarly immutable space in the American cultural landscape. Protected by literal and metaphoric fences, the family is the haven to which we retreat to escape the economic pressures, political disputes, and diverse populations of the public arena. Moreover, that public sphere is notable for its dynamic, autonomous, and socially constructed spaces. We build our skyscrapers, schools, and institutions, choose our presidents and our soft drinks, and are told that we can accomplish anything if we “just do it.”

  But at the same time, an older slogan reminds us that “you can choose your friends but not your family.” The only way to fit adoption into that slogan is to see members of the adoption triad as driven not by positive choice but by the negative necessities of infertility, poverty, and loss. While those elements are part of the Doss family story, they are far from its sum total. As Helen Doss breaks down “the walls of Jericho” to bring first one, then two, and eventually twelve children into her family, we come to understand that families may be chosen. We also see the variety of ways in which economic, social, and political factors shape a family’s journey to and through adoption. Above all, we come to believe and understand Helen Doss when she tells us that her heterogeneous adoptive family is exactly the family that she wanted. After reading The Family Nobody Wanted, we are ready to exclaim along with Dorothy Doss, “gosh, I wished I lived in that family”

  May 2001

  MARY BATTENFELD

  Notes

  *This introduction could not have been written without the support and example of Helen Doss Reed. Barbara Melosh’s comments on my paper at the October 2000 American Studies Association conference in Detroit, Michigan, also were invaluable. Finally, I would never have reread The Family Nobody Wanted without the presence in my life of my daughters, Priya and Varsha.

  1. Evan B. Donaldson Institute, Benchmark Adoption Survey: Report on Findings (Washington, D.C.: Princeton Survey Research Associates, October 1997).

  2. David Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25.

  3. Elizabeth Bartholet, Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 181.

  4. “The Baby Chase,” People, March 5, 2001, 60–70, and “The Adoption Maze,” U.S. News and World Report, March 12, 2001, 62–69.

  5. George Gerbner, Adoption in the Mass Media: A Preliminary Survey of Sources of Information and a Pilot Study (Philadelphia: Annenberg School of Communication, 1988); cited in Katarina Wegar, Adoption, Identity, and Kinship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 110.

  6. The term “transracial adoption” is sometimes used to refer to the adoption of African American children by white parents. However, the term more properly refers to any adoption across racial lines. See, for example, Christine Adamec and William Pierce, The Encyclopedia of Adoption, 2d ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2000), 272–275.

  7. See, for example, K. S. Stolley, “Statistics on Adoption in the United States,” The Future of Children 3, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 26–42; and Karen Spar, Foster Care and Adoption Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 1997).

  8. Barb Reinhold, “What’s Wrong with Foreign Adoption?” Salon.com, September 28, 2000 (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/09/28/Russian_adoption/index.html).

  9. See Katarina Wegar, “Adoption, Family Ideology, and Social Stigma: Bias in Community Attitudes, Adoption Research, and Practice,” Family Relations 49, no. 4 (October 2000): 363–370.

  10. For thoughtful discussions of this case, see Ellen Goodman, “Who Will Own These Lovely Twins?” Boston Sunday Globe, January 28, 2001, F7, and Madelyn Freundlich, “The Internet Twins Case,” Adoptive Families 34, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 10.

  11. Wegar, “Adoption, Family Ideology, and Social Stigma,” 369.

  12. Susan Ito, “An Intimate Rapport,” review of Sandra Lee Patton, BirthMarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, Adoptive Families 34, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 54.

  13. For recent work see, for example, Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Julie Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851–1950 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), and Adam Pertman, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

  14. Helen Doss, The Really Real Family (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959).

  15. Helen Doss, “Our International Family,” Reader’s Digest 55 (August 1949): 55–59.

  16. Helen Doss, “The Case of the Deferred Novelist,” Sears Peoples Book Club 11, no. 11 [1954].

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Helen Doss estimates that The Family Nobody Wanted sold more than 500,000 copies. Little, Brown did not keep sales figures, so I have been unable to confirm how many books were sold. Letter from Andrew Sheltry, Little, Brown and Company, August 11, 2000 (in my possession), and personal interview with Helen Doss, July 24, 2000.

  20. Amazon.com, “Customer Reviews of The Family Nobody Wanted,” December 18, 1999 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/book [April 11, 2000]).

  21. At the time this went to press, the range of prices for used booksellers advertising through Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com was $65.00 to $185.00.

  22. Margaret C. Scoggin, “The Outlook Tower,” Horn Book Magazine 31, no. 1 (February 1955): 25.

  23. From an ABC press release on “The Family Nobody Wanted,” January 27, 1975, in Helen Doss’s personal papers.

  24. Conversation with Helen Doss, January 18, 2001.

  25. Amazon.com, “Customer Reviews of The Family Nobody Wanted,” June 25, 1999 (accessed February 7, 2001).

  26. Ibid., March 11, 2000, June 21, 2000, and April 25, 2000.

  27. Ibid., April 25, 2000, and May 2, 1999.

  28. Mrs. Ray Severance, “Your Peoples Jury Says,” Sears Peoples Book Club 11, no. 11 [1954].

  29. Mrs. Glen Powell, “Your Peoples Jury Says,” Sears Peoples Book Club 11, no. 11 [1954].

  30. Elizabeth Nichols, Library Journal 79 (September 15, 1954), 1583.

  31. Amazon.com, “Customer Reviews of The Family Nobody Wanted,” July 30, 1999 (accessed February 7, 2001).

  32. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949).

  33. Ben Bradford, “A World Inside One Household,” New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1954, 34.

  34. Jane Voiles, San Francisco Chronicle, October 3, 1954, 18. Dolly Reitz, quoted in The Washington Farmer (undated), in Helen Doss’s personal papers.

  35. Wayne Miller, “Life Visits a One-Family U.N.,” Life (November 21, 1951), 157–162.

  36. Godfrey Winn, Women’s Illustrated (England). Quoted in The Washington Farmer (undated), in Helen Doss’s personal papers.

  37. Doris E. Wellman, “Your Peoples Jury Says,” Sears Peoples Book Club 11, no. 11 [1954].

  38. Adamec and Pierce, Encyclopedia of Adoption, xxvii, and Michael Schapiro, Study of Adoption Practice (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1957), 9.

  39. Helen Doss, All the Children of the World (New York: Abingdon Press, 1958), and Doss, Friends around the World (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959).

  40. Cornell West, Race Matters (New York: Random House, 1994), 8.

  41. Verna Kozak, “Your Peoples Jury Says,” Sears Peoples Book Club 11, no. 11 [1954].

  42. Bradford, “A World Inside One Household,” 34.

  43. Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 137.

  44. Helen Doss, “The Case of the Deferred Novelist,” and Carl Doss, “We’re All Proud of Mama,” Sears Peoples Book Club 11, no. 11 [1954].

  45. See, for example, Carp, Family Matter
s, and Judith Modell, Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  46. Barbara Kohlsaat and Adelaide M. Johnson, “Some Suggestions for Practice in Infant Adoptions,” Social Casework 35 (March 1954): 92. Marshall Schecter is quoted in Carp, Family Matters, 127.

  47. Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 15.

  48. Frederick G. Brownwell, “Why You Can’t Adopt a Baby,” Reader’s Digest 53 (September 1948): 58. See also M. W. Jackson, “Always Room for One More,” Ladies Home Journal 67 (January 1950): 111–114, and Pearl S. Buck, “Should White Parents Adopt Brown Babies?” Ebony (June 1958): 31.

  49. Jean Paton, The Adopted Break Silence (Philadelphia: Life History Study Center, 1954).

  50. Buck, “Should White Parents Adopt Brown Babies?” 31. For Welcome House, see Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 313.

  51. Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 16. Barbara Melosh made the same point in her comments following the session “Race and Adoption in National and Transnational Contexts” at the American Studies Association Convention in Detroit, October 2000.

  52. Cited in Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 189.

  53. May, Barren in the Promised Land, 142.

  54. See May, Barren in the Promised Land, Modell, Kinship with Strangers, and Carp, Family Matters.

  55. See, for example, May, Barren in the Promised Land, 140–143, and Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own, 16.

  56. Carp, Family Matters, 25.

  57. “Babies for the Brave,” Saturday Evening Post 227, no. 5 (July 31, 1954): 26–27.

  58. Adam Pertman, “U.S. Adoptees May Approach 6 Million,” Boston Globe, March 8, 1998, A35.