Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption

Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption, a quintessentially American institution in its buoyant optimism, generous spirit, and confidence in social engineering. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. It says much about the American experience of family across the twentieth century and our shifting notions of kinship and assimilation. Above all, it speaks of real people striving to make families out of strangers.

In the early twentieth century, childless adults confronted orphanages reluctant to entrust their wards to the kindness of strangers. By the 1930s, however, the recently formed profession of social work claimed a new expertise--the science and art of child placement--and adoption became codified in law. It flourished in the United States, reflecting our ethnic diversity, pluralist ideals, and pragmatic approach to family. Then, in the 1960s, as the sexual revolution reshaped marriage, motherhood, and women's work, adoption became a less attractive option and the number of adoptive families precipitously declined. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy; the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption; and the conflicts over transracial adoption.

This gripping history is told through poignant stories of individuals, garnered from case records long inaccessible to others, and captures the profound losses and joys that make adoption a lifelong process.

Although case histories from the Children's Bureau of Delaware and American literature and movies are the window into the personal side of this history, Melosh (English and history, George Mason U.) weaves their stories into the national experience with the growth, decline, and constantly changing nature of legal "stranger adoption" in the United States of the 20th century. The change evidenced in the institution reveal a host of shifting social realities, touching upon topics such as concepts of identity and assimilation, social work versus market models of placement, paternalistic liberalism versus ethnic nationalism, expansions of socially accepted individuals, and ideologies of the heterosexual nuclear family. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Taking the history of adoption into the early 21st century, "Strangers and Kin" offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy, the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption, and the conflicts over transracial adoption.

Barbara Melosh is Professor of English and History at George Mason University.

Preface

Introduction

1. Wanted--A Child To Raise as Our Own: Claiming Strangers as Kin

2. Families by Design: "Fitness" and "Fit" in the Creation of Kin

3. The "Best Solution": Adoption Embraced

4. Redrawing the Boundaries: Transracial and International Adoption

5. "Tell It Slant": Adoption and Disclosure

6. Adoption Challenged: Beyond the Best Solution

Epilogue

Notes

Index