Like Our Very Own
Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950
Julie Berebitsky
January 2001
272 pages, 12 photographs, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1051-8, $34.95
Talk about adoption has become
increasingly politicized, as debates swirl around the morality
and viability of various forms of adoption: interracial, international,
"open," and those involving single parents or gay and
lesbian couples. Paramount in many minds is the threat to the
traditional (or mythical) nuclear family. But, as Julie Berebitsky
shows, such concerns are fairly recent developments in the history
of adoption.
Berebitsky reveals that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries the rules governing adoption were much less rigid and
adoptive parents and families were considerably more diverse.
In Like Our Very Own, she chronicles the experiences of
adoptive parents and children during a century of great change,
illuminating the prominent role adoption came to play in defining
both motherhood and family in America.
Drawing on case histories, letters from adoptive parents,
congressional records, and fiction and popular magazines of the
day, Berebitsky recovers the efforts of single women, African
Americans, the elderly, and other marginalized citizens to obtain
children of their own. She contends, however, that this diversity
gradually diminished during the hundred years between the first
adoption laws in 1851 and the postwar "baby boom" era.
Adoption social theory and practice was gradually transformed
into a highly homogenized model that tried to match children
to parents by class and background and that ultimately favored
conventional middle class American families.
Changing attitudes about adoption, as Berebitsky shows, have
also mirrored changing definitions of motherhood. At a time when
womanhood and motherhood were socially synonymous, both birth
mothers who gave up their children and adoptive mothers seeking
a maternal role were viewed as transgressors of the natural order.
This eventually changed, but only after proper training and outside
expert approval replaced an assumed maternal instinct as the
keystone of good mothering.
A fascinating chapter in American social and cultural history,
Like Our Very Own offers compelling evidence that adoption
has always been an important factor in our evolving efforts to
define the meaning and nature of both motherhood and family.
"Thoughtful, provocative, and lucidly written, this fascinating
book explores a history that is both largely uncharted and of
considerable contemporary interest. Berebitsky argues that early
adoption practices held the potential to broaden our cultural
ideologies of family and domesticity--but that, as its definition
narrowed, adoption came to mirror the biological family, thus
losing its utopian appeal."--Barbara Melosh, author
of Gender and American History since 1890
JULIE BEREBITSKY is assistant professor of history
and director of the Women's Studies Program at The University
of the South.
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