Memoir of a surrogate's daughter: an autobiography

This is a personal history reflecting upon the part of my life that identified me as an adopted child. I was born in Vancouver British Columbia in 1940. My new identity grew within the social, political, and cultural domain of patriarchy in western Canada. My birth mystery is unravelled; difference between biological and legal kinship is explored; and differences of gender, class, and race limiting possibilities for self-definition in Canadian society are researched. Uncomfortable questions about nature and nurture and the adoption process are also raised. The writer recognizes that double standards apply to autobiographic writing whereby discourses by Augustine, Descarts, and Rousseau form a universal standard against which other works are measured. However, their academically ‘respectable’ models of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’ are void of female experience. The nature of female experience is, in contrast, the focus of feminist autobiography, and it is the model I have chosen for this study.