Americans have always worried that
children available for adoption are defective. Before World War
II, the eugenics movement openly promoted
the view that children whose birth parents
could not or would not care for them were likely to be genetic lemons,
destined to reproduce a host of menacing social problems, from criminality
and poverty to alcoholism and sexual immorality. According to the
vocabulary of the day, many were “feeble-minded,” meaning
mentally retarded or mentally deficient, a state that illegitimate
children were especially prone to inheriting from their “feeble-minded”
mothers. Early adoption field studies, like Ida
Parker’s, Fit and Proper?, confirmed that significant
numbers of adoptions involved children whose hereditary unfitness
was never discovered because minimum
standards did not exist in law or were not enforced in practice.
Henry Herbert Goddard, Director of the Training School for Backward
and Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland, New Jersey, was the single
most prominent authority on “feeble-mindedness” during
the early part of the century. Best known for introducing the term
“moron” into the English language, he was outspoken
about his opposition to adoption and his preference for institutionalization.
“Normal” children were qualified for family life, according
to his view. “Feeble-minded” children were not.
Many adults, however, were more than willing to discount heredity
(or overlook it entirely) in their quest for children, especially
infants. Even the era’s social workers, who believed that
natal families should be preserved and adoptions should be rare,
were relatively more optimistic than Goddard about the credentials
of available children.
Concern about mental retardation and deficiency was widespread
and long-lasting. They were visible in the mental tests that soon
entered the adoption process. Goddard imported the French Binet
Scale into the United States in 1908 and administered it first to
the “feeble-minded” children in his own institution.
The 1916 revision of this test, which popularized the Intelligence
Quotient (or “I.Q.”), gave adoption professionals a
new and powerful technology. Mental and developmental tests should
be used, they argued, for two important reasons. They could accurately
distinguish adoptable from unadoptable children by detecting feeble-mindedness.
And they could refine matching by pairing
children and adults whose intellectual qualifications were similar.
Mental resemblance was just as important in family-making as religious
and racial resemblance.
Child welfare organizations like the New England Home for Little
Wanderers and the New York State Charities Aid Association were
in the vanguard on this issue. Their staff psychologists mounted
testing programs, beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, to help determine
which children were qualified for which family placements. Elaborate
classification schemes for mental deviation were created—separating
idiots from imbeciles and morons from dullards—in hopes that
they would improve selection and placement techniques. Mental evaluation
was considered so important to making adoption work that W.H. Slingerland,
author of one of the first professional texts on family placement,
issued the following warning in 1919. “To put a low grade
mental defective in a family home where a normal child was expected
is a social crime, once to be condoned because of ignorance, but
now inexcusable in a well-ordered and progressive child-placing
By the 1930s, new and improved methods were available for uncovering
Gesell devised developmental scales that went beyond mentality
to measure a number of other, related developmental norms. An assistant
who worked Gesell’s Yale clinic, Margaret
Cobb, was one of the first researchers to explore the relationship
between nature, nurture, and intelligence by studying children in
need of family placement.
Efforts to expose “feeble-mindedness” assumed that
potential parents did not want children who deviated from the mental
average by falling below it. Was this true? In many cases, it probably
was. But evidence also suggests that some adopters were willing
and able to consider special needs adoptions
long before professionals agreed that they might be flexible enough
to love children who were something other than “normal.”