Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe V Wade

by Rickie Solinger

Book Overview

Rickie Solinger provides the first published analyses of maternity home programs for unwed mothers from 1945 to 1965, and examines how nascent cultural and political constructs such as the "population bomb" and the "sexual revolution" reinforced racially-specific public policy initiatives. Such initiatives encouraged white women to relinquish their babies, spawning a flourishing adoption market, while they subjected black women to social welfare policies...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 041590448X
• ISBN13: 9780415904483
• Release Date: February 1992
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Great study on pregnancy pre-roe v wade

This is a great study on what it was like for women, both black and white, to deal with pregnancy outside the institution of marriage. This book is well-researched and it reads like a book you would read for a college class so it is not something to just pick up and read on the beach. This book is highly informative and easy to read. The author has organized each chapter well and there is an extensive biography at the end of the book in case readers are interested as to where she obtained her information or who are interested to get other books on the same topic. This book took me awhile to get through because it is not light reading. It is dense and has a great number of arguments and details in it but its worth the read if you are interested in post-WWII unwed pregnancy and how different the experience was depending on your race. This book definitely makes the female readers of today grateful for the Roe v Wade case that made abortion a legal practice in this country. I would only recommend this book to people who are truely interested in the subject matter. Otherwise you will find this book dry and boring.

An insight into how Moms lost their children to adoption

I am a reunited Mom and as I was reading this book I felt the shame begin to lift from my soul. I have been asking myself why I didn't fight harder to keep my baby and after reading "Wake up Little Susie" I see there was a conserted agenda of our government, religious institutions,and those of the adoption industry to separate our children from us in the name of what others deemed was for the best.In truth it was both a punishment for female sexuality and also we were used to provide children for couples unable to procreate. The problem is those same people did not have to live with the wounds of us Moms and our children when they decided that unmarried woman were not worthy to parent their own flesh and blood in the marketting of our children.I am freeing my shame and I am now putting it where it belongs on those that profited off of the hearts of woman and children. Shame on them! And thank you Rickie Solinger for your honest account on what was done to us . Linda Webber

An Accurate Portrayal

This book helped me understand my mother's surrender of her right to raise me. It has helped tremendously in the reunion between my mom and me. I was especially interested to find that giving away the rights to raise one's child was more of a European-American phenomenon than an African-American one. I remember taking a class once with an African-American woman who was trying to research her family tree. I felt a great kinship with her because my own roots were severed, by adoption rather than slavery. How cruel for society and the adoption industry to coerce mothers into making their babies commodities. I would like to believe that practice has stopped, but even though the maternity homes are no longer there, the coercion still is. Reading Solinger's book made me think and do even more research into the adoption industry. I'm so thankful to Solinger for writing it!

Stunningly accurate account of the unwed mother experience

Neither "tiresome", "repetitive" nor "dry" (as stated by one reviewer). On the contrary, this book is exciting and refreshingly insightful. Only a "birth" mother can attest to the truth and honesty of the experience Ms. Solinger painstakingly, courageously and historically details in "Wake Up Little Susie".

Ground-breaking! Solinger has dared to tell the truth.

When I first read Ricki Solinger's book I could not believe that she had hit upon the same phenomenon as I had discovered in my doctoral research. I found her work thorough, scholarly yet biting. In no way is it restricted to those women who lost their babies to the adoption industry, but is an insightful view into the repressed '60s which many like to think of as "swinging' and sexually free. Read Solinger's work along with Wini Brienes' "Young, White and Miserable" and Susan Douglas's "Where the Girls Are" and you will get an accurate picture of what the '50s and'60s' were *really* like. I know - 'cause I was well and truly there.