Introduction*

In my prayers, I give thanks that we never had children of our own, after all. Of our own blood, I mean, because children couldn’t be any more my own than these. Somehow I feel that our family was meant to be just this way.

Helen Doss, The Family Nobody Wanted

THE NIGHT BEFORE they are to finalize the adoption of the last of their twelve children, Helen Doss turns to her husband, Carl, and affirms the central message of The Family Nobody Wanted. “Our family was meant to be just this way,” Doss declares, claiming her children, adopted at different ages and from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds, as “my own.” For the original baby boom audience of The Family Nobody Wanted, and even for many twenty-first-century readers of this new edition, that declaration is likely to sound perplexing, if not absurd. The cultural belief that adoptive families are “less than” biological ones is so entrenched that Doss must sidestep the biological connotations of the phrase “children of our own” with the qualification “Of our own blood, I mean, because children couldn’t be any more my own than these.” Despite that powerful declaration, others doubt Helen Doss’s claim. Even in the last chapter of The Family Nobody Wanted, a neighbor known as “Mrs. Pickles” tells the Dosses as they leave for the county courthouse to adopt three more children, “I’ll admit I don’t understand what you’re doing” (266).

Nearly fifty years have passed since the original publication of The Family Nobody Wanted, but it is clear that a majority of Americans still “don’t understand” adoption. The Evan B. Donaldson Institute’s 1997 Benchmark Adoption Survey found that half the Americans polled felt that adoption “is not quite as good as having one’s own child.”1 The survey confirms conclusions of scholars such as David Schneider, who contends that Americans ascribe to the biological family an “almost mystical commonality and identity.”² Such views have helped to create a contemporary America that, according to Elizabeth Bartholet, a law professor and adoptive mother, “glorifies reproduction, drives the infertile to pursue treatment at all costs, socializes them to think of adoption as a second-class form of parenting to be pursued only as a last resort, and regulates adoption in a way that makes it difficult, degrading, and expensive.”³ Bartholet’s comments were borne out by two cover stories in popular magazines that appeared during the week this essay went to the publisher.⁴ Although both articles included positive points, these cover stories also encouraged readers to regard adoption as an arduous and questionable way to form a family. Thus, U.S. News and World Report’s “The Adoption Maze” reminded readers of the “difficult, expensive and potentially heartbreaking” side of adoption, while People’s cover tag line, “How Stars Find Their Babies,” commodified and objectified those babies, and linked the lives of both birth parents and adoptive parents to the far-from-normal lives of celebrities. These articles, like most reviewed for a 1988 survey of film and print stories about adoption in the mass media, ultimately depict adoption “as a troubling and troublesome issue.”5

Transracial adoptive families such as the Dosses are met with even more suspicion, in part because they continue to constitute a small minority of adoptive families.⁶ Research on transracial adoption is limited, and the most recent statistics available suggest that only about 8 percent of adoptions occur across racial lines. The continued rarity of transracial adoption can be traced to concerns about appropriate support of a child’s racial identity, as well as to more general fears about interracial relationships. Even the 1994 Multiethnic Placement Act, which removed legal barriers to transracial adoption, has not resulted in demonstrably greater numbers of transracial placements. For example, in 1998 only 15 percent of adoptions from U.S. foster care were transracial.⁷

Discomfort with transracial adoption also has roots in the widespread cultural belief that “real” children look like their parents. The author of a recent Salon.com “Mothers Who Think” column describes what is to her the self-evident value of birth over adoptive children. “Like everybody else, I just want a child who looks like me and talks like me and fits into my family—just as if he or she was born into it. Is that a crime?”⁸ While not a crime, the views of this “mother who thinks” do suggest the extent to which she and our culture still see adoption as acceptable only in cases where a family can “pass” for one linked through the double helix chain of DNA. Indeed, a recent survey showed that social workers continue to believe that it is valuable to match physical and mental characteristics of adoptive parents and children.9 The beliefs of these contemporary social workers mirror those of adoption practitioners encountered fifty years ago by Carl and Helen Doss. One social worker dismissed the couple’s request for a mixed-race child because, she said, “I would rather see a child raised in an orphanage, than by parents who look so different” (30). Given these widespread and enduring attitudes, it is no wonder that adoptive families today continue to face intrusive questions from strangers, neighbors, friends, and family who doubt that parents and children “who look so different” constitute a “real” family.

The Family Nobody Wanted offers emphatic, vivid, humorous, and loving evidence that adoptive families are as valid as those with “blood ties.” Readers who, like me, are members of the adoption triad (birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted persons), will find in Helen Doss’s story a much-needed affirmation of ourselves and our lives. Doss’s 1954 memoir also continues to bring an important message to those many Americans whose views of adoption have been shaped by decades of secrecy and silence, broken intermittently by sensational news stories featuring degenerate birth mothers, desperate adoptive parents, corrupt adoption agencies, and victimized children. As 2001 began, the public face of adoption was represented by a bizarre and tragic transatlantic custody battle involving a birth mother, two sets of adoptive parents, a dubious adoption facilitator, and the six-month-old twins at the center of the dispute.10

Such distorted media images have tended to go unexamined, since scholarship on adoption has traditionally been the province of social workers and psychologists, whose interests are clinical rather than cultural. The research that has been done, as Katarina Wegar argues, has “served to perpetuate rather than correct dominant stigmatizing biases against adoptive families.”¹¹ Scholarship has been particularly limited on transracial adoption, which, as Susan Ito, a transracial adopted person, notes, “has existed far too long with neither academic attention nor practical support.”¹² Only recently have scholars begun to analyze the historical and cultural meanings of this important method of family formation.¹³ Given this context, it is hardly surprising that many continue to see adoption as a strange, unnatural, and inferior way to create and live in a family. In showing readers that the Doss family is normal and “meant to be just this way,” The Family Nobody Wanted, both in 1954 and today, thus performs the vital cultural work of legitimizing and normalizing adoptive kinship relationships.

Helen Doss begins with the poignant utterance “All in the world I wanted was a happy, normal little family” (3). At this point, as the Dosses struggle with infertility, a “happy, normal” family means to Helen Doss, and to her readers, a blood family. Yet by the end of The Family Nobody Wanted, the meaning of family has changed. Helen Doss’s intelligent and eloquent personal account convinces us that a family formed by adoption can be, as another book by Doss says, a “really real family.”¹⁴ Against all odds, Doss creates the happy, normal, although far from little, family she wants. Against even greater odds, readers come to accept that this international family, made up of white parents and twelve children whose heritages span much of the globe—from Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Burma to France, Spain, Mexico, Hawaii, and the Native American Chippewa, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne nations—is in fact a normal and happy American family.

As Doss wrote, “It is the outsiders who imagine that our family is made up of incompatible opposites” (165). Helen Doss recognized that “outsiders” would find her family alien and unwanted, a view alluded to in the title. In fact Doss’s first choice for a title, All God’s Children, was demonstrably more positive than The Family Nobody Wanted. Yet the irony in the title is clear. The stories of how Donny, Laura, Susan, Teddy, Rita, Timmy, Alex, Diane, Elaine, Gregory, Richard, and Dorothy became Dosses demonstrate emphatically that each child was a wanted child. Indeed, almost every page of The Family Nobody Wanted offers proof of the title’s fallacy. By the time nine-year-old Richard says, “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else” (265), we as readers have to agree. Helen Doss’s insider’s view of her diverse, happy, and successful household has transformed the Dosses into a family that anybody would want.

America first met “the family nobody wanted” in Helen Doss’s August 1949 Reader’s Digest article.15 The appeal of the Doss family was evident in initial responses to that article. Helen Doss reported that “we were flooded by letters from all over the United States, and clear around the world, asking for the rest of the story in a book.”¹⁶ By the end of 1951, Life magazine had featured the Doss family, and a nationwide NBC radio show had named them the “Christmas Family of the Year.” Intense interest in the family’s story led publishers to ask Helen Doss for a book. Initially reluctant to publish a story that would put her children in the spotlight and keep her from writing a novel, Helen Doss was finally convinced that a book about her family would have value. That book, composed in spare moments between dishwashing and diaper changing, was The Family Nobody Wanted.17

Helen Doss may have questioned the appropriateness of making “our own family . . . the subject of my first book,” but her readers have never had such doubts.¹⁸ Since its original publication in January 1954, The Family Nobody Wanted has inspired, instructed, and engaged the hearts of two generations of American readers. Although the book never achieved “blockbuster” status, its publishing history, like the Doss story itself, is one of persistence, loyalty, and love over the long haul. Other books can boast of more immediate sales than The Family Nobody Wanted, but few have achieved such longevity. The book went through more than two dozen printings and was translated into seven languages before going out of print in North America in 1984. McCall’s serialized the book, while a number of book clubs, including the Sears Peoples Choice Book Club and Scholastic Books, sold The Family Nobody Wanted. These inexpensive editions made the book available to a large and diverse audience. Two film versions, one made soon after the original publication and the other in 1975, provide further evidence of the book’s enduring and widespread popular appeal.¹⁹

Even after going out of print, The Family Nobody Wanted has continued to inspire a passionately loyal readership. Comments of readers who have posted reviews on Amazon. com suggest this, as do the high prices and limited availability of out-of-print editions of the book. A reader from Idaho echoed the sentiments of many Internet reviewers when she described the book as “one that I will always treasure. I would like to scream to every person, ‘Please read this book!’”20 If these loyal readers wanted to buy The Family Nobody Wanted, they could expect to pay more than one hundred dollars for a copy in good condition.²¹

The enduring appeal of The Family Nobody Wanted can be traced in part to the composition of its original audience. Recommended by libraries and educational associations, and sold through Scholastic Books, The Family Nobody Wanted was soon required reading at many elementary, middle, and high schools. The Horn Book Magazine placed its review of The Family Nobody Wanted in a section that highlighted “books of interest to high school students.”²² In giving its endorsement to the 1975 ABC television version of The Family Nobody Wanted, a National Education Association press release noted that although “prime time TV specials have been given the NEA Seal, this marks the first time it has been awarded to a prime time television movie.”²³ Helen Doss even today continues to receive letters from teachers who use tattered copies of The Family Nobody Wanted in their elementary or secondary school classrooms.²⁴ Thus, a large group of readers first encountered the Doss family as preteens or teenagers. Moreover, much of that younger audience read the book along with teachers in the institutional context of American public schools. For example, a classroom teacher described how “I would read it to my class as literature. Every now and then, I had to stop reading to fight back the tears. One of my students must have fallen in love with it too because it disappeared one day.”25

Helen Doss envisioned The Family Nobody Wanted as a book for adults. Yet I, along with almost everyone I have asked, can date a first reading of the book to the late elementary- or middle-school years. Three-quarters of the Amazon.com reviewers of The Family Nobody Wanted mention that they first read the book as a child or young adult. Many note that they have read and reread the book numerous times, both as children and as adults. These readers recall that the initial appeal of The Family Nobody Wanted lay in its charming descriptions of family life. A Maine reader described it as “wonderful, full of love and triumph, through some very trying times, as well as a lot of fun!” Another reader feared that the book would be filled “with big words that nobody understood.” Instead, The Family Nobody Wanted captured her interest so completely that “I couldn’t wait to finish this book.” A Massachusetts reader who claims to have read “this book about 100 times as a child” remembers it as “great to read—full of details of life with a houseful of kids and not much money!”²⁶

This original baby boom audience of The Family Nobody Wanted could find in Helen Doss’s story of a woman raising twelve children a reflection of the traditional nuclear family enshrined in popular situation comedies of the era. Yet while the size of the Doss family links it to dominant images of the family in the postwar years, in most ways the family is far from typical. Recognizing this, readers have particularly stressed the importance of the book to shaping their views of adoption. As one reader said, “I’m sure this book was an inspiration to many people to adopt children that ‘nobody wanted.’” Another Amazon.com reviewer credited The Family Nobody Wanted with influencing her decision to adopt several Asian children.27

The family’s adoptive status is not the only thing that sets it apart from dominant images of the postwar American family. Unlike the affluent Cleaver and Brady families of television fame, the Dosses, as the Massachusetts reader quoted earlier realized, had “a houseful of kids and not much money.” The Dosses are so far from the consumerism urged by the affluent fifties that one of the children responds to the overabundance of goods given the family for being “the Christmas Family of the Year” by observing, “Santa Claus brought you too many things” (219). And while television rarely if ever showed its housewives hard at work, Helen Doss gives us scenes in which she wallpapers a room with children underfoot, copes with a broken furnace in her husband’s absence, and does backbreaking, financially needed labor in a family garden. Perhaps most important, unlike the same-race families that even today set the standard for popular images of the American family, the Doss family was visibly multiracial. In such ways The Family Nobody Wanted opened important cultural fault lines, providing its original readers a glimpse at difference during a period in which dominant images of the American family stressed and promoted its homogeneity.

Like other books that have made a mark on both children and adults, The Family Nobody Wanted walks a narrow line between cultural mainstream and margin. Thus one reader of the original edition described it as “a good, clean, and Christian book to have in any home,”28 words applicable to another book that has appealed to both children and adult readers, Alcott’s Little Women. Yet The Family Nobody Wanted advocates for the radical, democratic tradition of Christianity that shaped both the antislavery activism of the Alcotts and the antisegregation work of the Dosses. As Carl Doss tells a neighbor, “We Americans can’t keep one tenth of our population in an inferior position. . . . It isn’t Christian and it isn’t democratic, and most of us claim to be both” (187–188). Similarly, like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which moves quickly from humorous boyish pranks to horrifying images of women being burned at the stake, The Family Nobody Wanted contains episodes both charming and frightening.

For example, the chapter “Taro” describes in humorous detail the “wild and woolly times” (88) of four boys at play. Yet we also learn that Taro came to the Dosses as a foster child after his entire family, with the exception of his father, died in the internment camps in which Japanese Americans were imprisoned. The chapter concludes with a bitter Thanksgiving message when Taro’s father arrives for dinner, his face “battered, swollen, with a large bandage over one ear, his lip split in an ugly cut, and one eye almost closed” (90). Taro’s father, the victim of “patriotic” neighbors who punch and kick him nearly to death because “the only good Jap’s a dead one,” is saved by a white U.S. serviceman married to a Japanese American woman. The story takes another dramatic turn when the soldier describes how in Italy “a Nisei boy saved my life—my life, at the cost of his” (91). In a fashion typical of The Family Nobody Wanted, the episode shows us both the ugly face of American racism and the redeeming hope of a multiracial American democracy.

The Family Nobody Wanted was published four months before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and the book’s appeal can be traced in part to the way in which it presents and views race relations. Published reviews and unpublished letters to Helen Doss from readers stress the impact of the book’s message of racial tolerance. One reader from the Sears, Roebuck Company’s “Peoples Jury” described The Family Nobody Wanted as “wonderful for the whole family to read—and for anyone who wants to have a better feeling toward the different races of people in our country.”29 A Library Journal review praised “the true spirit of brotherly love and tolerance which pervades the book.”³⁰ A woman from Tennessee who read the book as a teenager credited it with “giving me the open mind and loving heart that I now have.”³¹ The book’s numerous examples of both racism and racial tolerance reinforce this message, as do the many overt statements contained in chapters such as “Taro,” “All God’s Children,” and “Little Beaver and the War Orphan.”

Like Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, The Family Nobody Wanted gave readers a white woman’s personal view of race and family in America.³² Unlike Smith’s work, however, The Family Nobody Wanted was marketed to and read avidly by young people. Vivid scenes of family life and a writing style described by the New York Times as “the friendly simplicity of a woman talking over a back fence”33 made the book both compelling and accessible. For The Family Nobody Wanted does not make a merely theoretical argument for racial tolerance. Throughout the book, we see Helen Doss “walking the talk” in a particularly personal way. Helen and Carl Doss learn from and advocate for their children, even as they outspokenly preach for integration and tolerance from inside a multiracial family.

Life magazine featured the Doss family for reasons also related to racial tolerance, but with an important difference. To Life, the Doss family was good propaganda. When the Dosses balked at exposing their family to public scrutiny, Life’s reporter Dick Pollard exclaimed, “I wish you could realize how a general knowledge of your ‘United Nations’ family could help our country! Anti-American propaganda abroad emphasizes our intolerant side. If people in other countries could open a copy of Life and learn about your interracial family, they would see our better side, a glimpse of democracy in action.” Carl Doss himself suggests this view when he tells a neighbor who has accused him of being a radical, “Every time one of us steps on someone because of his color, we do as much harm to our country as if we were Communist saboteurs” (188). Pictures of this happy interracial family would show the Soviet Union and other cold war “anti-American” forces that Americans of different races do get along. A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer described “the Dosses’ experiment” as “more important than the work of the Atomic Energy Commission,” while the syndicated columnist Dolly Reitz contended, “I can’t think of a better book to be translated into foreign languages.”34

The Life article and reviews that link The Family Nobody Wanted to the United States’ image abroad offer provocative evidence of how mainstream American culture attempted to fit this transracial adoptive family into a world bordered internationally by World War II, the cold war, and Third World nationalism, and domestically by the internment of Japanese Americans, a nascent civil rights movement, and the elevation of the nuclear family. Even as Life labeled the Doss family “a one-family United Nations,” the magazine’s photographs and captions located this far-from-typical family within mainstream ideals of 1950s America. One photograph, for example, shows the children at school, reciting the pledge of allegiance. Another captures the five Doss girls, whose ethnic backgrounds include Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Native American Indian, dressed in identical “best white dresses” for a walk to church. Carl Doss is identified in the article’s subtitle as a Methodist minister, and photographs of the family attending church are prominently featured. The photograph that heads the article, which appears on this edition’s cover, offers the telling image of Helen and Carl Doss seated with the two youngest children on their laps while the other children climb a rope ladder.³⁵

Life thus led readers to see the Doss family as a clear example of an American success story. To Life magazine and the dominant culture that labeled them a “one-family U.N.,” the Dosses were a symbol of racial tolerance and integration. Their assimilated, mixed-race children would be given opportunities to climb any ladder to social acceptance and economic mobility. And in many ways, Life’s view was correct. The family, and the children, did succeed within the American mainstream, offering proof of the potential of a color-blind society. This message, which Helen Doss recently rearticulated to me as “I hope my readers will realize that there is just one race; the human race,” is profoundly important, and it had special significance to its original audience. The Family Nobody Wanted helped readers of the fifties, sixties, and seventies have faith in what one reviewer called “the universal brotherhood of man.” As that reviewer went on to say, “I shall always feel better for having read this book. And so will you.”36 For readers confronted with racial violence, from a church in Birmingham exploding with its youngest worshipers inside, to white mothers in Boston throwing rocks at buses holding black children, Doss’s example and message were invaluable. As a Sears book club reader put it, the story of the Doss family “truly offers an example of what we could be.”³⁷ The Family Nobody Wanted thus lent hope to a civil rights–era generation struggling to comprehend and overcome the failures of American democracy.

The Family Nobody Wanted tells us that we are capable of overcoming those failures, but it does not gloss over them. Helen Doss’s pointed comments on the effects of internment on Japanese Americans, on misguided race-matching adoption policies, and on the racial name-calling that hurt her children, graphically illustrate racism’s presence and dangers. As Doss tells her readers, “Carl and I must prepare our children to stand up in the face of prejudice. We know they will someday share the fate of many Americans who, like Taro’s father, are sometimes forced to live on the edge of danger because their skins are dark or their eyes ‘slant’” (170). At the same time, Helen and Carl Doss recognize and reject the privilege conferred by their white skin. To a social worker who warns them that adopting a child of another race will “drag” them “down to the level of the subjugated minority,” the Dosses respond that “skin color . . . should not give us the right to lord it over those who are born with darker skin” (31).

Helen Doss also critiques the racial matching in adoption practice. When they attempt to adopt a biracial German child, the Dosses are greeted with suspicion by neighbors and relatives and with red tape from adoption agencies. As Carl says to Helen, “Some of the intermediaries probably object to placing a Negro child in a so-called ‘white’ home, and just haven’t the courage to come out and say so” (190). Earlier, a social worker angrily rejects the Dosses’ request for a mixed-race child: “Crossing racial lines is against all our principles of good social-work practice” (30). Figures on transracial adoption indicate that these principles of good social work practice were seldom violated. In 1953 statistics gathered by the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America showed only 32,872 nonrelated adoptions, and during this period only 7 percent of all adoptions were transracial.38 Even though they were in 1951 celebrated as the “Christmas Family of the Year,” as an international and multiracial family the Dosses were still a cultural rarity and very much “the family nobody wanted.”

As a member of a transracial family, Doss also raises questions relevant to the 1950s liberal racial ideology of “colorblindness.” For example, the story of biracial Gretchen ends when the Dosses find an African American couple to adopt the little girl. Helen Doss concludes the chapter with an acknowledgment of the difficult identity issues facing black children with white parents. Doss reminds us that Gretchen has found a home with “a father and a mother and a brother, all the same warm toast shade that she was, and she would know that her own color was just right for her” (191). Gretchen finds her permanent family in an African American family, and Taro is reunited with his Japanese American birth father. When Teddy comes home in tears after a playground episode of racial name-calling, his mother reminds him that “God made more dark-skinned people than any other kind! . . . So I think God must especially love little brown children” (173). Shortly after this, Donny tells Teddy a Filipino legend about the creation of human beings. In the legend, which Donny learned from Taro’s father, God finally gets human beings right when he creates “a beautiful, warm-toned brown” person, “just exactly the way a man should be” (87).

Thus, The Family Nobody Wanted suggests the ways in which people of different races and cultures are both the same and different. Even as Doss reminds us that we are all part of the human race, she also celebrates her children’s individual cultures and differences. A similar pattern is found in two of many children’s books Doss published after The Family Nobody Wanted. One, All the Children of the World, highlights cultural differences in children’s lives. Another, Friends around the World, shows how children around the world share similar tastes and interests.39 Doss neither denies the importance of race and culture in a person’s life nor reduces those aspects of identity to an essentialist foundation. Her eye as a mother, writer, and social observer is too sharp for color-blindness and too sensitive to individual differences to see nothing but race or color.

This balance, important for readers of the 1950s, is equally crucial today. As Cornell West wrote in Race Matters, “To establish a new framework, we need to begin with a frank acknowledgment of the basic humanness and Americanness of each of us.”⁴⁰ Whether poking fun at a teacher who believes that Rita’s Mexican heritage makes her genetically disposed to like chili peppers (166), or reminding us of the institutionalized racism that brought “discrimination in jobs and housing, an Orientals Exclusion Act, and the ‘relocation centers’ of World War II” (170), Helen Doss helps us to see how the “Americanness of each of us” is undercut in both small and large ways by racial intolerance and racial essentialism. In writing the story of our multiracial society through one multiracial family, Helen Doss makes race matter in an intimate, familial, and believable context.

Indeed, the enduring appeal of The Family Nobody Wanted lies in part in its ability to take on such large social issues while never losing sight of the particular. Every chapter of The Family Nobody Wanted contains moments of trenchant social commentary, but Doss’s insights are delivered in the very specific context of her family and their vividly rendered lives. As one reader said, “I liked the details about their everyday life and I felt as if I could have been right there in their home.”⁴¹ This balanced attention to both household and world affairs is a unique and important quality of The Family Nobody Wanted. A scene in which Helen Doss pulls out a map to show six-year-old Teddy the Philippines is emblematic of the family’s relationship to the world. Doss tells Teddy, who is of Filipino and Malay heritage, about “where some of your ancestors came from” (173). She promises her son that if possible, the whole family will visit the Philippines some day. The geography lesson is followed with practical advice about how to cope with the cruel and racist taunts of some of his schoolmates. Clearly, the Doss home is no protected, isolationist haven. The world is part of this household, from the rich culture of the Philippines to the distressing realities of young children’s prejudice.

Reviews of the book all praised the warm stories of family life, and the New York Times entitled its review of The Family Nobody Wanted “A World Inside One Household.”42 However, as the mother of Asian, Native American, Hispanic, and mixed-race children, and a member of a socially rather than biologically constructed family, Doss necessarily confronts and writes about public attitudes and institutions. Family, considered by American culture as a separate and private sphere, is visibly public for a transracial family such as the Dosses, who cannot pretend a biological link to their Asian, Hispanic, and Native American children. The family’s celebrity, generated by the Life article, the national radio program, and the book itself, further breaks down the idea of family as a privileged private space.

For while The Family Nobody Wanted happily celebrates family life, it also offers a radical revision of the American family of the postwar era. The first two sentences, “I didn’t yearn for a career, or maids and a fur coat, or a trip to Europe. All in the world I wanted was a happy, normal little family,” place Helen Doss’s story and longings for children within dominant cultural ideals for women and families in the 1950s. Postwar America, as Elaine Tyler May has argued, needed and wanted large families, and encouraged women to find their identity in motherhood. Through these large families, America could demonstrate “optimism and abundance, a sign of faith in a better future.”43 Helen Doss, however, struggles with infertility and with adoption bureaucracies before finally attaining her large baby boom family. She reminds us after another unsuccessful attempt to adopt a second child that “I felt tired and discouraged, but so did the whole world” (32).

Moreover, Doss’s discouragement does not end until she takes on the whole world, in the form of public attitudes and regulations about adoption and race. We first see the public nature of Doss’s path to motherhood as she types letters to hundreds of adoption agencies in search of “unwanted” mixed-race children. Whether knocking on adoption agency doors, writing letters to social workers across the country, traveling to bring her children to their new home, or standing in a judge’s chambers to finalize an adoption, Helen Doss becomes a mother in a visible and public way. The public sphere intrudes into her home once she becomes a mother as well. For example, Doss describes an encounter with a state social worker in terms that make readers aware of the public links to her family life. “‘I don’t like the reports on this latest one you’ve taken,’ she [the social worker] said, as she sat in our living room” (60). Thus, while much of the action of The Family Nobody Wanted takes places in the Doss home, that home is far from a private world. In addition, Helen Doss’s desire to have children and, later, to support her children leads her to make many forays into the world outside the home.

Such facts enable readers to understand that while the mother/narrator of The Family Nobody Wanted is fulfilled by marriage and children, she is not “only” a wife and mother. In addition to being a persistent and outspoken advocate for adoption, Helen Doss is a writer throughout her marriage. She also contributes greatly to the family “kitty” through such work as planting a garden and painting houses. Halfway through the book, Doss leaves her family to go to college, and she graduates shortly before the publication of The Family Nobody Wanted. In an article written for the Sears Peoples Book Club, Doss defines herself as above all an author. “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer,” Doss begins.44 As the biographer and mother of the very public “family nobody wanted,” Doss implicitly challenges the postwar relegation of women to a protected and privatized home.

Moreover, in writing as a mother, Doss challenged the cultural authority of educated, often male professionals to speak for and about American women. Touted in publicity as a “true story,” The Family Nobody Wanted gained credibility and popular acclaim in part because Helen Doss used her status as an adoptive mother to reply to the social workers, doctors, scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and other professionals whose “expert” advice in the 1950s focused largely on the problems, rather than the promise, of adoption.⁴⁵ In offering American culture the clear, warm, and unapologetic voice of a parent who loves her children and is a proud advocate for adoption, Doss countered psychoanalysts such as Barbara Kohlsaat and Adelaide M. Johnson, who in a March 1954 article warned of “neurotic character traits” in adoptive parents, as well as child psychologists such as Marshall Schecter, who asserted, with little evidence, that adopted children were highly likely to exhibit “neurotic and psychotic states.”46 Against the “science” of social workers and psychologists, Doss placed her own experience.

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 Matters, 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.

59. V. E. Flango and C. R. Flango, “How Many Children Were Adopted in 1992?” Child Welfare 74, no. 5 (September/October 1995): 1018–1032. Also “Intercountry Adoptions Reach All-Time High in 2000,” Adoptive Families 34, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 12. Unfortunately, this essay was completed before the 2000 U.S. Census figures on adoption became available.

60. Carp, Family Matters, 1.

61. Beth M. Waggenspack, “The Symbolic Crisis of Adoption: Popular Media’s Agenda Setting,” ‘Adoption Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 57–82.