Jean Paton (1908–2002) fought tirelessly to reform American adoption and to overcome prejudice against adult adoptees and women who give birth out of wedlock. Paton wrote widely and passionately about the adoption experience, corresponded with policymakers as well as individual adoptees, promoted the psychological well-being of adoptees, and facilitated reunions between adoptees and their birth parents. E. Wayne Carp's masterful biography brings to light the accomplishments of this neglected civil-rights pioneer, who paved the way for the explosive emergence of the adoption reform movement in the 1970s. Her unflagging efforts over five decades helped reverse harmful policies, practices, and laws concerning adoption and closed records, struggles that continue to this day.

E. Wayne Carp is Benson Family Chair in History and Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran University. 

"Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption is fascinating to read on many levels, as a study of a movement, of grassroots organizing, and of adoption."
--American Historical Review

Carp is the consummate researcher—methodologically rigorous and historiographically savvy. Biographies require balancing subject empathy with objectivity and Carp navigates this well."
--Rachel R. Winslow, H-Childhood

"In Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption, E. Wayne Carp has crafted a biographical homage to a largely forgotten and important reformer, a history of the origins of adoption reform in the United States, and a book that adds critically to our understanding of postwar family history. With exacting attention to historical detail and accuracy, supported by his extensive knowledge of adoption policy and reform, Carp successfully places Paton's life story into its broader context. Carp's book is required reading for anyone interested in the ways the American family was politically and culturally contested reshaped in the last half of the twentieth century."
--Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

--Journal of American History