- Paperback: 328 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; Reissue edition (Mar 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0415908949
- ISBN-13: 978-0415908948
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,185,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
-"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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Race-specific explanations and experiences of single pregnancy in the postwar era shored up evidence of difference and hierarchy of race. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Race-specific explanations and experiences of single pregnancy in the postwar era shored up evidence of difference and hierarchy of race. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Not for everybody, BUT if you are a birthmother who relinquished a child 1940-1975, or an adoptee or adoptive parent involved in adoption from same period, READ this. The attitudes and treatment have changed so much that reading this is important for anyone involved in an adoption during that period of time. It also reveals interesting differences in attitudes and behavior between white, middle-class America and other groups.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
An insight into how Moms lost their children to adoption
28 Nov 2002
Format:Paperback
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
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Stunningly accurate account of the unwed mother experience
12 Oct 1999
Format:Hardcover
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".
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
An Accurate Portrayal
19 July 2000
Format:Hardcover
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!
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