Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives (review)

This volume of essays is a valuable addition to what the editor rightly identifies as an emerging "subfield of history," the history of adoption. Using the methods of several disciplines, the essays cover a range of topics within the rich province of this subfield. Although the essays cannot be read as complementary examinations of a single topic, they ably demonstrate both the ways in which the history of adoption can shed light on more general historical questions and the importance of this history to an understanding of today's adoption policies and practices. Carp's introduction skillfully summarizes five "watersheds" of adoption history from the colonial era to the present, and the essays, along with other recent works, lay the groundwork for a comprehensive history of adoption, which, as the introduction notes, is yet to be written.

Four essays are traditional historical narratives. Paula F. Pfeffer traces Catholic and Jewish adoption practices in Chicago from 1833 to 1933 to reveal how each group responded to waves of immigration and developed social-welfare attitudes and practices. Susan L. Porter, using quantitative data culled from her sources, recounts how nineteenth-century women managers of Protestant orphan asylums saw adoption not as a panacea but as one alternative to the scheme of institutional care followed by indenture. Patricia S. Hart looks beyond social theories about nineteenth-century America to the ways in which participants themselves experienced adoption, as suggested by a sample of the case records that were compiled at the Washington Children's Home Society (wchs) from 1895 to 1915. George K. Behlmer, venturing beyond the geographical boundary of the volume's title, describes the lengthy period in England before 1926 in which customary adoption had become common but legal adoption was not available, a strikingly different situation from the situation in the United States where adoption statutes began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century.

A fifth essay artfully tells the gripping story of a women's magazine's use of a narrative convention in its "Child-Rescue Campaign." Two other essays use literary explication and interpretation to explore social meanings. Julie Berebitsky recounts how women readers of the popular Delineator, from 1907 to 1911, responded to monthly stories that used the popular theme of rescue to profile children available for adoption from institutions. The essay convincingly contends that the campaign, linked to at least 2,000 adoptions, played a significant role in "popularizing and destigmatizing" adoption (137). Carol J. Singley's study of children's literature from 1850 to 1887 traces the development of attitudes surrounding adoption. In the earlier years of her period, stories reflected a "Christian emphasis on salvation, charity, and moral action" (54). As in the Delineator's appeals, adopting parents who saved homeless children were well rewarded, and both children and parents might be spiritually transformed. Later in the period, fiction "demonstrate[d] an increasing emphasis on money, with corresponding representations of children as objects of possession and display" (54).

Barbara Melosh mines the emotive autobiographies of adopted persons, birth mothers, and adoptive parents—a "subgenre" that became established in the 1970s—for "the experience and cultural meaning of adoption" (218). Her interpretive descriptions are comprehensive and penetrating, although some of her observations may rankle. Having noted that 80 percent of children born out of wedlock in 1970 were placed for adoption, whereas fewer than 4 percent were placed in 1983, she writes that birth mothers of an earlier era, in subsequently claiming their identity as mothers, were often disclaiming "their own agency in relinquishment" (234). But what meaning does "agency" have outside of the cultural context in which individuals and their families act?

Finally, two essays take unique approaches. Brian Paul Gill, coming to his subject from a social-policy background, persuasively argues that adoption-agency practices from 1918 to 1965 embodied the goal of creating families that reflected the contemporary ideal of...