| Book Review | Law and History Review, 22.3

Book Review

Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 326. $29.95 (ISBN 0-674-00912-6).

While historical scholarship on adoption in the United States has long been notable primarily for its absence, there are promising indications that this neglect is fast becoming a thing of the past. Joining recent contributions by Julie Berebitsky, E. Wayne Carp, and Ellen Herman, to name only a few, Barbara Melosh's engaging exploration of twentieth-century adoptive kinship, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption, provides further evidence of a welcome confluence of scholarly interest in the topic.

Melosh draws on an impressive array of primary sources to fashion a study that affords some of the virtues of the local history with demonstrably national implications. Founded on a sample of over 400 case files from the Children's Bureau of Delaware (a private, nonsectarian, child welfare agency), Strangers and Kin is complemented by archival records from the U.S. Children's Bureau and the National Urban League, as well as professional literature, journalistic commentary, autobiography, and fiction. Throughout the text, Melosh foregrounds the exigencies of sexual inequality, race and class oppression, and prevailing gender ideologies to illuminate the constrained and complex universe in which adoptions were transacted. This is not, however, a purely academic inquiry; rather it is informed in part by the author's experiences as an adoptive mother, a biographical fact that ultimately enhances her perspective. Melding historical excavation and experiential insight, what emerges is a thoughtful meditation of the construction of family, identity, and nation.

Strangers and Kin is organized into six loosely chronological chapters. With an occasional gesture toward the antecedents of her subject, Melosh begins her story in the earlier years of the twentieth century, when adoption appeared as "an ambitious new social transaction" (15). The 1910s and 1920s marked a transitional period fraught with tension between two distinct models of adoption—"instrumental" and "sentimental"—the first dominant in the prior century, when children were prized for their labor, and the latter denoting a modern view that privileges the child's emotional worth. Progressive reformers, predominantly women, rejected institutional care for dependent children and sought instead to preserve families through "home relief," and, where that was impracticable, to replicate the advantages of familial care by "placing out." At once "[s]keptical of the kindness of strangers" and dubious "that adults could accept as their own children not born to them," child welfare workers were deeply pessimistic about adoption's viability (3). Under pressure from would-be adoptive parents and other supporters in the 1920s and 1930s, they grudgingly acquiesced, endeavoring to superintend the process according to reigning social science principles.

During the next twenty years, lay and professional constituencies alike came to regard adoption as a humane and pragmatic response to the problem of child dependency. Lingering discomfort with the institution was revealed in social workers' meticulous evaluations of children's fitness, or "eligibility," for adoption, which entailed careful background assessments, extended observation, and medical, psychological, and intelligence testing. Those wishing to adopt were subjected to comparable scrutiny, as agencies sought to "match" parents and children by race, ethnicity, religion, and other characteristics, thereby creating the "as if begotten" family—one closely approximating biological kinship. Child placements rose significantly in the 1950s and 1960s as a (largely white, middleclass) consensus developed upholding adoption as the "best solution" to outofwedlock pregnancy. Granting a "second chance" to everyone involved, it was a "bold stroke" that not only "rescued children from illegitimacy, [and] offered a 'fresh start' to 'girls in trouble,'" but also enabled infertile couples to participate in America's "domestic idyll" (4). With its heightened emphasis on confidentiality—"the hallmark of post-war adoption"—this approach produced confounding obstacles for those later wishing to learn more about themselves and their biological kin (133).

Reaching an historic high in 1970, child placements declined precipitously thereafter, signaling the breakdown of the postwar consensus. The sexual revolution, expanded birth control options, and the availability of abortion intensified the stigma of relinquishment, while feminism and black nationalism engendered harsh critiques of adoption's underlying ethos. Among the book's most compelling features is its explication of the memoirs that proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, as representatives of each position in the adoption triad passionately attested to the disruption occasioned by the technologies of the "second chance." These years also witnessed the rise of the contemporary adoption rights movement and with it vigorous advocacy for the cause of open records. Activists' manifest influence on popular perceptions of adoption has not, however, extended to the domains of law and public policy, where change has been gradual and uneven. Today, with the practice of matching in disrepute and caution again pronounced, adoption is both more visible and less common than it has been in the recent past. At the same time, Melosh maintains it is a quintessentially American institution that presents opportunities for self-construction and pluralism that biological kinship does not.

On the whole a persuasive study, Strangers and Kin also raises a number of concerns. Most notably, its lean scholarly apparatus enables an abundance of generalizations sustained by little or no explicit documentation. For instance, support for an assertion regarding the marginalization of certain discussants in adoption chatrooms is confined to an anecdote "told to the author in the mid-1990s" (317, n.81). The failure to include more precise non-identifying data, not to mention the singularity of the example, tends to undermine confidence in an otherwise unobjectionable conclusion. Legal historians are apt to be especially frustrated by the repeated omission of case names and citations for judicial decisions and statutes referenced in the text, and its minimal engagement with pertinent law review scholarship.

Also disappointing is the scant attention accorded to pregnancies resulting from rape and incest. Doubtless partly attributable to gaps in the historical record, there are published primary sources that might have been profitably employed to elucidate some of the book's central themes: the balance of agency and coercion in the relinquishment process; shifting ascriptions of shame to sexual transgressors; and the competing demands of privacy and confidentiality in the context of out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Melosh offers intriguing hints about birth mothers refusing to disclose their children's paternity in order to conceal histories of incest and other forms of abuse, but does not pursue them in great depth, a problem compounded by the sparseness of her references and necessary reliance on confidential records. Other promising areas of inquiry remain similarly unexploited. Adoption history is ideal terrain on which to interrogate professional encounters at the intersection of law and psychology. Regrettably there is no sustained analysis of the interaction between mental science discourses and the legislative and juridical processes that established adoption's legal parameters. The same may be said of Melosh's discussion of "wrongful adoption," an issue that clearly merits closer examination than was possible in this sweeping account.

These reservations notwithstanding, Strangers and Kin performs a valuable service in charting the evolution of twentieth-century American adoption. Those interested in pursuing further research in the field will find many useful suggestions in this pioneering work.

Lisa Cardyn

New York, N.Y.

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