Rickie Solinger provides an analysis of maternity home programmes for unwed mothers from 1945 to 1965, as well as examining 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.