The Sentimentalization of Adoption: A Critical Note on Viviana Zelizer's Pricing the Priceless Child

Abstract

7 The Sentimentalization of Adoption: A Critical Note on Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child by E. Wayne Carp To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children,1 Brigette Soland, an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and Emily Bruce, a graduate student in the department of History at the University of Minnesota, organized a symposium to celebrate and honor Zelizer’s book at the annual meeting of the 2011 Social Science History Association. The short, informal symposium papers, enthusiastically praising the book, have recently been published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Paula S. Fass, Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, described Zelizer’s study as one of two “foundational” books in the field of Childhood and Children’s History (457).2 Daniel Thomas Cook, an associate professor of childhood studies and sociology at Rutgers University, called Pricing the Priceless Child “a must-read for anyone interested in grasping the emergence of what some may call ‘modern childhood’” (468). Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a research associate in the Populations Study Center at the University of Pennsylvania, proclaimed the book’s archival research base “deep, thorough, and imaginative” (462). Barrie Thorne, Professor Emerita of sociology and gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, like several of the other symposium contributors, “routinely assigned Pricing” in her university sociology courses, where “‘Viviana Zelizer’ has become a household name” (474). It is almost unprecedented that any book, even a classic, can still be held in such high regard and deemed relevant to contemporary readers nearly thirty years after its publication. In stark contrast to Pricing the Priceless Child, Patrick J. Ryan, Associate Professor of Childhood and Social Institutions at King’s University College (Western), has maintained that PhilippeAriès’s Centuries of Childhood, the other book Fass described as foundational, “is the most harshly critiqued work in the historiography of childhood” (566; for more information, see Heywood 343–65). What historical interpretation could prompt such passionate endorsement from so many distinguished scholars? The thesis of Pricing the Priceless Child is that in the United States, “a profound transformation” in the social value of children occurred during the period 1870–1930, when the nineteenthcentury useful child was displaced by the twentieth-century economically Adoption & Culture Vol. 5 (2017) 8 useless but emotionally priceless child (209). It was during this period, Zelizer argues, that regardless of social class, the sentimentalization of childhood intensified until “the new sacred child occupied a special and separate world” (209). She supports this interpretation in six chapters examining the economic and sentimental value of children. Topics include, inter alia, changing attitudes toward the death of a child, the struggle over child labor legislation, the controversy over children’s life insurance, the changing criteria for compensation for the accidental death of children, and the transformation in adoption and the creation of a black market in children. In chapter six, which treats the sentimentalization of adoption, Zelizer contextualizes her thesis by stating that nineteenth-century children who were placed out with Midwestern farm families were “valued” for their economic contribution to the family’s well-being. By midcentury, she argues,arevolutionarytransformationin“value”beganrenderingchildren’s contribution to the family economically valueless but sentimentally “priceless,” resulting in an upturn in adoptions. This sentimentalization of adoption, according to Zelizer, created “an unprecedented demand for children under three, especially infants” (192). Babies who could not be given away in the late nineteenth century were, by the first decades of the twentieth century, preferred by adoptive parents. Zelizer asserts that a paradoxical consequence of the advent of the sentimentalization of adoption was the growth of a black market in babies and the charging of fees by adoption agencies. As a result, there was a “greater commercialization and monetization of child life” (201). By the 1930s, the priceless child displaced the useful child. This essay reexamines Zelizer’s thesis by challenging her chronology about changing social attitudes toward and practices in adoption, the concomitant advent of adoption fees, and an...