An unwed mother: The source of babies for childless couples; a scapegoat for rising tax bills; a symbol of the wages of gender insubordination; the cause of all problems in the black community; the typical American girl--the variety of roles assigned to the "unwed mother" in the postwar era highlights the consistent vulnerability of sexually active girls and women. It also reveals the shifting requirements of a society which depends upon sustaining gender, class, and racial inequality under changing historical conditions.
Despite the fact that black and white "unwed mothers" in the pre-Roe v. Wade era experienced the same biological events, their lived experiences were very different. "Wake Up Little Susie" surveys the public policies, community attitudes, and private responses to illegitimate pregnancy, maternity, and children that structured these women's experiences. It demonstrates how female sexuality and fertility, and the single mother herself, have been used as proving grounds for theories of race, gender, motherhood, and social stability. Rickie Solinger provides the first published analyses of maternity home programs for unwed mothers from 1945 to 1965, as well as 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 which assumed they would keep their babies and aimed to prevent them from having more.
Incorporating the responses of social service and political professionals of this era to the "crisis" of out-of-wedlock pregnancy with letters, poems, and statements from the pregnant women themselves, "Wake Up Little Susie" offers readers an arena to explore the intersections of female biology and social constructions of gender, race, and class.
Industry Reviews
"This is a powerful and devastating book. Though it is scholarly, thoroughly researched and documented, it is also a touchingly personal book. Excerpts from case histories make it heartbreaking, consciousness raising, anger-producing and humbling."
-"New Directions For Women
"Solinger's book--the most brilliantly acute analysis of the central role of sexuality and race in postwar American culture yet written--is of particular relevance now that the "Roe v. Wade era seems to be coming to an end."
-"In These Times
"The assault on single pregnancy--whether Murphy Brown's or the anonymous African-American teenager's on the evening news--encodes an attack on civil rights and women's rights. "Wake Up Little Susie is indeed a wake-up call, warning us of the danger of the demand that women fix the body politic by letting others control their bodies."
-"The Nation
""Wake Up Little Susie is one of the best books about women and reproduction in years. Rickie Solinger shows the deep and powerful meanings that have been attached to unmarried pregnant women, and the way in which they have appeared as a social resource for others rather than as subjects."
-Linda Gordon, Florence Kelley Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, author of "Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, and "Women, The State and W
..."the research, topic, and approach make this an exceptional work of social history. It captures the atmosphere of public coercion, stigma, and panic associated with pregnancy, abortion, and the entire subject of women and sexuality in the post war era. Certainly weaving the public policy and social implications of pregnancyfor unwed' Black and white women advances both feminist and Black scholarship."
-Barbara Omolade, City College of New York, Center for Worker Education
