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Book Review
| Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption. By Barbara Melosh. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. x, 326 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-00912-6.)Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives. Ed. by E. Wayne Carp. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. 257 pp. $57.50, ISBN 0-472-10999-5.)
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| It used to be that white men wrote histories of white men, and that was that. Over the past generation, of course, we have seen the rise and ubiquity of identity histories, lots of historians writing about their own kind—a development that can sometimes provide special insights and can sometimes list toward special pleadings. Barbara Melosh, an adoptive parent, has crafted a very well-written, occasionally elegant, polemic in the interest of adoption as the best solution to certain nebulously defined social problems, including inadequate social provision and infertility. |
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Melosh begins her history of "the American way of adoption" in the early twentieth century, as child-transfer practices were shifting from arrangements that looked a lot like indenture to ones that looked like family formation or extension. Drawing largely on agency sources, Melosh finds that adoption has been a success story in the United States, a win/win/win for all members of the triad (the child in need, the birth parents, and the adoptive parents). |
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Strangers and Kin effectively demonstrates that ideas about adoption have changed over time, for example, ideas (and resulting practices) regarding the importance or irrelevance of matching children to their adoptive families and the shamefulness or not of infertility and so-called illegitimacy, conditions that have been intimately connected with the rise and fall of child adoption at particular historical moments. Even as ideas changed, though, Melosh shows that adoptive parents, especially, have continually had to contend with questions about the normality or abnormality of adoption-constructed families. Melosh and others define this debate as one between proponents of the superior value of blood versus proponents of the equal value of families by choice. |
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Melosh joins her analysis of the history and contemporary practice of adoption to a number of the big ideas that arguably define American culture and shape American studies. For example, she ties the rise of reproductive choice after the advent of the birth control pill to the growing accessibility of adoption: families by choice. She ties the evolution of the family as a private entity to a willingness to imagine family membership as a more flexible status. She ties an American cultural commitment to blood to an enduring strain of anti-adoption biological determinism in the United States. |
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Melosh is a good writer and a strong, strategic analyst. But so much is left out of her account and consideration of adoption that, ultimately, it is difficult to test these claims. In the second half of the book, the personal polemic shines through most brightly: adoption is good; reformers, doubters, critics are caught up in a mindless, politically driven narrative. |
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