Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950Talk about adoption has become increasingly politicized, as debates swirl around the morality and viability of various forms of adoption: interracial, international, "open," and those involving single parents or gay and lesbian couples. Paramount in many minds is the threat to the traditional (or mythical) nuclear family. But, as Julie Berebitsky shows, such concerns are fairly recent developments in the history of adoption. Berebitsky reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rules governing adoption were much less rigid and adoptive parents and families were considerably more diverse. In Like Our Very Own, she chronicles the experiences of adoptive parents and children during a century of great change, illuminating the prominent role adoption came to play in defining both motherhood and family in America. Drawing on case histories, letters from adoptive parents, congressional records, and fiction and popular magazines of the day, Berebitsky recovers the efforts of single women, African Americans, the elderly, and other marginalized citizens to obtain children of their own. She contends, however, that this diversity gradually diminished during the hundred years between the first adoption laws in 1851 and the postwar "baby boom" era. Adoption social theory and practice was gradually transformed into a highly homogenized model that tried to match children to parents by class and background and that ultimately favored conventional middle class American families. Changing attitudes about adoption, as Berebitsky shows, have also mirrored changing definitions of motherhood. At a time when womanhood and motherhood were socially synonymous, both birth mothers who gave up their children and adoptive mothers seeking a maternal role were viewed as transgressors of the natural order. This eventually changed, but only after proper training and outside expert approval replaced an assumed maternal instinct as the keystone of good mothering. ,br>A fascinating chapter in American social and cultural history, Like Our Very Own offers compelling evidence that adoption has always been an important factor in our evolving efforts to define the meaning and nature of both motherhood and family. |
Contents
Becoming an Adoptive Parent the Early Years | 17 |
The Social Construction | 51 |
Representations | 75 |
Copyright | |
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adop Adopted Child adopted children Adoption Practice adoptive families adoptive mothers adoptive parents African American agent Asylum believed biological parents birth mother Brian Gill CAS/HSP caseworker Central Files Charities chil Child Welfare Child Welfare League Child-Rescue Campaign childless couples Cradle cultural custody Delineator Delineator's dependent children diss Dreiser dren emotional example experience father foster family foster parents girl heredity Hillcrest Collection history of adoption husband ideal illegitimacy infants infertility institutions January League of America legal adoption letters Literary Digest Mabel Walker Willebrandt magazine Margaret Deland Margaret Marsh married Mary matching maternal instinct noted open adoption Orphan parenthood placed children popular professional prospective adopters readers records reformers relationship role Roosevelt sexual single adoptive mothers single women social workers society story Study of Adoption Theodore Dreiser tion twentieth century University Press unwed mothers wanted Washington WCOA Widmans woman wrote York Yunicks Zainaldin