This paper traces the history of single parent adoption in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. It examines how formal legal eligibility for single adults to adopt was undermined in practice by social stigma, Freudian-influenced welfare policies, and agency standards favoring married, heterosexual couples. The paper discusses the special needs adoption movement of the 1960s as a turning point, including the Los Angeles Bureau of Adoptions' pioneering program to recruit single African-American parents. It concludes by reflecting on the tension between democratization in adoption policy and the persistence of hierarchical matching practices based on perceived parental desirability.
Every country currently allows single adults to adopt children. This may be less surprising than the fact that singles have been legally eligible to adopt since the first adoption laws were passed in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the "spinster" who took in children was a staple of Victorian moral fiction and a recurrent figure in adoption narratives. A fair number of unmarried women — Jessie Taft was one — adopted children in the early decades of the twentieth century. They often raised children in pairs as well as alone, illustrating that the vast majority of adoptions by lesbians and gay men have been arranged as single-parent adoptions, whether they actually were or not. But formal legal eligibility did not imply tolerance, let alone acceptance. Singles were viewed as less desirable parents than married couples. Men were considered far less desirable than women, if they were considered at all.
The number of families headed by single parents increased in the United States throughout the twentieth century, due mainly to rising rates of divorce and nonmarital childbearing. Yet their increasing prevalence did little to dispel fears that growing up in such families would harm children, both emotionally and economically. Many state welfare officials enacted regulations making it difficult or impossible for agencies to place children in the care of single individuals.
By midcentury, encouraged by the popularization of Freudian ideas and therapeutic approaches to child welfare, agency workers were determined to find "normal" families for parentless children. To be normal, households had to be headed by heterosexual, married couples who were comfortable with a division of labor between non-working wives and breadwinning husbands. This ideal made single applicants for adoption abnormal by definition. If they wanted children so badly, why weren't they married? Who would take care of children whose single mothers worked for a living? What would become of children — especially boys — who grew up without fathers? In 1958, the adoption standards issued by the Child Welfare League of America stated simply that adoptive families should include both a mother and a father. No mention was made of single parents at all.
In the popular imagination, unmarried adults figured as birth parents, not adopters. The stigma attached to illegitimacy could be reason enough for unwed mothers to surrender children to married couples who could, at least, legitimize their birth status. Why heap more shame on unlucky children by having them adopted by single parents?
Still, single parents did adopt prior to the 1960s, although there is no way of knowing how many. The number was probably small. Very little is known about who these adopters were or what kind of children they took in, although it is certain that most were women and probable that they adopted more relatives — nieces and nephews — than unrelated children. Adoption statistics offer few clues.
Systematic efforts to recruit single parents began only in the 1960s, initiated by advocates of the special needs revolution in adoption. These advocates insisted that children who were hard to place should have equal opportunities to grow up in families despite their mental or physical disabilities, advanced ages, minority or mixed-race status, or a combination of these factors. Many potential adopters, however, were looking for healthy white infants, and these private preferences slowed the practical progress of special needs adoptions, as did agency policies that favored or limited placements to infertile couples.
"First organized single-parent recruitment program, 1965"
"Democratization versus persistent hierarchy in adoption matching"
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