| Description |
212 pages ; 25 cm |
| Contents |
1. The 1850s and Their Echoes: Two Case Studies -- 2. Money Talks: The Displaced Child, 1860-1885 -- 3. Melodrama and the Displaced Child, 1886-1906 -- 4. Metaphor and the Displaced Child, 1886-1906 -- 5. Adoption and Women, 1907-1918 -- 6. Adoption Up to Date: The Rhetoric of Mass Individuality, 1919-1929 |
| Summary |
"Little Strangers examines the representations of adoption and foster care produced over the intervening years. Claudia Nelson argues that adoption texts reflect changing attitudes toward many important social issues, including immigration and poverty, heredity and environment, individuality and citizenship, gender, and the family. She considers orphan fiction for children, magazine stories and articles, legal writings, social work conference proceedings, and discussions of heredity and child psychology. Nelson's ambitious scope provides for an analysis of the extent to which specialist and mainstream adoption discourse overlapped, as well as the ways in which adoption and foster care captivated the public imagination."--BOOK JACKET |
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"When Massachusetts passed America's first comprehensive adoption law in 1851, the usual motive for taking in an unrelated child was presumed to be the need for cheap help. Institutions housed young children but expected to place them as they became old enough to be useful; foster parents contracted to trade care for the child's services. But by 1929 - the first year that every state had an adoption law - the adoptee's main function was seen as emotional. Adopting strangers' children had become commonplace, and infants, who perform no work, were now more readily placed than older children." |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Adoption -- United States -- History.
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Orphans -- United States -- History.
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Adoption in literature.
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| LC no. |
2002014747 |
| ISBN |
0253342244 (cloth : alk. paper) |
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