Edna Gladney’s Spirit Blossoms Eternal

She championed the rights of the “illegitimate” and “unwanted” and inspired a silver screen adaptation of her life.

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No author of heroic fiction could have imagined a social-reform powerhouse such as Fort Worth’s Edna Gladney (1886–1961). She invented herself, instead, out of loneliness and charitable indignation and wound up inspiring big-league Hollywood to tell her story in an Oscar-bait motion picture of 1941 called “Blossoms in the Dust.” (The film landed the Academy Award in 1942 for Best Art Direction, among four nominations.)

At 17, during 1903-04, Edna was sent to reside with relatives in Fort Worth, where the climate would prove healthful for her delicate respiratory system. Edna found herself drawn into civic-betterment activities. At age 20, Edna married Sam Gladney, a flour-milling operator. They spent their first year of marriage in Cuba, where Sam had business interests. A tubal pregnancy ended Edna’s chances of motherhood. They returned to Texas in 1909, eventually settling in Sherman. Edna became active as a Civic League volunteer, concentrating by 1917 upon improvements at the Grayson County Poor Farm, which housed orphans and disabled or aged citizens.

She was appalled to find the Poor Farm scarcely more than a dumping ground, ramshackle and unsanitary, for the unwanted. She petitioned the County Commissioners Court for reforms, only to find that upstanding governing body quick to agree but slow to act. Gladney led the women of the Civic League on a housecleaning mission at the Poor Farm, then arranged for the transfer of its abandoned children to the Texas Children’s Home & Aid Society in Fort Worth, a shelter developed by the Rev. Isaac Morris and his wife, Belle.

The number of orphans in the area had increased since the 1850s as a consequence of a so-called “orphan train” movement. That nationwide campaign sought to relocate orphans and impoverished families to rural areas. Also known as “placing out,” the process ended with as many as 200,000 individuals having been relocated. The trains would make drop-offs across the nation. At each stop, those who had promised to raise the kids as their own would make their selections, practicing a type of indentured servitude. Those making the selections were usually farmers in search of cheap fieldhand labor.

“I just wish that all of you men were pregnant!”

— Edna Gladney

In an appeal to an all-male board for Children’s Home funding.

The “placing out” scam was discontinued during the 1920s. Isaac and Belle Morris had found homes for some 1,000 children. Belle Morris invited Edna to join the board of the Children’s Home. The Gladneys moved to Fort Worth around 1920 after the collapse of Sam Gladney’s granary business. He died in 1935.

As a board member-turned-superintendent (at no salary) with the Texas Children’s Home, Edna organized and operated a day-care center and school for children of working women, similar to a venture she had begun in Sherman. During her three decades-and-change as superintendent, she supervised the placement of more than 10,000 children into nurturing families and promoted adoption as a positive option for unmarried mothers.

She also established a nonjudgmental environment for birth mothers to make their own decisions whether to seek adoption. During the 1930s, as a lobbyist for adoption-law revision before the Texas Legislature, Gladney helped to achieve such changes as the removal of the label of “illegitimate” from birth certificates and the assurance that a child’s adopted status would be protected information. She promoted privacy in the adoption process — both for birth parents and adoptive families — and argued successfully to change the once-common “guardianship” label to that of “adopted.” She helped further to affirm inheritance rights for adopted children.

In 1939, Ralph Wheelwright, an MGM Studios publicist who had adopted a child from the Texas Children’s Home, composed a story based on Gladney’s work. His tale formed the basis of the 1941 film “Blossoms in the Dust,” starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon as Edna and Sam Gladney. Shooting was done in Hollywood, but the essentially accurate sets were modeled after photographs of authentic locations in Sherman, Fort Worth, and Austin. A friendship developed between Gladney and Garson, and Gladney channeled her movie stipend into funding for the Children’s Home.

By 1950, the place was renamed as the Edna Gladney Home, having expanded into a maternity hospital building. Edna lobbied again in 1951 before the Legislature for adoption-law refinements. In 1953, she appeared on the network-television program “This Is Your Life,” a real-time broadcast usually reserved for prominent entertainers in their waning years. 

Edna’s task had been formidable: Well along into the 20th century, pregnancy signaled ostracism and stigma for unmarried women, largely stemming from a child’s official designation as “illegitimate” on the birth certificates. Such mothers were often forced by their families to marry. Abortion was illegal. Adoption was a more complicated procedure. By the 1950s, the situation had improved, largely through the efforts of Edna Gladney. A colleague, Ruby Lee Piester, once wrote, “No one in this country had done more than Edna Gladney to erase the stigma of unwed motherhood and to promote adoption as a positive option...”

Edna Gladney retired in 1960 but remained active at the Gladney Home until her death in 1961. Her principles remain in place at Fort Worth’s Gladney Center for Adoption.