Wake up little Susie :single pregnancy and race before Roe v. Wade

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 erato 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.

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.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 290-311) and index.