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Adoption Stories Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity Adoption is Other in a culture and kinship system organized by biological reproduction . This essay examines autobiographical narratives of adopted persons , birth mothers, and adoptive parents as uneasy negotiations of identity.1 Memoirs of adoption by adoptive parents first appeared in the 1930s, but adoption autobiography was not established as a recognizable subgenre until the 1970s, when first adopted persons and then women who had relinquished children for adoption published their stories as testimony of their critique of adoption practices. Some of these accounts have been written by the founders of and activists in the adoption rights movement; virtually all acknowledge its influence. At the same time, the increasing number of such accounts and their broader audience suggest their wider cultural resonance. Even as the number of adoptions has fallen sharply since 1970,2 adoption stories have claimed a heightened public visibility. Autobiographical construction of self is social and historical. These narratives illuminate the experience and cultural meaning of adoption, even as their explorations of anomalous families illuminate, by contrast, contemporary discourses of motherhood, family, and cultural identity more generally. I read these narratives as memoirs that write the self in negotiation with wider cultural positions or discourses on adoption. After World War II, adoption became more common and more widely accepted than it had been before. For the first time, a broad white middle-class consensus proclaimed adoption the “best solution” to the “problem” of pregnancy out of wedlock. Regina Kunzel has traced the shift of white middle-class response from the evangelical reform of the early twentieth century, which saw the pregnant woman as a sinner in need of moral redemption, to the expert professional consensus of the 1930s and 1940s, which viewed out-of-wedlock pregnancy as the “symptom” of neurosis: their clients were not fallen women but problem girls.After World War II, rising rates of pre218 Barbara Melosh marital pregnancy among white teenagers further tempered white middle-class zeal for condemning the sinner. At the same time, the pronatalism of the 1940s and 1950s generated new public discussion and sympathy for the plight of infertile couples. In this context, adoption became widely accepted as an alternative route to family formation. The boundaries of adoptive families widened, too, as some agencies began to place African-American and American Indian children with white adopters.3 “Expert” narratives of adoption both reflected and codified these conditions . Professional literature—primarily that of social work but also that of psychology and psychiatry—advocated adoption as the “best solution” to the “problem” of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, at least for white women. In this narrative , adoption served all three parties in the relationship. The unwed mother might recover from the stigma of pregnancy out of wedlock, gaining a second chance for marriage and respectable motherhood. The child surrendered for adoption would benefit from the improved life chances afforded by growing up in a two-parent family. And the adoptive parents could recoup the losses of infertility by forming families through adoption (though not all adoptive parents were infertile or childless, most “stranger adoption” was motivated by infertility , and the discussion tends to focus on this kind of adoption, which constitutes on average about half of all adoptions). During the period 1945–1965, adoption practice became more uniform than it had been before or would be after. Though adoption was and remains controlled at the state level and therefore operates under varying legal codes, most adoptions were mediated by public or private agencies under the control of social workers. Courts widely accepted social workers’ legitimacy as experts qualified to counsel relinquishing parents, to assess adoptive homes, and to defend the best interests of the children.4 Confidential adoption became standard practice —that is, birth and adoptive parents generally did not meet, birth parents had no contact with their children after they were relinquished, and most states used sealed records that concealed the identity of birth parents and substituted the names of adoptive parents on the birth certificate of adopted persons.5 This practice powerfully symbolizes the cultural status of adoption as substitute family : the amended birth certificate rewrites the actual circumstances of the adoptive family in a document that makes their relationship indistinguishable from blood kinship, at least in the public record. Concern for matching—placing children with adoptive parents who were similar in appearance, temperament, and intelligence—also attests to the interest in effacing the difference of adoption , of making the adoptive...

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