Numbers as Narratives: Quantification and the Growth of the Adoption Research Industry in the United States

Abstract

Numbers as Narratives: Quantification and the Growth of the Adoption Research Industry in the United States By Ellen Herman Stories have played starring roles in adoption history. In European and American literature, from William Shakespeare to Frances Hodgson Burnett and Barbara Kingsolver, adoption plots have been read as mythic tales addressing universal questions of belonging and identity.1 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adoption narratives were moral parables, vehicles for modern cultural messages about childhood innocence and maternal nurture. In the past halfcentury , first-person stories have been central to both self-making and the mobilization of movements for search, reunion, and records reform.2 Florence Fisher’s The Search for Anna Fisher was perhaps the best known during the early phases of postwar adoption activism. The widely read 1973 memoir doubled as an explanation for why birth records should be unconditionally opened to adult adoptees. Many other examples exist, including Jean Paton’s The Adopted Break Silence, published in 1954 by an organization called, not coincidentally, the Life History Study Center. During the past several decades, as the United States has witnessed a renaissance in confessional forms of expression, numerous adoption watchers have commented on the centrality of life history, personal testimony, and the evidence of experience—what we might call “story-truth” (O’Brien 203–04).3 Few things have shaped adoption history and reform movements more powerfully than the narrative act of “coming out.” There is another much less publicized but critically important method by which adoption was known and changed during the twentieth century: counting. For the past century in the United States, adoption and its participants have been numerically aggregated so as to make adoption visible and manageable. Quantification was considered inseparable from efforts to govern adoption more effectively, reducing its risks and improving the lives of its participants. This had significant consequences,suchaswhatwemightcallthedisseminationof“numbertruths ”: statistical facts about what was “average,” “typical,” or “to be expected” in adoption. “Number-truths” have sometimes confirmed popular perceptions about adoptees and adoptive family-making, but Adoption & Culture 2 (2009) 124 they have also offered surprises that revised widespread stereotypes about adoption, its participants, practices, and outcomes. Recent historical scholarship has illustrated two important patterns in numbertruth . First, trust in numbers became most prominent precisely where trust in people was least likely: in hotly contested areas of social life and public policy.4 Second, quests for quantitative objectivity helped to inaugurate new forms of statistical subjectivity among American citizens.5 At once intensely anonymous and voyeuristic, the numbers disseminated by polls, surveys, and quantitative inquiries of all kinds flooded over modern Americans, promoting new forms of self- and national consciousness. Numbers increasingly saturated the lives of adoptees and their families, as they did citizens in general. This article briefly illustrates number-truths in twentieth-century adoption history by outlining three novel genres of quantitative research about adoption: field studies, outcome studies, and epidemiological studies. Qualitative approaches—ethnographies, case studies, and interviews, for instance—persisted as methods of accumulating knowledge about adoption, but the quantitative approaches outlined here contributed disproportionately to the remarkable growth of a modern adoption research industry that devoted itself to perfecting adoptive kinship on the basis of systematic, scientific, and invariably numerical findings.6 Inthe1910sand1920s,fieldstudiesconductedinordertogatherbasic data on adoptions represented the first wave of empirical inquiries about adoption, generating summary portraits of family-making in snapshot fashion, at fixed points in time and space. Court records were typically utilized as the documentary basis for field studies, which were generally initiated with the goal of promoting more effective legal regulation of family-making. These studies set out to answer the following questions: How many adoptions were taking place in a given county or state during a given period? At what ages were children adopted? By whom? Who arranged these adoptions? Field studies created aggregate profiles of adoption that were used for two specific purposes. The first was to determine if states’ regulatory requirements were adequate—usually they were not—and the second was to discover if regulations were being followed—usually they were not. To offer only one example, the Children’s Commission of Pennsylvania studied more than a thousand adoptions in thirteen counties...