White, Unwed Mother: The Adoption Mandate in Postwar Canada

The white adoption mandate was a process of interrelated institutional power systems which, together with socio-cultural norms, ideals of gender heteronormativity, and emerging sociological and psychoanalytic theories, created historically unique conditions in the post WWII decades wherein white unmarried mothers were systematically and often violently separated from their babies by means of adoption in the hundreds of thousands in Canada. These factors, together with urbanization, eugenics, the profession of social work, and the introduction of baby formula; all within the context of two World Wars, collided as a kind of perfect storm to create an unprecedented locus in history where approximately 300,000 unmarried mothers in Canada were systematically separated from their babies at birth for adoption in an attempt to rehabilitate them for normative womanhood.