Ellen Herman's study of adoption in the modern United States focuses on the rise of "kinship by design": the concerted attempt to reduce or eliminate uncertainty and risk in adoption through public regulation, professional standards, and expert knowledge. Beginning in the early twentieth century, promoters of design-at first philanthropic amateurs, then child welfare reformers and policymakers at the state and federal levels, newly professionalized social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians-claimed that when families were deliberately made the potential for things to go wrong was so high that expert intervention was crucial. To avert the serious social and personal problems that might result from bad adoptions, proponents of kinship by design developed four strategies: regulation, interpretation, standardization, and naturalization. Herman discusses the first two strategies in Part 1, which covers the period 1900-1945, and the last two in Part 2, covering the period 1930-1960.
Adoption reformers opposed the forms of child placement (commercial and sentimental) that existed before the twentieth century. When children were placed in families merely out of altruistic or economic motives, the risks were considerable. In the early twentieth century, the main fears were that "normal" and deserving parents might adopt a defective or racially mixed child and that unscrupulous or cruel adults might abuse vulnerable children. To make adoption safe (or at least safer) for all parties involved, reformers endeavored to regulate it and establish minimum standards having to do with the qualities or conditions that made children and parents suitable for adoption, the keeping of records, and the training of staff. Child welfare reformers in this "antiadoption era" (p. 30) nevertheless believed that the child's tie to the birth mother must be maintained at all costs, and thus viewed adoption as an inferior alternative.
For social workers influenced by Freudian theories, the psychological investigation and interpretation of the personalities and motivations of every participant in adoption were essential to making adoptive families "real" families. Interpretation was important because people were unaware of their unconscious desires and motivations. Herman shows how interpretation led to a new understanding of the adults involved in adoption. Rather than a feebleminded girl of loose morals, the (white) unmarried birth mother was seen as a neurotic or hysterical woman who unconsciously wished to become pregnant and who would make a terrible mother. Couples who applied to become adoptive parents were subjected to interpretation too, as they did not know their true motivations and needed help dealing with infertility. Whereas in the early twentieth century eugenic fears dictated that infant adoptions were inadvisableto know that a child was normal and completely white, one had to wait-by mid-century, research on attachment and early deprivation as well as the new stress on love and feelings of belonging between parents and children made early placements acceptable and even preferable for adoption professionals (as they had long been for adoptive parents).
A central element of kinship by design was the hope to erase or conceal the difference between adoptive and nonadoptive families by making the former resemble "natural" families as much as possible. Herman's discussion of "matching" reveals the various concerns, interests, desires, and prejudices that informed this ideology and the involvement of scientists and practitioners (such as the prominent child expert Arnold Gesell