| Sophie van Senden Theis was the
first genuine adoption professional and researcher in the history
of the United States. She was best known for her pioneering outcome
study, How Foster Children
Turn Out, published in 1924, in which Theis documented
what had become of 910 children placed in homes by the New York
State Charities Aid Association between 1898 and 1922. It was the
first large-scale inquiry of its kind, became the prototype for
many later outcome studies, and is still cited as a landmark in
the history of adoption research.
Theis worked for the NYSCAA for forty-five years, from 1907 until
her retirement in 1952, and served as the Executive Director of
its Child Adoption Committee for thirty-six of those years. She
graduated from Vassar College in 1907, at a moment when the professionalization
of social work was imaginable
but formal training in the field barely existed. From the very beginning
of her career, Theis set out to communicate whatever she knew about
desirable adoption procedures to her colleagues and a broader public
while also warning them about the risks of unregulated family-making.
Theis was a firm believer in adoption modernization and the empirical
research, specialized training, and minimum
standards that went along with it. Her agency embraced mental
tests as placement aids early on but Theis always cautioned against
simple-minded hereditarianism. Early on in her career, she agreed
that only “normal” children were qualified for family
life and even suggested that families who insisted on adopting children
with bad histories should sign binding agreements promising to return
them if and when abnormal characteristics appeared. In general,
however, Theis was less influenced by eugenics
than most of her peers. She trusted that children would take advantage
of opportunities for love and belonging and expressed confidence
in adoption as an institution long before most other child welfare
professionals.
Along with her NYSCAA colleague Constance Goodrich, Theis published
one of the first training manuals for professional child-placers
in 1921. It moved step-by-step through the process, devoting chapters
to the selection of children and homes, placement, supervision,
and replacement. Full of details from her own agency’s case
records, The Child in the Foster Home taught by example.
It offered concrete help to workers confused about when to reject
applications for children, what to do about placing siblings, and
how to handle the touchy issue of telling,
a parental responsibility that adopters often resisted against the
best advice of agency staff. The philosophy the manual conveyed
anticipated many features of therapeutic adoption. It stressed casework,
psychological diagnosis, and close attention to personality and
its adjustment.
Theis never married, which was far from unusual among well-educated,
reform-minded women of her day. She encouraged single
women and female couples to adopt and personally facilitated
the placement of two children with Jessie Taft
and her partner, Virginia Robinson. This illustrated that definitions
of acceptable and legitimate family were relatively more diverse
and flexible early in the twentieth century than they became later
on.
After her retirement from the NYSCAA, Theis became the Executive
Secretary and Treasurer of the Doris Duke Foundation. She died in
1957.
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