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| Reaching Back, Reaching Out |
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The Adoption History Project
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| Historian Ellen Herman created her adoption history website as an offshoot of her NSF-funded research on adoption issues. |
In newspaper articles, magazine features, the evening news and now — believe it or not — on reality TV, stories about adoption capture the public’s imagination. Ellen Herman, a history professor at the UO who has been collecting such stories, believes the topic attracts a broad audience because it raises fundamental human concerns.
“Adoption in some ways is very unique and at the same time very universal. It is a form of family that affects a tiny minority of Americans while addressing issues of identity and belonging that affect us all,” she said.
Herman has produced a website that explores one of the more unfamiliar aspects of adoption: its modern history. Herman uses history to probe various adoption issues — its human interest, controversy, and relation to science — and also as a way bridging the gap between the public and academia.
The Human Connection
“I’ve been bombarded with emails,” said Herman. The high public interest in adoption became even more apparent to Herman after the launch of her project in June of 2003. “I’ve gotten some fascinating feedback, mostly from the audiences that I wanted to reach,” she said. “A lot of people write to tell me their stories.” Sometimes, adoptees write Herman asking for assistance with connecting to their past. Many individuals who have discovered their Native American heritage, for example, have written for advice on locating lost relatives and tribes.
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| Orphan Train 1904 |
The Adoption History Project provides a service to its visitors by offering profiles of numerous people, topics, and organizations. On the same page, readers can access documents from Bastard Nation, a radical adoptee- rights organization, and Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize winning novelist and adoption reform advocate from the mid-20th century.
Stories and narratives about adoption — documents with a human face — are what lured Herman into adoption research in the first place. “People have lots of personal connections to adoption and to family-making. The compelling human drama of adoption really appealed to me.”
Evolving Attitudes
Oregonians weighed in on a controversial adoption issue in 1998, when voters passed a ballot measure allowing adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates. The new law angered some birth parents who said they were guaranteed secrecy when the adoptions took place. A few anonymous birth mothers filed suit against the state of Oregon, demanding the law be overturned. They failed, and Ballot Measure 58 is now state law.
Herman believes history can shed light on how changing attitudes and values influence issues like open records. “There are things I can do to communicate what a source of terrible shame it was for many unmarried women and their families to have an unwanted pregnancy just a few decades ago,” she said. “It’s an example of something young people today may not realize. It suggests that history can make an immediate difference in how people understand something that has enormous personal and legal consequences in the world.”
Over time, shifting values have changed the focus of our public debates. Today, interracial adoptions may raise eyebrows, but this wasn’t always a primary concern. “The whole idea of crossing religious lines was as least as controversial in the past as the debate over race is today. If you look back and try to understand what that conversation was about, and why it pushed buttons, you can gain real insight.”
Creating “Kinship by Design”
Herman created the Adoption History Project as an offshoot of her current research on the history of adoption science. Supported by the National Science Foundation, the project examines why and how social and behavioral scientists considered adoption an unusual social laboratory.
“Because non-relative adoptions separated parental genes from family environment, adoption amounted to the sort of scientific experiment that could not otherwise be ethically conducted with human beings,” she says. The Adoption History Project provides material about research studies that tested theories of nature and nurture, measured adoptees’ developmental outcomes, and treated psychopathologies.
The connection between science and adoption is the basis for Herman’s forthcoming book, Kinship by Design. “Kinship by design” is a term I use to describe a history of self-conscious efforts to make families up on purpose, on the basis of systematic research and regulation. The point of kinship by design has been to maximize the ability to predict and control outcomes and minimize the mysteries, uncertainties, and risks of family-formation. To think about adoption in this way is to turn it into a social engineering project.”
Making Research Accessible
Fueling public interest in academic history is one of Herman’s main objectives, and the reason why she chose to put her work on the web. “It’s a different sort of thing to reach deliberately beyond the community of scholars, and to say that history matters to all people. I consider that part of my responsibility as a historian,” she said.
With help from the George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the UO’s Wired Humanities Project, Herman was able to create a viewer-friendly site that both educates and entertains. Viewers not only have the opportunity to learn about little-known facets of adoption, but also about the history of American law, science, culture, and government. By connecting a subject that attracts general interest with historical research and new media, Herman hopes to draw attention to the importance of university research. She also hopes to provide a public service to those whose struggle with the past is deeply personal.
“History can teach us that we are not the first people to ever think of anything, to struggle with anything. One of the things that has always drawn me to history is knowing that I’m part of something bigger.”
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2004 University of Oregon
Updated October 28, 2004
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