Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States (review)

The body of scholarship on the history of adoption in the United States has grown markedly in the last decade, with the creation of an online project and the publication of an historical handbook, a score of articles, and monographs by Wayne Carp, Barbara Melosh, Claudia Nelson, and, now, Ellen Herman.¹ In this, her second book—her first is a well respected history of twentieth-century American psychology—Herman focuses on the changing character and meaning of adoption from 1900 to the mid 1970s. Expanding on themes she first developed in a 2002 essay, “The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption,” Herman contends that, beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, adoption was reimagined and reinvented as a type of family formation that was potentially dangerous and thus required careful planning and stringent regulation.² Labeling this new form of adoption “kinship by design,” Herman devotes much of the book to illustrating and explaining how it came about through four processes she identifies as regulation, interpretation, standardization, and naturalization.

Dividing her narrative into three overlapping chronological periods, Herman shows how in the first third of the century, child welfare advocates in the U.S. Children’s Bureau, the Child Welfare League of America, and other organizations spearheaded a campaign to make child placing governable by making it subject to state regulation in regard to recordkeeping and investigation and to supervision and reform consistent with new social work and psychological theories of individual and family adjustment. The early 1930s through 1960 constitutes Herman’s second period, and she characterizes it as a time in which expert theory, particularly that developed by Arnold Gesell, was utilized in an effort to decrease the potential for adoption failure through improving the match between child and parents. Standardizing matching mechanisms and requirements also served to naturalize the adoptive families by decreasing the distance between them and birth families. In the final section, covering the years from 1945 to 1975 and titled “Difference and Damage,” Herman examines the disintegration of the foundation assumptions of kinship by design, particularly those supporting matching, as adoption theory and practice was roiled by controversies over adoptees’ right to access formerly sealed records and by the emergence of special needs, transracial, and intercountry adoption.

Linking all three sections is Herman’s central theme that at the heart of kinship by design, and its rationalization as needed, natural, and best for both the adopted and their adoptive parents, is a particularly American paradox rooted in the coexistence in this country of two opposing ideals of family formation that parallel two opposing ideals of nation formation. One is the liberal pluralist ideal that families and nations can be constituted through voluntary association, whether adoption in the former case or immigration and naturalization in the latter. The other is the blood ideal, that birth determines belonging. Obviously not the first to note the fundamental tension between these two ideals, Herman is the first to use that tension to explain why adoption has elicited far more public discussion and controversy in the United States than its statistical incidence would seem to warrant.

With its interlinking of expert theory and agency practice with national identity narrative, Kinship by Design will be of especial interest to those who wish to explore the cultural context of evolving social policy.