Wake Up Little Susie

Rickie Soliger seeks to unravel the complex, disturbing reality of single parent pregnancy in the post World War II era, exploring the way in which race, more than any other factor, defined the experience of unwed motherhood.

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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 which assumed they would keep their babies and aimed to prevent them from having more.