| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851–1950. By Julie Berebitsky. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. viii, 248 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1051-0.)

Adoption has never been easy in the United States. From 1851 to 1950, adults hoping to establish nonbiological families found it difficult both to find adoptable children and to prove themselves "fit" parents. Before 1900, when adoption was not yet fully distinct from indenture, few Americans believed that adoptive mothers could provide authentic sentimental nurture. And because most homeless children were not true orphans, adoptive parents feared that their children might someday be reclaimed by biological parents. 1

The Delineator magazine began to challenge societal doubts about adoption in 1907, publishing articles that praised childless middle-class women (even the unmarried) for "rescuing" poor orphans from deprivation and neglect. Yet even as the Delineator endorsed adoption by the well-to-do, a new generation of social workers raised arguments against it. Noting that most children in orphan asylums had at least one living (albeit impoverished) parent, they lobbied for social welfare programs that might "redeem" the poor and sustain the "irreplaceable" love between birth mothers and children. . . .

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