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Family Matters cuts through the sealed records, changing policies, and conflicting agendas that have obscured the history of adoption in America and reveals how the practice and attitudes about it have evolved from colonial days to the present.
Amid recent controversies over sealed adoption records and open adoption, it is ever more apparent that secrecy and disclosure are the defining issues in American adoptions - and these are also the central concerns of E. Wayne Carp's book.
Mining a vast range of sources (including for the first time confidential case records of a twentieth-century adoption agency), Carp makes a startling discovery: openness, not secrecy, has been the norm in adoption for most of our history; sealed records were a post-World War II aberration, resulting from the convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends.
Pursuing this idea, Family Matters offers surprising insights into various notions that have affected the course of adoption, among them Americans' complex feelings about biological kinship versus socially constructed families; the stigma of adoption, used at times to promote both openness and secrecy; and, finally, suspect psychoanalytic concepts, such as "genealogical bewilderment," and bogus medical terms, such as "adopted child syndrome," that paint all parties to adoption as psychologically damaged.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Adoptees, Adoption, Birthparents, Confidential communications, Family social work, History, Identification, Open adoption, Adoptie, Secret professionnel, Enfants adoptés, Gezinsrelaties, Service social familial, Histoire, Geheimhouding, Social Work, Geschichte, Adoption, united states, Adoptees, identification, New York Times reviewedPlaces
United statesShowing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
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1
Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption
April 7, 2000, Harvard University Press
Paperback
in English
- New Ed edition
0674001869 9780674001862
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2
Family matters: secrecy and disclosure in the history of adoption
1998, Harvard University Press
in English
0674796683 9780674796683
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- Created April 29, 2008
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September 28, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
August 18, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
April 26, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
August 6, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |