Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 (review)

American legal adoption is an innovation not generally recognized for its cultural and legal significance. English and American common law never recognized the status of adoption, though, in America, certain private statutes facilitated adoption for inheritance purposes. Not until the Massachusetts statute of 1851 did adoption become a court procedure that invoked a concept of the child's interest. The 1851 model marked an innovation that spread rapidly to other states.

Berebitsky distinguishes legal adoption from other forms of early child placement (apprenticeship and "placing out") and from the more modern foster care. Adoption is a construction of a new family—a permanent bond that makes the child the adoptive parents' "very own." Between 1851 and the first decade of the twentieth century, children's aid societies promoted adoptions, especially for young children and infants, seeing such placements as an extension of simple charity toward children. Though some adoptions could still be arranged privately, the rise of professional social work in the early twentieth century turned adoption into a contested ground between the wants and needs of would-be adopters and the gatekeeping professionals who successfully inºuenced legislation and standards of adoption.

Under the unfolding "science" of adoption, not all applicants for children were fit, and not all children were ideal candidates. Indeed, the central thesis of Berebitsky's important book is that adoption became a kind of social laboratory, managed by experts and professionals, who could "get it right" in the child's second time around by constructing a perfect family. The dominant cultural ideal that shaped these efforts was "the nuclear, democratic family—the sexually satisfied, playfully compatible heterosexual couple with 'planned for' children living in an 'emotionally healthy' home" (3).

Professionals brought other early-century values to the table, including a new strain of biological bias fueled by eugenics and a fear of "race suicide" that made them extremely reluctant to sever natural parental ties (ordinarily the mother's). Not surprisingly, when adoption was appropriate, biology continued to furnish the mold as professional intermediaries endeavored to "match" children to their adoptive parents—including not only hair and eye color but also IQ. The cloak of secrecy that gradually emerged to protect adoptive parents from potentially intrusive biological family members sealed the bargain. Berebitsky convincingly demonstrates the power of culture in projecting onto adoption a familial paradigm that ultimately restricted adoption's possibilities. Not until recent years has this paradigm begun to change.

There are few more complex subjects than adoption. Berebitsky skillfully and sensibly navigates the terrain, moving comfortably among the literature of anthropology, psychology, the history of family and gender, popular culture, and case records of several agencies. If Berebitsky had said more about statutory and case law, her argument might have been stronger.

An important contribution to the literature of adoption and gender, this book comes at a time when change is possible. Hopefully, it will find its way into the hands of lawmakers who are taking a renewed interest in adoption. Bringing her story up to the present, Berebitsky calls for a more generous definition of what constitutes a family (the capacity for loving and nurturing) that would usher more childless adults into legal parenthood and more children out of the limbo of foster care. For many children in need of a permanent family, Berebitsky's vision offers hope.