What Makes a Family?

If you live in the United States, chances are you are no stranger to adoption.

ALSO SEE: 'Adoption Studies' Hits the Humanities, With Surprises in Store Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Barbara Melosh, author of Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (forthcoming from Harvard University Press), about humanities research on adoption.

A 1997 survey found that 6 in 10 Americans have a personal connection to the institution -- that is, they, a family member, or a close friend was adopted, had adopted a child, or had placed a child for adoption. Newspaper and television stories of adoptive families abound, and many Americans know at least one family that includes a child from Asia, Latin America, or the former Soviet Union. Surely, Americans are more willing than ever before to open their homes to the children who need them.

To the contrary, says Barbara Melosh, a professor of English and history at George Mason University and an adoptive mother herself. While adoption has been practiced more widely in the United States than in any other industrialized nation, it reached its peak in 1970, which saw 89,000 "stranger" adoptions, or adoptions by people other than relatives or stepparents. By 1975, that number had plummeted to 48,000, near where it has hovered ever since.

"One reason adoption is so visible now is that it is highly exceptional," says Ms. Melosh. "Another reason is that the kinds of adoptions you see are nonmatching families, so they stand out." Families formed through international adoption, which more than doubled between 1992 and 1997, differ from the families that social workers engineered 50 years ago to fit the middle-class ideal: one girl, one boy, with looks, intelligence, and even temperament selected to make a perfect match with their parents.

Ms. 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 a forthcoming book, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (Harvard University Press, November). Other scholars call it pathbreaking. "She's setting an agenda for the rest of the social-history discipline," says E. Wayne Carp, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University and himself a pioneer in studying the subject. Her book "supersedes all other books on this vital and fraught topic," writes the political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain in a jacket endorsement.

The Third Degree

Ms. Melosh began thinking about these issues in 1985, when she and her husband adopted their son, Mike, then 5 months old. Required to submit tax and health records, proof of marriage, letters of recommendation, and a guarantee that she could take time off when a child arrived, Ms. Melosh says she "became aware of the kinds of intrusions on adoptive families that are not made on other families, and started to wonder what the history of the institution was."

Ms. Melosh would have faced a different sort of intrusion in the 1950s. Caseworkers would have taken notes on her hairstyle and her dress -- were they appropriately feminine? Her obvious compassion for chil-dren would have scored points, as would evidence of her domestic skills -- a quilt she made, covered with hearts, hangs on the wall in her office. But the caseworkers would have demanded more proof that she was ready to be a mother, requiring her to quit her job even while still waiting for a child, and to provide evidence that biological children were impossible. As one 1957 adoption manual explained, "No matter how desperately anxious for motherhood a woman claims to be, social workers know that a potentially good mother makes every effort to have her own child before she tries to adopt one."

At the same time, being infertile was itself suspect: The manual also suggested psychological counseling to make sure a woman's infertility was not caused by her subconscious reservations about motherhood. (Thank you, Dr. Freud.)

Social workers' wariness of adoptive mothers was just part of their general uneasiness about adoption, according to Ms. Melosh's research. In 1994, she gained unprecedented access to hundreds of case records at the Children's Bureau of Delaware, which was established in 1918 as a private child-welfare agency and became a full-time adoption agency in 1951. Based on those documents, as well as on national records and portrayals of adoption in news accounts, autobiographies, novels, and film, Ms. Melosh's book reveals a persistent American ambivalence about the difference of families formed by law, not blood.

The Kindness of Strangers

Legal adoption is a relatively new practice in the United States, and its history is intimately tied to the rise of social work as a profession. In colonial times, children were often informally adopted by relatives, or lived with other families as apprentices, but even in the 19th century when increased urban and rural poverty led to more official adoptions, those were usually arranged with families needing extra help at home or on the farm. When the parents died, adopted children could not inherit their property.

Such "instrumental adoption" began to give way to "sentimental adoption" in the 1920s and '30s, as infertile couples began to seek children to love. With contraception more widely available, people started to think of the family as something intentionally formed. But as late as 1929, 30 of the 48 states had no provisions for the supervision of adoption. And social workers, though eager to get children out of the institutional harshness of orphanages and into paid foster care, were reluctant to place children permanently. "Skeptical of the kindness of strangers," writes Ms. Melosh, "they doubted that adults could accept as their own children not born to them."

"Social workers were much less likely than adopters to think that children were completely blank slates," says Ms. Melosh, in spite of contemporary sociological and anthropological evidence that nurture trumped nature. They did not allow adoptive parents to take home newborns because they thought children ought to be observed for several months to rule out any deficiencies of intellect, character, or health -- to make sure they were "suitable" for adoption.

In this way, social workers claimed adoption as an area in need of their professional services. In fact, they believed their scientific expertise was essential to creating stable families.

Swayed by success stories and the flood of middle-class couples seeking children, social workers finally became strong advocates of adoption after World War II -- as long as those adoptions were professionally supervised. In an atmosphere of unprecedented economic expansion, the consensus among opinion makers -- that is, the white middle class -- became that adoption was the "best solution" for illegitimate babies and unmarried mothers, both of whom would be given a second chance at the American dream of upward mobility. Adoption would allow infertile couples, too, "to join in the postwar domestic idyll." The number of adoptions roughly tripled between 1937 and 1945, and had nearly doubled again by 1957.

Changing opinions about unmarried mothers may also have influenced the statistics. Before the war, Ms. Melosh writes, single mothers were not encouraged to give up their babies. But as more middle-class girls got pregnant, social workers started seeing clients who resembled themselves. Believing it was "neurosis" that had led to the girls' pregnancies (thank you again, Dr. Freud), they declared them unfit mothers. Adoption would erase their past, serving "to meliorate the harshest consequences of sexual transgression," writes Ms. Melosh, "even as it supported a version of the social order that contained women's social, economic, and sexual possibilities."

As the mothers' social milieu was no longer suspect, the children did not need to prove themselves qualified for adoption. In 1948, the Child Welfare League insisted that every child was "fit." By the mid-1950s, increasingly convinced that early placement was important, social workers expected adopters to accept the normal risks of parenthood.

A Perfect Fit

That's not to say that professionals let the chips fall where they might. They continued to be obsessed with engineering ideal families, which meant families that appeared "as if begotten." Postwar assimilation meant that white ethnic differences no longer seemed important, but social workers still made every effort to form families that "matched" in religious background and race. Matching "served the larger social purpose of boundary maintenance, and thus was a stay against fears of transgression associated with adoption," Ms. Melosh writes. It also promised to keep the adoption secret, from neighbors and even the children themselves. But the social workers' biggest worry, she argues, was whether the parents would truly accept their children's differences. "There was this real concern, and a laudable one, to do the best you could for a child who entered your care," she says.

Matching became less important in the late 1950s and '60s. Influenced by the civil-rights movement and beset with white applicants desiring children, social workers started to ask if they would consider "Oriental," "American Indian," or "Negro" children. In a statement that sounds bizarre today, one social worker wrote, "the matching of children becomes more and more irrelevant because the family is really just a place to grow up in, and not a place in which one develops a sense of identity." Between 1958 and 1967, 700 American Indian children were placed with white families through the Indian Adoption Project. African-American adopters had always accepted biracial children (though sometimes insisting they not be too light-skinned); now white parents started to adopt biracial and black children, too. (Racial matching remained pervasive, though: Even at its peak, in 1971, transracial adoption represented only 2 or 3 percent of cases.)

Adoption began to be seen as a gift to needy children more than to adults longing to be parents, and social workers started to accept applicants able to have biological children. International adoptions also increased during this time, seen as a way to "sweep the world's needy children into the peace and prosperity of the much-touted 'American century,'" writes Ms. Melosh.

That goal came under scrutiny in the late 1960s and '70s. Critics saw transracial and international adoption as expressions of white paternalism and American arrogance. Disillusioned with the politics of integration, black people and members of other minority groups asserted the importance of a child's connection to members of his racial or ethnic group. The number of black mothers relinquishing their children for adoption had always been relatively low, in part because black people (like poor and rural white people) preferred to care for children through networks of relatives and friends. In addition, Ms. Melosh argues, black women who sought to put their children up for adoption were usually turned away.

In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers declared that African-American children should not be placed with white families. That provided a rationale for social workers already reluctant to make such matches, says Ms. Melosh. Transracial placements, which had peaked at more than 2,500 in 1971, dropped to less than 1,000 a year by 1975. In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act effectively outlawed placements outside the tribe.

Risky Business

The postwar consensus on adoption fell apart in the 1970s and '80s. Even with access to abortion, the rates of birth out of wedlock continued to rise, as single motherhood became more acceptable. The mother who gave up her child, always suspect among black and poor white communities, became stigmatized in white middle-class circles as well, Ms. Melosh writes.

The language of risk returned to adoption in the 1980s and '90s, she argues, as biological determinism reared its head again in the sciences and the mass media. The writer Michael Dorris, for example, in The Broken Cord, his memoir of adopting a Native American boy, painted a frightening picture of the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. In 1986, a couple who argued that their adoption agency had misrepresented their child's background filed the first "wrongful adoption" case. In the 1990s, a handful of widely publicized cases in which the birth-parents resurfaced to claim their child, such as the Baby Jessica case in Michigan, also put would-be adoptive parents on guard.

But it was actually adoptees, not adopters, who began to be seen as most at risk. Memoirs of searching for birthparents or long-lost children -- with titles like The Primal Wound and Adoption Healing: The Path to Recovery -- helped create a new orthodoxy in which to be adopted meant to be marked forever, Ms. Melosh argues. Birth mothers who felt they had been coerced into giving up their babies, grown adoptees eager to reunite with their biological parents, and other "adoption activists," as Ms. Melosh calls them, began to lobby for open records. (Ms. Melosh supports open adoption but questions the idea of unilateral access to records that were sealed years ago. "I don't accept the logic that the [adoptee's] right to know should trump every other consideration," she says.) For many of these activists even today, adopted people who see adoption as an insignificant part of their identity, or even a source of creative possibility, are in denial. Their perspective "doesn't help adoption activists get the records opened," she says.

Those activists have been tremendously influential on public policy, says Ms. Melosh. "There's been a very broad acceptance of the claims of adoption activists about the reality of birth family and biological ties." After the collapse of the postwar consensus on adoption, policy makers favored family preservation at all costs. More recently, government agencies have favored "permanency planning," giving parents a limited time to make a stable home for their children. "It's excruciating," says Ms. Melosh. "What's the deadline? It doesn't take forever for a child to grow up."

Questioning 'Choice'

"I hope her book creates a huge amount of discussion. She is a serious and fabulous scholar," says Rickie Solinger, an independent historian and the author of Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (Routledge, 1992) and Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (Hill and Wang, 2001). But she believes some of Ms. Melosh's claims are way off.

"I don't agree that adoption is once again considered risky," says Ms. Solinger. "Look at the availability of new reproductive technologies, the increase in single mothers keeping their babies, the new social normativity of childlessness. All kinds of things have changed." More importantly, she thinks Ms. Melosh fails to recognize adoption as a market that depends on birth mothers.

"There is no such thing as adoption except off the backs of resourceless women," she says, whether that resourcelessness is financial or reflects rigid social rules against single motherhood. "There is absolutely no evidence that African-American women wanted to give up their children and were unable to find agencies to facilitate that." And after publishing Wake Up Little Susie, Ms. Solinger says, she began hearing from hundreds of white women who "had their babies taken away from them" in the postwar era.

Ms. Melosh is sure that such situations happened, but points to contrary evidence from the archives. She shows, for example, that the Delaware agency routinely turned black mothers away because it could not guarantee permanent placement of their babies, and dropped the stay-at-home requirement for black adoptive mothers in an effort to meet the demand for families. She also shows that social workers were suspicious of birth mothers who made the decision to relinquish too quickly. "They were committed to making sure that women were making the decision freely," says Ms. Melosh.

She remembers weeping as she sat in the archives reading of a 16-year-old named Joanne, whose mother insisted she put her baby up for adoption. When Joanne agreed, the mother abruptly changed her mind, saying that keeping the baby would "learn her a lesson."

"The ambiguities of 'choice' in that kind of situation -- what does it even mean?" asks Ms. Melosh.

"The mothers whose babies get adopted need to be studied not just on the emotional level but in the social and political context," says Ms. Solinger. "Adoption is really the transfer of babies across class and national lines." Adoption policy is riven with the arrogant assumption that middle-class families should rescue the children of the lower class, she says. The 1996 welfare reform law, for example, is "full of degrading language about the capacity of poor women to be mothers."

Family Ties

Ms. Melosh agrees that welfare policy and recent initiatives to provide federal support for adoption are tainted by prejudice against poor people. She believes that just as family preservation has been too rigid a goal sometimes, at other times children have been too easily taken from their biological parents. But she insists that the consensus now is in favor of biological families.

The pendulum may be swinging back toward a broader cultural acceptance of adoption, she says, pointing to the recent surge in international adoptions. Multiculturalism and even postmodern thought, she believes, are affecting how people understand their lives.

"I hear this from students, who have this sense of identity as something that shifts," she says. "That opens up a more positive space for adoption as not weird but as 'other' in a way that is similar to everyone's experience of multiple identities."

As she writes in her book, "None of us choose our families, whether we arrive at them by birth or adoption." Whether we are kin by blood or by fiat, there are limits to how well we can know our families. In that sense, perhaps, we are all strangers.