From Melosh, Barbara. “Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narrative and the Politics of Identity.” Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives, edited by E. Wayne Carp, U of Michigan P, 2004, pp. 218–246.

Adoption is Other in a culture and kinship system organized by biological reproduction. This chapter examines autobiographical narratives of adopted persons, birth mothers, and adoptive parents as uneasy negotiations of identity. Memoirs of adoption by adoptive parents first appeared in the 1930s, but adoption autobiography was not established as a recognizable subgenre until the 1970s, when first adopted persons and then women who had relinquished children for adoption published their stories as testimony of their critique of adoption practices. Autobiographical construction of self is social and historical. These narratives illuminate the experience and cultural meaning of adoption, even as their explorations of anomalous families illuminate, by contrast, contemporary discourses of motherhood, family, and cultural identity more generally. During the period 1945–1965, adoption practice became more uniform than it had been before or would be after.