Abstract
Policies, practices and attitudes in relation to adoption changed enormously during the three decades spanned by this book. After the First World War adoption was seen by many as a last resort for the care of unwanted illegitimate children. By 1950 it was an established way of setting up a family. In 1918 unmarried mothers had been figures of shame to be pitied, helped or despised; by the late 1940s they were increasingly invisible — either the providers of babies for childless couples or silently bringing up their children on their own. The years after the Second World War saw the distillation of a process that began during the interwar years in which the nuclear family — two parents and one or two children — became the dominant model. Adoption of the children of the unmarried fitted neatly into this.
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Notes
Mildred de M. Rudolf, Everybody’s Children: The Story of the Church of England Children’s Society 1921–48 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 96.
June Rose, Inside Barnardo’s: 120 Years of Caring for Children (London: Futura, 1987), p. 200.
Lettice Fisher, Twenty One Years and After, 1918–1946, The Story of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (London: NCUMC, 2nd ed, 1946), p. 19.
See Hera Cook, ‘The Long Sexual Revolution: British Women, Sex and Contraception in the Twentieth Century’ (DPhil thesis, University of Sussex 1999).
Elliot Slater and Moya Woodside, Patterns of Marriage: A Study of Marriage Relationships in the Urban Working Classes (London: Cassell & Company, 1951), p. 179.
Janet Fink, ‘Private Lives, Public Issues: Moral Panics and “The Family” in 20th-Century Britain’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, vol. 9/2 (2002), p. 139.
Erica Haimes and Noel Timms, Adoption, Identity and Social Policy: The Search for Distant Relatives (Gower, Hants 1985), p. 3.
Between 1961 and 1970 an average of 42 Scottish adoptees a year applied for their original birth certificates. This is 1.5 per thousand of adopted people over 17 years old. See John Triseliotis, In Search of Origins: The Experience of Adopted People (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 2.
Not surprisingly there are no overall figures for this but in Howe & Feast’s study of adopters who search for their parents 7 per cent were rejected out-right by the birthparent (i.e. 19 out of 274 people; 17 by their mother, 2 by their father) and another 9 per cent (24 people) had the contact terminated by the birth parent within a year. David Howe and Julia Feast, Adoption, Search & Reunion: The Long Term Experience of Adopted Adults (London: The Children’s Society, 2000), pp. 108, 111.
Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’ in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Vol. 2: People and their environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 27.
Julie Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood 1851–950 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), p. 76.
For this account I have used N. V. Lowe, ‘English Adoption Law: Past, Present, and Future’, in Sanford N. Katz, John Eekelaar and Mavis Maclean (eds), Cross Currents: Family Law and Policy in the United States and England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Caroline Bridge and Heather Swindells, Adoption: The Modern Law (Bristol: Family Law, 2003);
NCVO Briefing, ‘The Changing Role of Voluntary Agencies in Adoption’ (1982);
S. Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
David Howe and Julia Feast, Adoption, Search & Reunion: The Long Term Experience of Adopted Adults (London: The Children’s Society, 2000);
Erica Haimes and Noel Timms, Adoption, Identity and Social Policy: The Search for Distant Relatives (Gower, Hants 1985);
John Triseliotis, Evaluation of Adoption Policy and Practice (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1970).
Patricia Morgan, Adoption and the Care of Children: The British and American Experience (London: The IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1998).
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© 2009 Jenny Keating
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Keating, J. (2009). Conclusions — And Later Developments. In: A Child for Keeps. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582842_9
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