Further Reading

A-B | C-E | F-I | J-N | O-R |S-T | U-Z

I have selected a few additional primary and secondary sources to encourage further reading about the people and subjects explored on this site. Because a great deal has been written recently about adoption by legal scholars, policy analysts, social scientists, adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents, I have listed sources that are especially useful in thinking about adoption historically that may not appear in many excellent bibliographies emphasizing only the recent past.

A-B

Adoption History, General Sources

Lori Askeland, ed., Children and Youth in Adoption, Orphanages, and Foster Care: A Historical Handbook and Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).

Julie Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

Naomi Cahn and Joan Heifetz Hollinger, eds., Families by Law: An Adoption Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

E. Wayne Carp, ed., Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Barbara Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Kathy Shepherd Stolley and Vern L. Bullough, eds. The Praeger Handbook of Adoption, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985), chap. 6.

Adoption Narratives

Barbara Melosh, “Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity,” in Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, ed. E. Wayne Carp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 218-245.

Susan G. Miles, Adoption Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991).

Claudia Nelson, Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850-1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

Marianne Novy, ed., Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

Marianne Novy, Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Susan Wadia-Ells, ed., The Adoption Reader: Birth Mothers, Adoptive Mothers and Adopted Daughters Tell Their Stories (Seattle: Seal Press, 1995).

Adoption Statistics

Anjani Chandra et al., “Adoption, Adoption Seeking, and Relinquishment for Adoption in the United States,” Advance Data from Vital and Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Center for Health Statistics, no. 306 (May 11, 1999).

Victor E. Flango and Mary M. Caskey, “Adoptions, 2000-2001,” Adoption Quarterly 8, no. 4 (2005):23-43.

Kathy S. Stolley, “Statistics on Adoption in the United States,” The Future of Children 3, no. 1 (Spring 1993):26-42.

Adoption Studies/Adoption Science

Bernadine Barr, “Spare Children, 1900-1945: Inmates of Orphanages as Subjects of Research in Medicine and in the Social Sciences in America” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1992).

John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health: A report prepared on behalf of the World Health Organization as a contribution to the United Nations programme for the welfare of homeless children (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1952).

Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

Diane Eyer, Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Harry F. Harlow, “Love in Infant Monkeys,” Scientific American 200, no. 6 (June 1959):68-74.

Leon J. Kamin, “Studies of Adopted Children,” in The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Potomac, MD: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1974), 111-134.

David M. Levy, “Primary Affect Hunger,” American Journal of Psychiatry 94 (November 1937):643-652.

Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

René A. Spitz, “Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1 (1945):53-74.

African-American Adoptions

Andrew Billingsley and Jeanne M. Giovannoni, Children of the Storm: Black Children and American Child Welfare (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972).

Child Welfare League of America, “Child Care Facilities for Dependent and Neglected Negro Children in Three Cities: New York City, Philadelphia, Cleveland” (New York: Child Welfare League of America, March 1945).

David Fanshel, A Study in Negro Adoption (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1957).

Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).

Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974).

Baby Farming

Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

George Walker, The Traffic in Babies: An Analysis of the Conditions Discovered During an Investigation Conducted in the Year 1914 (Baltimore: The Norman, Remington Co., 1918).

Viviana A. Zelizer, “From Baby Farms to Baby M,” Society 25 (March/April 1988):23-28.

Bastard Nation

E. Wayne Carp, Adoption Politics: Bastard Nation & Ballot Initiative 58 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

Viola Wertheim Bernard

Viola W. Bernard, “Adoption,” in The Encyclopedia of Mental Health, vol. 1, ed. Albert Deutsch (Franklin Watts, Inc., New York, 1963), 70-108.

Viola W. Bernard, “Adoption,” in American Handbook of Psychiatry, vol. 1, ed. Silvano Arieti (Basic Books, New York, 1974), 513-534.

Viola W. Bernard, “First Sight of the Child by Prospective Parents as a Crucial Phase in Adoption,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 15 (April 1945):230-237.

Viola W. Bernard, “Psychiatric Consultation With Special Reference to Adoption Practice,” Casework Papers (1954):70-83.

Nicholas P. Christy, “Viola Wertheim Bernard 1907-1998,” P & S (magazine of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University) (Spring 2000):4-5.

Birth Parents

E. Wayne Carp, “Professional Social Workers, Adoption, and the Problem of Illegitimacy, 1915-1945,” Journal of Policy History 6 (1994):161-184.

Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe V. Wade (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

Merry Bloch Jones, Birthmothers: Women Who Relinquish Babies for Adoption Tell Their Stories (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1993).

Marion E. Kenworthy, “The Mental Hygiene Aspects of Illegitimacy,” Mental Hygiene 5, no. 3 (July 1921):499-508.

Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Rose V. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Leontine Young, Out of Wedlock: A Study of the Problems of the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954).

Charles Loring Brace

Bruce Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” in The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis, ed. Peter Mandler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 123-160.

Clay Gish, “Rescuing the 'Waifs and Strays' of the City: The Western Emigration Program of the Children's Aid Society,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (Fall 1999):121-141.

Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck, Children for Adoption (New York: Random House, 1964).

Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds (New York: John Day Company, 1954).

Pearl S. Buck, “Should White Parents Adopt Brown Babies?,” Ebony, June 1958, 26-30.

Pearl S. Buck, “Welcome House,” Reader's Digest, July 1958, 47-50.

Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 4.

C-E

Child Welfare

LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997).

Children's Defense Fund, The State of America's Children Yearbook (Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, 2003).

Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1973).

Mary Ann Mason, From Father's Property to Children's Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Eve P. Smith and Lisa A. Merkel-Holguín, eds., A History of Child Welfare (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

Child Welfare League of America

Child Welfare League of America, Standards for Adoption Service (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1958).

Child Welfare League of America, Standards of Excellence for Adoption Services, revised ed. (Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America, 2000).

Concerned United Birthparents

Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Judith S. Modell, Kinship With Strangers: Adoption and Interpretations of Kinship in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe V. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Confidentiality and Sealed Records

Janine M. Baer, Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences (Xlibris Corporation, 2004).

E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Elizabeth J. Samuels, “The Idea of Adoption: An Inquiry Into the History of Adult Adoptee Access to Birth Records,” Rutgers Law Review (Winter 2001):367-436.

Arthur D. Sorosky, Annette Baran, and Reuben Pannor, The Adoption Triangle: Sealed or Opened Records: How They Affect Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents (San Antonio: Corona Publishing, 1978).

Katarina Wegar, Adoption, Identity and Kinship: The Debate over Sealed Birth Records (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

Eugenics

Henry H. Goddard, “The Basis for State Policy,” Survey 27 (March 2, 1912):852-1856.

Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics From the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

F-I

“Feeble-Minded” Children

James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

First Specialized Adoption Agencies

A.S. Chapman, “Homes for Babies, Babies for Homes,” Hygiea, December 1932, 1106-1109.

Neil M. Clark, “Filling Empty Arms,” American Magazine, September 1930, 24-25, 82-90.

Laura Crozer, “Clearing House for Babies,” Illustrated World 24, no. 6 (February 1916):763-764.

Charles Gilmore Kerley, “The Adoption of Children,” Outlook 112, no. 2 (January 12, 1916):104-107.

Milton MacKaye, “The Cradle,” Saturday Evening Post, April 9 1938, 12-13, 95-100.

Paula F. Pfeffer, “Homeless Children, Childless Homes,” Chicago History 16 (Spring 1987):51-65.

Peter Romanofsky, “Professional Versus Volunteers: A Case Study of Adoption Workers in the 1920's,” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 2 (April 1973):95-101.

Fostering and Foster Care

Elizabeth Bartholet, Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).

Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001).

Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

Nanette Schorr, “Foster Care and the Politics of Compassion,” in Family Matters: Readings on Family Lives and the Law, ed. Martha Minow (The New Press, New York, 1993), 117-124.

Anna Freud

Anna Freud, The Writings of Anna Freud vols. 1-8 (New York: International Universities Press, 1967-1981).

Uwe Henrik Peters, Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children (New York: Schocken Books, 1985).

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New York: Summit Books, 1988).

Sigmund Freud

Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).

Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964).

Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

Nathan G. Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in America: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

Arnold Gesell

Arnold Gesell, The Mental Growth of the Pre-School Child: A Psychological Outline of Normal Development from Birth to the Sixth Year, Including a System of Developmental Diagnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

Arnold Gesell in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 4, ed. Edwin G. Boring, et al. (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1952), 123-142.

Arnold Gesell, Infancy and Human Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1928).

Arnold Gesell, “Reducing the Risks of Child Adoption,” Child Welfare League of America Bulletin 6 (May 15, 1927):1-2.

Benjamin Harris, “Arnold Lucius Gesell,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1999), 877-878.

Ellen Herman, “Families Made by Science: Arnold Gesell and the Technologies of Modern Child Adoption,” Isis 92 (December 2001):684-715.

Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), chap. 6.

Harry Harlow

Deborah Blum, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002).

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), chap. 9.

Harry F. Harlow, “The Nature of Love,” American Psychologist 13 (1958):673-685.

Harry F. Harlow and Margaret Kuenne Harlow, “Social Deprivation in Monkeys,” Scientific American 207 (November 1962):136-146.

Harry F. Harlow and Robert R. Zimmermann, “Affectional Responses in the Infant Monkey,” Science 130 (August 21, 1959):421-432.

Home Studies

Howard G. Aronson, “The Problem of Rejection of Adoptive Applicants,” Child Welfare 39 (October 1960):21-26.

Mary S. Doran and Bertha C. Reynolds, The Selection of Foster Homes for Children: Principles and Methods Followed by the Boston Children's Aid Society With Illustrative Cases (New York: School of Social Work, 1919).

Helen Fradkin, The Adoption Home Study (Trenton, NJ: Bureau of Children's Services, 1963).

Raymond Mondloh, “Changing Practice in the Adoption Home Study,” Child Welfare 48 (March 1969):148-156.

Charlotte Towle, “The Evaluation of Homes in Preparation for Child Placement,” Mental Hygiene 11 (July 1927):460-481.

Illegitimacy

E. Wayne Carp, “Professional Social Workers, Adoption, and the Problem of Illegitimacy, 1915-1945,” Journal of Policy History 6 (1994):161-184.

Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

Marion E. Kenworthy, “The Mental Hygiene Aspects of Illegitimacy,” Mental Hygiene 5 (July 1921):499-508.

Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Maud Morlock, "Wanted: A Square Deal for the Baby Born Out of Wedlock," Child 10 (May 1946):167-169.

U.S. Children's Bureau, Children of Illegitimate Birth and Measures for Their Protection (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926).

Indian Adoption Project and the Indian Child Welfare Act

Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York: Warner Books, 1996).

Robert Benson, ed., Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).

Joan Heifetz Hollinger, “Beyond the Best Interests of the Tribe: The Indian Child Welfare Act and the Adoption of Indian Children,” University of Detroit Law Review 66 (1989):451-501.

Marilyn Irvin Holt, Indian Orphanages (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).

Sondra Jones, “'Redeeming' the Indian: The Enslavement of Indian Children in New Mexico and Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67 (1999):220-241.

Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).

Arnold Lyslo, “Adoptive Placement of American Indian Children With Non-Indian Families,” in Readings in Adoption, ed. I. Evelyn Smith (New York: Philosophical Library, 1963), 231-236.

Steven Unger, ed., The Destruction of American Indian Families (New York: Association on American Indian Affairs, 1977).

Infertility

Jill Bialosky and Helen Schulman, eds., Wanting a Child: Twenty-Two Writers on Their Difficult But Mostly Successful Quests for Parenthood in a High-Tech Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Arlene Skolnick, “Solomon’s Children: The New Biologism, Psychological Parenthood, Attachment Theory, and the Best Interests Standard,” in Mary Ann Mason, Arlene Skolnick, and Stephen D. Sugarman, eds., All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 236-255.

Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

International Adoptions

Howard Alstein and Rita Simon, Intercountry Adoption: A Multinational Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1990).

Elizabeth Bartholet, Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

Laura Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption,” Gender & History 15 (2003):179-200.

Kirsten Lovelock, “Intercountry Adoption as a Migratory Practice: A Comparative Analysis of Intercountry Adoption and Immigration Policy and Practice in the United States, Canada and New Zealand in the Post WWII Period,” International Migration Review 34, no. 3 (Fall 2000):907-949.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Theft of Life,” Society 27, no. 6 (September/October 1990):57-62.

Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and SunYung Shin, eds., Outsiders Within: Racial Crossings and Adoption Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006).

J-N

H. David Kirk, author of Shared Fate

H. David Kirk, Adoptive Kinship: A Modern Institution in Need of Reform (Toronto: Butterworths, 1981).

H. David Kirk, Looking Back, Looking Forward: An Adoptive Father's Sociological Testament (Indianapolis, IN: Perspective Press, 1995).

B.J. Tansey, ed., Exploring Adoptive Family Life: The Collected Adoption Papers of H. David Kirk (Port Angeles, Washington: Ben-Simon Publications, 1988).

Matching

Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001).

Ellen Herman, “The Difference Difference Makes: Justine Wise Polier and Religious Matching in Twentieth-Century Child Adoption,” Religion and American Culture 10 (Winter 2000):57-98.

Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Judith Modell and Naomi Dambacher, “Making a 'Real' Family: Matching and Cultural Biologism in American Adoption,” Adoption Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1997):3-33.

Minimum Standards

Ellen Herman, “The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption,” Journal of Social History 36 (Winter 2002):339-385.

Mazie Hough, “'To Conserve the Best of the Old': The Impact of Professionalization on Adoption in Maine,” Maine History 40 (Fall 2001):190-218.

Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, eds., Formative Years: Children's Health in the United States, 1880-2000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

U.S. Children’s Bureau, Standards of Child Welfare: A Report of the Children's Bureau Conferences, U.S. Children's Bureau Conference Series No. 1, Bureau Publication No. 60 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1919).

U.S. Children’s Bureau, Minimum Standards for Child Welfare: Adopted by the Washington and Regional Conferences on Child Welfare, 1919, Conference Series No. 2, Bureau Publication No. 62 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919).

O-R

Orphan Trains

Bruce Bellingham, “Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” in The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis, ed. Peter Mandler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 123-160.

Annette Riley Fry, “The Children's Migration,” American Heritage (1974):4-10, 79-81.

Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

Placing-Out

Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago, 1995)

Matthew A. Crenson, Building the Invisible Orphanage: The Prehistory of the American Welfare System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Tim Hacsi, “From Indenture to Family Foster Care: A Brief History of Child Placing,” in A History of Child Welfare, ed. Eve P. Smith and Lisa A. Merkel-Holguín (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 155-173.

U.S. Children's Bureau, The Work of Child-Placing Agencies, Part I. A Special Study of Ten Agencies Caring for Dependent Children by Catharine P. Hewins and L. Josephine Webster; Part II. Health Supervision of Children Placed in Foster Homes by Mary L. Evans, Bureau Publication No. 171 ( Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927).

Justine Wise Polier

Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997), chap. 6.

Ellen Herman, “The Difference Difference Makes: Justine Wise Polier and Religious Matching in Twentieth-Century Child Adoption,” Religion and American Culture 10 (Winter 2000):57-98.

Rachel Nash, “Justine Wise Polier: The Conscience of the Juvenile Court” (senior honors thesis, Harvard College, 1998).

Justine Wise Polier, “Adoption and Law,” Pediatrics 20 (August 1957):372-377.

Justine Wise Polier, Juvenile Justice in Double Jeopardy: The Distanced Community and Vengeful Retribution (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989).

Justine Wise Polier, “Religion and Child-Care Services,” Social Service Review 30 (June 1956):132-135.

S-T

Search and Reunion

Florence Fisher, The Search for Anna Fisher (New York: Arthur Fields Books, 1973).

Joyce Maguire Pavao, The Family of Adoption (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

Arthur D. Sorosky, Annette Baran, and Reuben Pannor, The Adoption Triangle: Sealed or Opened Records: How They Affect Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents (San Antonio: Corona Publishing, 1978).

Single Parent Adoptions

Juliet Horne, “Single Adopters in the U.S.,” Adoption & Fostering 8 (1984):40-41.

Robert Klose, Adopting Alyosha: A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998).

Hope Marindin, The Handbook for Single Adoptive Parents, rev. ed. (Chevy Chase, MD: Committee for Single Adoptive Parents, 1997).

Jane Mattes, Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood (New York: Times Books, 1994).

Naomi Miller, Single Parents by Choice: A Growing Trend in Family Life (New York: Insight Books, 1992).

Loretta Renn, “The Single Woman as Foster Mother," in Studies of Children, ed. Gladys Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 59-95.

“Should a single person adopt a child? Good Housekeeping 169 (August 1969):12, 14, 16.

Social Work

John H. Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Miriam Van Waters, “The New Morality and the Social Worker,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work (Chicago, 1929), 65-79.

Daniel Walkowitz, Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Special Needs Adoptions

Florence G. Brown, “Adoption of Children With Special Needs” (New York: Child Welfare League of America, March 1958).

Alfred Kadushin, “A Study of Adoptive Parents of Hard-to-Place Children,” Social Casework 43 (May 1962):227-233.

Michael Schapiro, A Study of Adoption Practice, Volume III: Adoption of Children With Special Needs (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1956).

Jessie Taft

James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001), 66-76.

Virginia P. Robinson, ed., Jessie Taft: Therapist and Social Work Educator, A Professional Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962).

Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chap 5.

Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction to Jessie Taft, 'The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness',” Hypatia 8, no. 2 (Spring 1993):215-218.

Jessie Taft, “The Need for Psychological Interpretation in the Placement of Dependent Children,” Child Welfare League of America Bulletin No. 6 (April 1922).

Jessie Taft, “A Changing Psychology in Child Welfare,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 151 (September 1930):121-129.

Jessie Taft, ed., The Role of the Baby in the Placement Process (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 1946).

Jessie Taft, ed., Social Case Work With Children: Studies in Structure and Process (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 1940).

Sophie van Senden Theis

Frances Lockridge and Sophie van S. Theis, Adopting a Child (New York: Greenberg, 1947).

Sophie van S. Theis, “The Passing of the Orphanage,” New York Times Magazine, January 18 1953, 16.

Sophie van S. Theis, “Some Aspects of Good Adoptive Practices,” Child Welfare 19 (November 1940):1-3.

Transracial Adoptions

David C. Anderson, Children of Special Value: Interracial Adoption in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971).

Elizabeth Bartholet, “Where Do Black Children Belong? The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139 (1991):1163-1256.

J. Douglas Bates, Gift Children: A Story of Race, Family, and Adoption in a Divided America (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993).

Laura Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption,” Gender & History 15 (2003):179-200.

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Quarry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Hawley Fogg-Davis, The Ethics of Transracial Adoption (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

Lucille J. Grow and Deborah Shapiro, Black Children—White Parents: A Study of Transracial Adoption (New York: Child Welfare League of America, 1974).

Joan Heifetz Hollinger, A Guide to the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 as Amended by the Interethnic Adoption Provisions of 1996 (Washington, DC: ABA Center on Children and the Law, 1998).

Ruth-Arlene W. Howe, “Transracial Adoption (TRA): Old Prejudices and Discrimination Float Under a New Halo,” Boston University Public Interest Law Journal 6 (Winter 1997):409-472.

Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), chaps. 9-12.

Joyce A Ladner, Mixed Families: Adopting Across Racial Boundaries (Garden City: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1977).

John Neufeld, Edgar Allan (New York: S.G. Phillips, 1968).

Joe Rigert, All Together: An Unusual American Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

Barbara Katz Rothman, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

Rita James Simon and Howard Alstein, Transracial Adoption (New York: Wiley, 1977).

Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and SunYung Shin, eds., Outsiders Within: Racial Crossings and Adoption Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006).

U-Z

U.S. Children's Bureau

Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Molly Ladd-Taylor, ed., Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers' Letters to the Children's Bureau, 1915-1932 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986).

Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

U.S. Children's Bureau, Foster-Home Care for Dependent Children, Bureau Publication No. 136 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926).

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To learn more about The Adoption History Project, please contact Ellen Herman
Department of History, University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1288
(541) 346-3699
E-mail: adoption@uoregon.edu
About the Project and the Author
© Ellen Herman