FAMILY TIES
Rachel Aviv writes about the placement of a child with a foster family after his mother leaves him unattended in his crib, and the termination of the mother’s parental rights in order to establish a stable home life for the boy (“Where Is Your Mother?” December 2nd). As an adoptive mother, I can attest that private adoption agencies likewise create pressure to place children in permanent homes. In 2006, my husband and I applied to adopt a child through a reputable agency. We met a four-year-old Korean boy and his mother, but felt that they were attached to one another and that the mother did not want to give up her child. When we decided against adopting the boy, we were told that our application was on hold, since we had not shown sufficient commitment to adopt. In order not to jeopardize our chances to adopt another child, we wrote a statement saying we had learned that successful adoptions depend on trusting agency social workers, and that we had overcome our insecurities. By complying with these coercive requirements, we were able to adopt our four-year-old son, from China, in 2008. I often think of that other little boy. Unlike my son, who had been raised in an orphanage, and whose parents are unknown, this little boy knew his mother. The two of them deserved to be treated as more than another opportunity to make a placement.
Caroline Rupprecht
Newburgh, N.Y.
Aviv’s sad story might have been different if the U.S. provided universal access to parenting programs. Parenting education is a hard sell because of the stigma attached: attending a parenting program is often the result of desperation or a court order. In other countries, notably England, parenting resources are more widely accepted. These should be made a standard social service in this country. They could be offered during regular checkups with the pediatrician, or in tandem with social-emotional learning programs. Remedial or punitive programming simply does not work for parents or for their children.
Eve Sullivan
Cambridge, Mass.
PROGRESSIVE PIONEERS
Nicholas Lemann, writing about Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on the Progressive Era, accurately describes S. S. McClure as “a genius,” while noting that the “core staff” of his magazine left in 1906, causing the “heyday” of McClure’s to end “quickly” (“Progress’s Pilgrims,” November 18th). Lemann does not mention McClure’s recruitment, in 1906, of a writer then working as a high-school English teacher in Pittsburgh. Her name was Willa Cather, a genius in her own right.
As managing editor of McClure’s until 1912, when she resigned to focus on her own writing, Cather was one of the most powerful editors in the country. She continued to work with Joseph Conrad, A. E. Housman, and William Butler Yeats, as well as with such distinguished journalists as Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and Lincoln Steffens. Anyone studying the table of contents of McClure’s during the years that Cather edited the magazine should be able to see that it continued to set the standard for American journalism.
And Cather did not abandon the brilliant but erratic publisher who had hired her. In 1913, she agreed to write his “autobiography” (published, in 1914, without any recognition of her contribution), after publishing the first of her major novels: “O Pioneers!” Cather had good reason to be grateful to Samuel McClure: he transformed her career. But McClure had reason to be grateful to Cather, too.
Robert K. Miller
Lake Oswego, Ore.
