Imagined, intended, forsaken : The status of the mother in a century of Australian adoption advertisements

Book chapter

Swain, Shurlee. (2019). Imagined, intended, forsaken : The status of the mother in a century of Australian adoption advertisements. In In Pascoe Leahy, Carla and Bueskens, Petra (Ed.). Australian mothering : Historical and sociological perspectives pp. 111-126 Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20267-5_5

Publication dates
Authors	Swain, Shurlee
Editors	Pascoe Leahy, Carla and Bueskens, Petra
Abstract	Adoption has always been a story about competing and conflicting claims to the status of mother. This chapter analyses the invocation of the maternal in the more than 35,000 classified adoption advertisements published in Australian newspapers between 1840 and 1954. Paul Bruthiaux has argued that classified advertisements were models of ‘linguistic simplicity,’ highly coded communications in which authors chose from an established repertoire of words and phrases to get their message across, but sequenced them in novel ways. The chapter examines sequencing of the word ‘mother’ in advertisements seeking or offering a child for adoption, looking for evidence of change over time, and locating this analysis in the context of debates around the transformation of adoption from a mercantile to an emotional transaction.
Page range	111-126
Year	2019
Book title	Australian mothering : Historical and sociological perspectives
Publisher	Palgrave Macmillan
Place of publication	Cham, Switzerland
ISBN	9783030202668
	9783030202675
	9783030202699
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20267-5_5
Scopus EID	2-s2.0-85085831690
Web address (URL)	https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/acu/detail.action?docID=6031962
Publisher's version	License All rights reserved File Access Level Controlled
Output status	Published
Print	2019
Online	29 Jan 2020
Publication process dates
Deposited	08 Aug 2022

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