Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950

Rating:
Summary: An excellent history, perfect for the questions of today
Review: Anyone who is thinking about adopting a child or already has done so really should read this clearly written, engaging study of the history of adoption in the United States. Berebitsky's book is history that is relevant to our lives today and to the problems so many of us have confronted as we have explored how adoption relates to the so-called "real" biological family. To put it simply, the author shows that the issues and problems that adoptive parents face today are hardly new, but have a long and rich history. The best example of how the past illuminates the present is what Berebitsky discovers about the many unmarried women living before 1920 and who adopted children even though they either had no husband or were living with a female partner. Such women were not only accepted as mothers, they were encouraged to adopt such children. At a time when people believed that women's natures suited them to rear children, even women without a man in the house were sufficient as mothers. Beginning in the 1920s, though, single women fell out of favor as adoptive parents. That was when child "experts" and social critics began worrying that women without the tempering hand of a husband might "smother" their children with excessive affection or that mature unmarried women were really lesbians who would pass their deviance on to their children. What Berebitsky's work shows, then, is that there really is no such thing as a "real" or "natural" family that the rest of us must measure ourselves or our domestic arrangements against. In the recent past there were real alternatives to the "natural" family of married mother and father. Any adoptive parents today, as well as single women and gay or lesbian couples who are creating their own families through adoption will find plenty of evidence here to show that the unnatural or deviant ones are those who say there is only one kind of real family.