Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption

This work looks at the history of adoption in American society and reveals how the practice and attitudes about it have evolved from colonial days to the 1990s. The author argues that it is ever more apparent that secrecy and disclosure are the defining issues in American adoptions. He discovers that openess used to be the norm before World War II and that this ceased due to a convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends.