Strangers and kin : the American way of adoption

Adoption is a quintessentially American institution, says...Barbara Melosh, in that it embodies optimism, generosity of spirit and confidence in "social engineering." In Strangers and Kin, Melosh offers a history of adoption from the early 20th century to today. Drawing on records of adoptions and individual stories, she presents thoughtful comments on current debates surrounding adoption, including transracial adoption and the ethics of international adoption. Publishers Weekly 20020805 Melosh argues that a brief, post-World War II acceptance of adoption has given way to skepticism--even fear--about embracing outsiders as part of the family. She attempts to explain why in Strangers and Kin...Melosh's book reveals a persistent American ambivalence about the difference of families formed by law, not blood. -- Jennifer K. Ruark Chronicle of Higher Education 20021025 Despite their far greater visibility, adoptive families are less common in the US now than they were in the 1950s. In Strangers and Kin, Barbara Melosh tells us why, simultaneously tracing the transformation of adoption over the past century and exploring how it has served as a charged site of American notions of identity, motherhood, family, and nation...Melosh eloquently reveals how in the twentieth-century United States, the practice of turning strangers into kin "became familiar, and how it remains strange" even today...It is both a fascinating cultural history of twentieth-century adoption in the US and a deeply informed study of what it reveals about the shifting concepts of family, identity and the limits of American pluralism...[Melosh's] reasoned, assiduously researched and carefully argued analysis is as thoughtful as readers are likely to find. She is sensitive to her multiple historical subjects as well as to her differently situated readers. -- Sherri Broder Women's Review of Books 20030201 Melosh has applied her sharp analytical skills to an archival treasure, the papers of the Children's Bureau of Delaware, a child welfare agency established in 1918. Drawing on narratives contained in these records, she has crafted a nuanced history with a lively forward momentum. -- Cheri Register Ruminator Review 20031001 Barbara Melosh, an adoptive parent, has crafted a very well-written, occasionally elegant, polemic in the interest of adoption as the best solution to certain nebulously defined social problems, including inadequate social provision and infertility Strangers and Kin effectively demonstrates that ideas about adoption have changed over time, for example, ideas (and resulting practices) regarding the importance or irrelevance of matching children to their adoptive families and the shamefulness or not of infertility and so-called illegitimacy, conditions that have been intimately connected with the rise and fall of child adoption at particular historical moments. Even ideas changed, though, Melosh shows that adoptive parents, especially, have continually had to contend with questions about the normality or abnormality of adoption-constructed families Melosh is a good writer and a strong strategic analyst. -- Rickie Sollinger Journal of American History 再读一些...