Kinship by design: a history of adoption in the modern United States /
byEllen Herman
- Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- xii,: 381p.
1.The perils of money and sentiment (and custom, accident, impulse, 2.intuition, common sense, faith, and bad blood) -- 3.Making adoption governable -- 4.Rules for realness -- 5.Matching and the mirror of nature -- 6.The measure of other people's children -- 7.Adoption revolutions -- 8.The difference difference makes -- 9.Damaged children, therapeutic lives -- 10.Reckoning with risk.
What constitutes a family? Tracing the dramatic evolution of Americans? answer to this question over the past century, Kinship by Design provides the fullest account to date of modern adoption?s history. Beginning in the early 1900s, when children were still transferred between households by a variety of unregulated private arrangements, Ellen Herman details efforts by the U.S. Children?s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America to establish adoption standards in law and practice. She goes on to trace Americans? shifting ideas about matching children with physically or intellectually sim.