Related link: Melosh the featured guest on Chronicle of Higher Education website

What makes adoption tick in America?
Read seminarian Barbara Melosh's new book

Mother, spouse, college professor of English and History, commuting seminary student, aspiring pastor and author of three books. Whew! Seminarian Barbara Melosh of Wilmington, DE, seems to have energy to burn, and she is looking forward to her new life as a parish pastor in a year or two.

But for now, let's talk about her latest enterprise, a recently published book on the history of adoption in the United States – Strangers and Kin, The American Way of Adoption (Harvard University Press, 2002).

When Melosh and her spouse, Gary Kulik, adopted their 5-months-old son, Mike, in 1985, the complicated adoption process sparked a host of questions in the mind of Melosh, who was then becoming a mother for the first time.

"Adoption is an unusual process," says Melosh, who teaches English and History at George Mason University while she studies at seminary. "So much paperwork, and questions about subjects like infertility. The adoption agency looks through your house, researches where prospective parents have come from. The whole process says a lot about what we think of the family as an institution, about our fears and hopes for children and parents."

The experience started Melosh wondering about writing a new book, as she changed Mike's diapers. (She had previously written two works – about the history of murals, sculpture, theater and culture in the 1930s, and about the history of nursing.) Melosh discovered no history had ever been written about adoption in the United States. "Adoption is accepted more readily here (in the United States) but it is still viewed as different and strange. What's it all about?" she says. The book is a result of her curiosity and love of history in a variety of contexts.

To prepare for her writing, done in the late 1990s, she scrutinized closely the records of more than 400 adoption cases in Wilmington. Her research helped her comprehend the history of adoption on a wide variety of personal case history levels.

Melosh notes that adoption began in the U.S. in the 1920s, as prospective adopters eagerly sought out children without families, gradually overcoming the skepticism of child welfare reformers. These experts were dismantling the orphanages, concerned about children raised in institutions, but they doubted that strangers could become family. Instead, they first supported "placing out" – what we would now call foster care – as a substitute for orphanages. But as they observed successful adoptive families, experts soon came to favor adoption themselves. A broad white middle-class consensus supported adoption, and the numbers of adoptive families peaked in the 1940s and 1950s.

But the numbers of adoptions began to drop precipitously in the 1970s in America. Why? Melosh says her research told her that many at the time were concluding that adoption was approached "with too much zeal" as a way to deal with out-of-wedlock births and unplanned pregnancies. The legalization of abortion likely had some effect, though births out of wedlock – traditionally one of the main reasons for adoptive placement – continued to increase through the 1970s and 1980s. But female-headed families were becoming more accepted, and relinquishing a child for adoption became widely stigmatized.

What are several factors Melosh thinks worth noting especially about the practice of adoption in America? "Adoption is worth looking at as a fundamentally American institution," she says. Factors behind the historic acceptance of adoption include the openness of American society, the upward mobility of many different kinds of people in America and the ethnic and racial diversity of the United States. She said adoption's acceptance in America is also "a testament to the optimism about social engineering" in the society. But she adds adoption has been more accepted in some periods of American history than in others, depending on the mood about different kinds of family arrangements, uneasiness over diversity, fear of the "risks" of adoption, or a conviction that "only blood kinship counts."

As for adoptive offspring Mike, he is now 17, has talent as a computer problem-solver, an automobile mechanic and loves mathematics.

About her experience, Melosh says she wants to "reassure anyone that adoption is a wonderful way to form a family. Don't be scared off by the language of risk that many people bring to the idea of adoption. Parenting is always risky! Be bold," she says. For her, adoption of Mike has been a reminder that parents do not "own" a child. "A child is not an extension of 'me'," she says. "Adoption is part of our theological heritage too. We belong to Christ by adoption, St. Paul writes. Jesus tells us to welcome the stranger, and we are called to reach beyond the boundaries of blood kinship, nation and tribe."

Melosh earned her undergraduate degree from Middlebury in 1972 and was awarded a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1979, concentrating in American Civilization. Her first teaching job was in the history department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She was awarded a graduate degree in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1983 and has taught at George Mason for 20 years, attaining the rank of assistant professor by the age of 30 and full professor by the time she was 42. Having taught for two decades, she finds herself "drawn to the ministry. I once wanted to be a hospital chaplain." But she now believes that parish ministry is the best way for her to be in "more direct service" to others.

Her spouse, Gary Kulik, is head of the library, academic programs and publishing for Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, a Wilmington, DE, library and museum that specializes in American decorative arts and includes an extensive garden and fine arts library.

Melosh has found seminary study to be stimulating and filled with commuting challenges. She has a 135-mile trip to her teaching assignments at George Mason and a 45-mile commute to the seminary campus. She's completed Clinical Pastoral Education training at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, but still has an internship field work assignment ahead of her. "I feel like I have been a full member of two classes of students here because of my flex schedule," Melosh says.

She credits the relationships she has developed in her home congregation, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Wilmington with much of her inspiration and calls the congregation's pastor, the Rev. Thomas R. Swears, both a mentor and a model.