Familial Fitness: Disability, Adoption, and Family in Modern America

The first social history of disability and difference in American  adoption, from the Progressive Era to the end of the twentieth century.

 Disability and child welfare, together and apart, are major concerns in  American society. Today, about 125,000 children in foster care are  eligible and waiting for adoption, and while many children wait more  than two years to be adopted, children with disabilities wait even  longer. In Familial Fitness, Sandra M. Sufian uncovers how disability  operates as a fundamental category in the making of the American family,  tracing major shifts in policy, practice, and attitudes about the  adoptability of disabled children over the course of the twentieth  century.

Chronicling the long, complex history of disability,  Familial Fitness explores how notions and practices of adoption have—and  haven’t—accommodated disability, and how the language of risk enters  into that complicated relationship. We see how the field of adoption  moved from widely excluding children with disabilities in the early  twentieth century to partially including them at its close. As Sufian  traces this historical process, she examines the forces that shaped, and  continue to shape, access to the social institution of family and  invites readers to rethink the meaning of family itself.