Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives

Contributors

Contributors George K. Behlmer is professor of history at the University of Washington, where he teaches modern British, Irish, and European topics. He is the author of Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (1982) and of Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940 (1998) and coeditor of Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture (2000). He is currently working on representations of the South Pacific’s “cannibal isles.” Julie Berebitsky is assistant professor of history and director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood , 1851–1950 (2000). E. Wayne Carp is chair and professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University. He is the author of Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (1998), To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783 (1984), which won the National Historical Society Book Prize. He is also the author of Bastard Nation and the Politics of Adoption Reform (forthcoming, 2003), and of numerous articles on the history of adoption. He is currently writing a biography of Jean M. Paton, the mother of the adoption rights movement. Brian Paul Gill is an analyst for the RAND corporation. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley’s doctoral program in jurisprudence and social policy, his dissertation is titled,“The Jurisprudence of Good Parenting: The Selection of Adoptive Parents, 1894–1964”(1997). In addition to a variety of projects in education policy, he is currently developing a new RAND research agenda in foster care and adoption. Patricia S. Hart teaches American studies and journalism at the University of Idaho and is managing editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies at Washington State University. She is the author of A Home for Every Child: Child Relinquishment and Adoption at the Washington Children’s Home Society, 1896– 1915 (forthcoming, 2002). 247 Anna Leon-Guerrero, coauthor of Social Statistics for a Diverse World (1999) is associate professor of sociology at Pacific Lutheran University, where she teaches courses in statistics, social theory, and social problems. Barbara Melosh is professor of English and history at George Mason University . She is the author of Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (1991); “The Physician’s Hand”: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (1982); and Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (2002). She is also the editor of Gender and American History since 1890 (1993) and American Nurses in Fiction (1984). Paula F. Pfeffer is associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. Her first book, A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (1990), received the 1991 Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights Award. She is the author of “Homeless Children; Childless Homes,” Chicago History (1987). Other more recent publications include “The Evolution of A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin from Radicalism to Conservatism,” in Black Conservatism: Essays in Intellectual and Political History, ed. Peter Eisenstadt (1999); “Eleanor Roosevelt and the National and World Woman’s Parties,” Historian (fall 1996); and “The Women Behind the Union: Halena Wilson, Rosina Tucker, and the Ladies Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” Labor History (fall 1995). Susan L. Porter is manager of research at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and a resident scholar in the women’s studies program at Brandeis University Library. She is the author of “Victorian Values in the Marketplace: Single Women and Work in Boston, 1800–1850,” Social Science History (spring 1993), and Gendered Benevolence: Orphan Asylums in Antebellum America (forthcoming), and is the editor of Women of the Commonwealth : Work, Family, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (1996). Carol J. Singley is associate professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden. She is the author of Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (1995) and coeditor of two collections of essays, Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women (1993) and The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (1997). She is also editor of the new Riverside edition of The Age of Innocence (2000) and A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (forthcoming, 2002). She is currently writing a book on adoption narratives in American literature and culture. 248 Contributors ...