Tag Archives: adoption history

American Baby: Join the book launch of Gabrielle Glaser’s adoption blockbuster

Posted on by — Leave a reply

A year ago, just before Covid hit, Jeannette Dudley Robnett, Shawna Hodgson, (Texas Adoptee Rights Coalition) and I enjoyed a leisurely lunch with Gabrielle at the Stagecoach Inn in Salado,Texas, where we drank wine and talked adoption (and other things) for a few hours. It was, to put it mildly, a treat to talk to someone who actually thinks adoptee rights activists aren’t creepy ingrates and unicorn killers and our rights are little more than those of a cockoach. I hope our discussion helped. Continue Reading →

Jean Paton, The biography of the mother of the adoption reform movement to be published this fall

Posted on by — Leave a reply

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but when in the mid-1990s when I first got seriously involved in adoptee rights, I had never heard of Jean Paton. My ignorance was disabused at the Seattle AAC conference (I think it was 2000) E. Wayne Carp, who had just released his pioneering work Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption was  first day keynoter.  Among the special guests that day was  Jean Paton. As I remember it, some of us Bastard Nationals were running around with little homemade “nametags” with Bastards are Beautiful” handprinted on them with a magic marker–mainly as a dig at the goody-2-shoes AAC crowd and, of couse, to advertise ourselves.  Someone, and I don’t remember who, (maybe it was Jean) pointed out that this phrase  was not original with Bastard Nation. It was an original Jean Patonism. Well, who was Jean Paton?  Only the mother of the adoptee rights movement in America! That’s who! It was almost like opening your OBC and learning that you had a name and a history.  As a trained historian I was shocked to learn that I hadn’t done my homework. I knew about Joanne Wolf Small,   B J Lifton, Continue Reading →