Strangers and Kin

Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption, a quintessentially American institution in its buoyant optimism, generous spirit, and confidence in social engineering. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. It says much about the American experience of family across the twentieth century and our shifting notions of kinship and assimilation. Above all, it speaks of real people striving to make families out of strangers.In the early twentieth century, childless adults confronted orphanages reluctant to entrust their wards to the kindness of strangers. By the 1930s, however, the recently formed profession of social work claimed a new expertise--the science and art of child placement--and adoption became codified in law. It flourished in the United States, reflecting our ethnic diversity, pluralist ideals, and pragmatic approach to family. Then, in the 1960s, as the sexual revolution reshaped marriage, motherhood, and women's work, adoption became a less attractive option and the number of adoptive families precipitously declined. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy; the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption; and the conflicts over transracial adoption. This gripping history is told through poignant stories of individuals, garnered from case records long inaccessible to others, and captures the profound losses and joys that make adoption a lifelong process.

Finally we have a history of adoption that is sensitive to all parties. Based on meticulous archival research, Barbara Melosh's superb book tells modern adoption's complicated and surprising story in a lucid, comprehensive manner, laying to rest many old misconceptions but also raising new questions anyone involved with adoption on the personal or policy level must confront., Melosh's brilliant study helps us to understand the ways in which the combined forces of a resurgent sociobiology, cost-benefit market models, and idealized images of natural motherhood have cast adoption into the shadows. We have become a society less generous in opening our homes to strangers who then become kin. Melosh helps us to understand why. Strangers and Kin supersedes all other books on this vital and fraught topic., Gracefully written and brimming with insight, Strangers and Kin tells a story about child adoption during the twentieth century that is as little known as it is significant. With a stunning array of original sources, Melosh provocatively suggests that birth mothers and adoptive parents have been well ahead of policy-makers and professionals in influencing adoption practices and enhancing the reputation and visibility of adoption. Although it has touched only a tiny minority of children and adults, adoption symbolizes the historic American conversation about identity, difference, and solidarity. Anyone interested in belonging--to families, communities, and country--will learn a great deal from this book., Strangers and Kin combines history, popular culture and deft political analysis to tell a fascinating story of adoption's changing face in our society. Melosh shows how adoption policy reflects and illuminates our understanding of family and community, biology and race, self and other. She provides a thoughtful, sensitive, and deeply informed rejection of the new orthodoxy of adoption, and an embrace of adoption's positive potential.", Strangers and Kin is a wonderful addition to the literature on adoption practices in the U.S. today, but it also offers a fresh angle on the general history of assumptions about the nature of the American family. I much appreciated Melosh's even-handedness, her clear and original thinking in an area where positions are so polarized.

Barbara Melosh is Professor of English and History at George Mason University.