I don’t know how it happened but I missed the wonderful, splendid Masterpiece series that is Downton Abbey. After watching the finale first, I became intrigued and have been watching all six seasons of the show, albeit somewhat out of order. Let’s just say I now know the meaning of the term ‘binge-watch’. Downton is a period drama, or soap opera, depending on your point of view, but what a fabulously acted one. As a matter of fact, I had to keep reminding myself that these people are only fictional characters that they didn’t really exist.
Of course, since adoption is what I focus on, I was especially intrigued by the role that adoption played in the series. In one major storyline, the middle daughter of the lord and lady of the house, Lady Edith, becomes pregnant by her fiancé, who then goes missing and never returns to marry her before the child is born. Needless to say, it was completely unacceptable for any woman to get pregnant out of wedlock in those days but especially so for a woman of the aristocracy. Through an intriguing series of plot twists and turns, first an out of country adoption which Lady Edith could not go through with, and then choosing to place the child with a local family, the show made it quite clear that Lady Edith would never get over the loss of her child. But what I found most interesting is that when Edith decided that she absolutely could not live without her daughter and had to bring her home–even though that meant concocting a story that she was the child’s guardian rather than her natural mother–the show did not tug at viewers’ heartstrings by stressing the pain of the child’s foster mother and how heartless the natural mother was for taking back her child. The show did not try to hide the adoptive mother’s* pain, but at no time did it stress that Lady Edith was wrong for taking her child back or imply that it was in any way better for the child to remain with the adoptive parents; none of this “It’s the only home she’s ever known” business, which we are all too familiar with here in the states. The most salient feature of adoption from the British perspective seemed to be that the bond between the natural mother and child is paramount. And I, for one, am very glad that Edith’s daughter, little Miss Marigold, ended up being raised in the nursery with her cousins. She is in the family where she belongs, and it’s not as if they didn’t have enough money to keep her!
Whether upstairs or downstairs, having a child out of wedlock was guaranteed to wreak havoc on one’s life and position. In another storyline, housemaid Ethel becomes pregnant by an officer convalescing during World War I, when the Abbey was turned into a hospital for wounded soldiers. In Ethel’s case her story goes from bad to worse. She gets unceremoniously sacked from her job for her ‘indiscretion’ and ends up with no other option but working as a prostitute to support herself and her son, Charlie. The boy does have wealthy paternal grandparents and Ethel makes repeated attempt to contact them. At first they rebuff her, but then have a change of heart. Despite her fall from grace, Ethel still has strong support from other characters on the show to keep her son, in particular from Mrs. Isobel Crawley, a wonderful open-minded character who worked as both a nurse and a social worker. Mrs. Crawley encouraged Ethel to not make the decision lightly to give her son to his grandparents, and even strongly encouraged her to keep him, despite all the difficulties. She even employed “fallen woman” Ethel as a cook-housekeeper in her own home, risking ostracism from her friends and family. In the end, however, Ethel does decide, although clearly brokenhearted, to allow Charlie’s grandparents to raise him.
First Mother forum’s Lorraine Dusky was triggered (i.e. shed buckets of tears) when Ethel is firm in her decision to give her child up. From an adoptee perspective, this outcome wasn’t as devastating for me. I reasoned the child will be with his kin and there are a few valid reasons when a child might be better off being adopted. Actually, I don’t recall if legal adoption was mentioned or just that the child would be raised by his paternal grandparents. But the story does have an even happier ending, in my opinion, when Ethel accepts another position, as a housemaid and cook, in a home closer to her son. This will ensure that she will still be able to have some type of connection with him. Once again, through this below stairs storyline, the British mentality was clear. The strongest bond is between a mother and her child and it is only in the rarest of circumstances that they should ever be separated. Even another character, a lady’s maid named Anna, had a line of dialogue that went, “They say a mother’s love is the strongest love there is.” Well, you can’t get much clearer than that!
Downton Abbey takes place in the early part of the 20th century, starting in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic and ending on New Year’s Day 1926. But the British attitude that sided with the child remaining with his or her natural mother and against widespread adoption seemed to exist even before then, if world renowned mystery writer Agatha Christie’s family’s story is any indication. Dame Agatha’s own mother was placed in a kinship adoption in the 19th century and, as recounted in her autobiography, she is quite vocal about her views on adoption.
But let’s now come back to the current day and travel across the pond, and that brings me to Dr. Phil. I know, I know. But he’s as good an example as any to showcase this difference in attitude between the Brits and the Yanks when it comes to adoption. I’ll admit I have been staging a one-woman boycott of Dr. Phil after his outrageous part in stealing Veronica Brown from her own father, half-sister and extended family, although I had never really been a fan. He may be considered America’s guru but he has certainly never been mine. But I happened to catch a preview for a two-part show called “Woman claims daughter was illegally adopted”, and since it looked like he might be willing to support a natural family for once, I decided to tune in.
The condensed version of the story is that a family, consisting of a grandmother and her two teenage daughters, was homeless and living in their car, when the county, through what they claim was an illegal maneuver, took the older teen’s baby daughter and finalized an adoption without any family member’s consent. So what we saw on the show were these highly emotional family members who, I’m sorry to say, may have come across to many viewers as ‘hysterical’. But this family wasn’t crazy by any means. And if they came across as overly emotional that’s because their reaction is precisely what happens when people lose a beloved family member to strangers against their will. They were simply expressing the raw and honest emotions at the loss of their daughter, granddaughter, and niece, respectively.
In what I considered an unexpected twist, the devastated first grandmother said that the loss of her granddaughter was the impetus for her to attend law school. Dr. Phil used this information to remind her that she must therefore know that the most basic principle in law is “possession is 9/10th of the law”. Well, my ears certainly perked at hearing that. I mean, where was this principle when Veronica Rose Brown was living happily with her father and stepmother and Dr. Phil did everything he could to have her returned to the Capobiancos? A couple she had not seen in over two years and probably didn’t even remember. Does Dr. Phil believe “possession is 9/10th of the law” only applies when prospective adoptive parents have or just want the kid? It certainly seems that way.
Now I’m a Yank but I come from British stock on my father’s side (maybe they should have stayed?! ha ha), and although I was born almost 40 years after the fictional Marigold, society’s attitudes vis-à-vis out of wedlock motherhood didn’t seem to have changed very much on either side of the Atlantic. It’s amazing to think that with all the enormous, even mind-blowing, changes in technology AND society during that time, bearing a child out of wedlock was still the ultimate ‘sin’ even when yours truly was born.
Even today the percentage of adoptions in the U.S. is much higher than in the U.K., even accounting for the difference in size and population. There are many factors of course that go into explaining this difference, but there does seem to be a stark difference in attitude about the importance of the biological mother/child bond that stretches back over more than a century. And I do so wish we could get more of their attitude transported to our side of the Atlantic. The acknowledgement of the negative effects of separating a natural mother and child is apparently so important in British culture that author Jessica Fellowes, niece of Downton Abbey creator and writer Julian Fellowes, even wrote “viewers should not judge Lady Edith harshly for deciding not to keep her own child.”** I would never assume that American viewers would judge her harshly. The prevailing attitude here would more likely be that adoption is a wonderful option for the child.
So let me just say this: if these two shows were a sporting match, instead of a period drama and a talk show, I’d be rooting for team Brit.
Signed,
Lady Robin
*Technically, the farmer and his wife were not the child’s adoptive parents since prior to 1926 there was no formal legal system of adoption in England. **
**Fellowes, Jessica, A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2014, p.58
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n Perhaps the difference in attitude is due to our history. In America, it’s not supposed to matter who your ancestors are. Our country was founded by people who left loved ones behind, in their home country, so perhaps we are used to separating from our pasts.
We are also more consumer driven,which leads many vulnerable mothers to believe that their child will be better off with more things, instead of the love of their own mother.
Whatever the reason for the different attitudes, I wish Americans could understand how much a newborn loses, when they lose their entire family at birth.
that would make sense if american women wanted their babies to be taken, the sellers profess babies are better off with things instead of love, heredity, loyalty, devotion. but sellers lie a lot to make a sale. if fact sellers still coerce and threaten.
sorry that still sounds way too painful to watch. to me the whole baby taking world would be the same as a slave saying he is losing his mind about the injustice and having counselors tell him he must buck up and be the good slave he legally is destine to be it is cruel beyond words. it’s like making a drama of the life in a perpetual concentration camp. it is insane
I once asked my a mom how she could live with herself, adopting a baby and never talking about it, keeping it a secret from friends and neighbors. She said, “I didn’t do anything wrong”. My first thought was that was what slave owners said too. It was legal.
Since the subject of slavery has come up in the comment section, let me also recommend the movie 12 Years a Slave. It’s an excellent film, although, not surprisingly, very difficult to watch. The issue of how slave holders separated parents from their children, and the devastation it caused to the families, was brought up in the film. I could see the parallel with adoption.
12 years a slave was a hard movie. The grief that mother felt for her children was very real.
Some of today’s birth mothers seem happy to give their children away. It’s one of the saddest things about adoption today.
I wonder if today’s first mothers are genuinely happy to be giving their children away or if they are just reacting to the kudos they’re getting for being so “selfless, brave and heroic”. I’m sure plenty of them will “wake up” one day and realize the truth about what happened to them. In many cases, they’ll see that they’ve been had.
Downton Abbey, for all its charms, is bathed in that rosy glow of nostalgia which makes everything seem much prettier and more benign than it really was. There is no doubt that two main problems for most unmarried mothers in England between the two wars were twofold; lack of financial resources and social ostracization. They and their illegitimate children were societal lepers. Few unmarried mothers would have had familial support and unlike the fictional Lady Edith would not have been in a position to recover or even ever to acknowledge the existence of their children.These attitudes largely persisted well into into the sixties. When adoption hit its peak in England, with 16,164 adoptions granted, there were 172 official homes for unmarried mothers, mostly run by religious organizations – such as the Catholic Church, the Methodists, the Salvation Army and the Church of England. These institutions cared little about the emotional damage caused by separating a child from its mother. With regard to the psychological underpinnings of the defence of adoption, including the belief that environment was more important than heredity, it was, after all, an English philosopher, John Locke, who first postulated that the mind was a “blank slate” and that people are born without any innate sense of identity. The one organization that existed to help single mothers and their children was The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, now called Gingerbread http://www.gingerbread.org.uk
For anyone interested in learning more about the history of adoption in England .(policies and even attitudes varied throughout Britain) an excellent book describing the lives of unmarried mothers and attitudes towards them from The First World War to the present day is “Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?” by Tanya Evans and Patricia Thane http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1349
Thank you for this detailed look at adoption practices and attitudes in England. I agree that Downton Abbey does soften many issues to accommodate to modern day sensibilities. For example, smoking was much more prevalent, the bells were ringing constantly for assistance, and the relationships between members of the aristocracy and their staff were unlikely to have been as close as those depicted on the show. And I realize that Great Britain did have a baby scoop era in the mid-twentieth century. But the attitude that “adoption is wunnerful, adoption is beautiful” doesn’t seem to have maintained quite the same stranglehold on the culture that it still has today in the United States.
Thank you also for the book recommendation. I will have to look into it. The book I link to by Jessica Fellowes also includes some stories by the actors on the show on how out-of-wedlock births affected their real life families. It makes for some quite interesting reading.
I’m inclined to think that the glorification of adoption in America has at least something to do with the prevalence (although that has decreased over the last decade) and intensity of religious belief in the U.S, as well as the particular brand of saviourism that seems to pervade organized religion, especially among the more extreme evangelical rightwing. And that this saviourism is not just confined to international adoption (Kathryn Joyce, The Child Catchers) but applies to domestic adoption as well.
According to a 2013 poll by UPIT/Harris, three-quarters of U.S adults believe in God. Polls in the U.K show than less than half of Brits share that belief, and of teenagers, only a quarter. It could be too, as your first commentator suggested, that America is simply more revisionist and ahistorical in its approach to social problems. It is no surprise to me that as religion has declined in the the U.K, so have attitudes to unmarried mothers and their children improved. However there is the inevitable backlash. Old stereotypes die hard: http://www.itv.com/presscentre/ep1week22/myleene-klass-single-mums-benefits “I think the biggest surprise was when I interviewed a cross section of the public asking what they associated a single mum with. Nine times out of ten the answer was, ‘Teenagers on benefits.’ Many were shocked to find (myself included) that the average age of a single mum is 37. Teenagers can’t even claim these benefits as they’re viewed as children in the eyes of the law. Another big myth dispelled.” Essentially, single parenthood, and especially unmarried motherhood, is no longer regarded so much as a moral or religious problem as a burden on the state’s coffers. It seems to me that this is also used as an argument in America, but with the added stigma of religious censure.
I do know that Julian Fellowes and his wife are actively involved in supporting Families For Children, a specialist adoption agency which believes that the best place for a child to grow up is with their birth families, and only when this is not possible do they place children in new adoptive families who can offer them a stable and loving home.
Your last paragraph is particularly interesting, Lisa. Perhaps there is more to the Fellowes’ connection with adoption than what is publicly known. I certainly hope that those children who truly cannot be raised in their birth families get placed in loving and stable homes. Although, as you are probably aware, the “loving and stable home” is used as a selling feature of adoption. It is hardly unheard of for an adopted child to land in a home that is anything but.
“Perhaps there is more to the Fellowes’ connection to adoption than is publicly known.”
I have no idea, Robin, any more than I know why Lady Fellowes is rarely if ever seen in public without a white turban. It seems adoption is one among many causes they support. Maybe it is just an example of noblesse oblige.
Here is a link to the page that includes the “loving and stable” quote: http://familiesforchildren.org.uk/about-us/who-are-we/
I think a lot of people, especially those North Americans who like to see their Old Europe through rose-tinted glasses, are misled by the sentimentality that pervades Downton. I think it’s fine to to enjoy it on the level of entertainment and fantasy, but not as a serious representation of the past. It is not a key to understanding British attitudes about anything much, including adoption.
The UK is different to the USA regarding adoption mainly in that there is rarely any religious component to the discourse around it, and also that there is not vast quantities of money attached to the process (though I believe there are financial incentives to local authorities to place foster children up for adoption)..
My family has been ravaged by the effects of adoption here in the UK.
As a 16 year old, I was told by my social worker that I was just a vessel, and that the as yet unchosen adoptive parents were the real parents. She got me to write a letter to these make believe people saying just that, while I was 8 months pregnant, She withheld all information about the statutory help available to me, and never missed an opportunity to remind me what a disservice I would do to my son to keep him and thus deny him the wonderful life in store for him if I allowed ‘better’ people than me to adopt him.
Twenty years earlier, in a 1950s Mother and Baby home, my mother gave birth to my older sister alone and in intolerable and unrelieved pain, Afterwards she was made to do degrading and menial chores as a penance for her sin of unwed motherhood. When she tried to get work or somewhere to live, she was denied because she was a single mother. At a loss, she allowed her sister to look after her daughter until she got on her feet. This temporary situation eventually resulted in my sister’s in-family (and still terribly painful for her) adoption. It was another adoption resulting from hopelessness.
Recently, I visted some of my childhood haunts. There on a gigantic billboard on a busy roundabout, was an advert yelling ‘Don’t Think. Adopt!’
It is no panacea here, really. It’s just a lot less obvious than in the US..
Thanks so much for sharing your experiences and perspective from across the pond. Downton Abbey is obviously fictional and perhaps Julian Fellowes’ affiliation with adoption is more involved than what is publicly known.
I remember reading during the time of the Australian apology for forced adoption that American social workers had gone to that country to coach Australian social workers in the best techniques to encourage unmarried mothers to surrender. Do you know if anything like that also took place in the U.K.?
Hi there, sorry for the delay in replying.
I don’t know the answer to your question. There was a BBC documentary shortly after the Australian Apology, called ‘Our World – Australia’s Adoption Shame’ which contained an interview with a social worker who admitted applying such coercive techniques to young mothers. The programme was written and presented by Duncan Campbell and I’ve included a transcript of that interview below.
As far as I know, there is no hard evidence that such coercive techniques were learnt and applied here in the UK, although I’m absolutely sure they were as so many of us had such similar experiences and heard the same phrases from social workers (summarised as ‘you will ruin your child’s life if you keep him/he will have a brilliant life if you give him up for adoption’). I have absolutely no doubt that a script of some kind was used here, but Britain’s adoption history is opaque, shrouded in secrecy, dotted with endless fires wherever relinquishment papers and other adoption-related documents were held, and shoved sideways so that it looks like it was just the religious in Ireland, with the Magdalene Laundries, who practiced such things. But it was everywhere – I was the second teenage girl in our street to have my newborn baby adopted and there is no sense in which this is what I wanted (nor my neighbour, I’m guessing).. I cannot imagine what that would be like, to want to have your baby adopted.
The transcript below, taken from that documentary, contains words and phrases so familiar to me. The coercive manipulations, the phraseology, the feeling of being a nuisance. I did get out of the office before signing, but I did not get out of the process before signing. I could not find a way, no matter how much I tried. As the 53 year old I am now, I could easily blast my way out of that situation, but as a 16 year old I couldn’t..
Anyway, here’s the transcript: .
‘[VOICEOVER]: Social workers were usually the ones employed to intimidate the pregnant teenagers into signing.. This woman was one of them. She doesn’t want her face or name shown, and says every kind of coercian was applied..
[SOCIAL WORKER]: Well, the phrasing was along the lines of you’re being selfish if you keep your child, you’re being selfish for yourself because you won’t get a job, you won’t get married, life will be harder. You’re being selfish for the baby because it won’t have as good a lifestyle, and you’re also being selfish for these adoptive parents who can’t have babies of their own and who would really love this child.. You’ll bring shame on your family and embarrassment in your town, that sort of stuff.
{VOICEOVER]: She says she’s now remorseful and regrets what she did.. She says no-one, no matter how distressed they were, was allowed to leave her office until they’d signed a consent form.
[SOCIAL WORKER]: Well, they were just seen as a nuisance, trouble-makers, time-wasters. Just sign the paperwork, have your baby and go, let’s get the system rolling.
From .’Our World – Australia’s Adoption Shame’ by Duncan Campbell (Interview at 10 mins 20 secs in).