Kinship by Design: The History of Child Adoption

We are all familiar with the idea of adoption--either because we personally know an adoptee, a birth parent, or adoptive parent, or because we have encountered adoption in Bible stories, fairy tales, on television, or in the movies. But few are acquainted with the long history of adoption in this country or how topics such as secrecy and openness, legal regulation, "matching," and transracial and international adoption have changed over time. Although children have always been transferred to substitute parents, adoption was not legally recognized in the United States until the nineteenth century. Shortly after passage of the first modern adoption law, in Massachusetts in 1851, the New York Children's Aid Society made the orphan trains famous, sending hundreds of thousands of children to the West to be adopted by farm families that needed extra hands for work. In the years that followed, adoption laws were passed and revised, and new practices were put into place, including permanently sealing birth records. In 1998, Oregon voters approved the first state ballot measure in the country allowing adult adoptees access to their original birth records, and the state's policy of openness has been in effect since 2000. This presentation will survey several dimensions of modern American adoption, including those mentioned here and others: the adoption market, the invention of the adoption agency, current legislation concerning records, and, most importantly, the quest for realness.

Presenter Profile: Ellen Herman, Associate Professor, History

Ellen Herman is a faculty member in the University of Oregon Department of History. She grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and lived in Boston for many years before moving to the Pacific Northwest with her family in 1998. She is interested in what happens when human beings and social behavior become subjects of science, and her research involves questions pertaining to psychology, therapeutic culture, social engineering, and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of The Romance of American Psychology (1995) and is a recipient of a major grant from the National Science Foundation. Ellen is writing a book about child adoption and has developed a website called The Adoption History Project.