Jean Paton, the pioneer of adoption reform was not an activist; that was left to adoptee Florence Fisher, as well as our own first mother Lorraine Dusky, and many others. Although Paton was convinced that adoptees needed to reunite with their birth family to become whole, she eschewed behavioral scientists, she left it to adoptee Betty Jean Lifton and others to frame adoption separation in psychological terms. Paton was a visionary who saw beyond opening records and psychological cures for primal wounds, arguing for replacing adoption with guardianship, allowing children to keep their original identities and connection to their birth families. She was brilliant and courageous but also disagreeable and argumentative; her writings were often obtuse and verbose. In his excellent, lengthy biography,
Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption, historian E. Wayne Carp uses her own words--she gave him access to all her papers--to tell her story.
