This book is essential reading for every member of the adoption triad, most particularly adoptive (or prospective adoptive parents)like myself. Many parents who seek to adopt are told literally hundreds of times that if they are lucky enough to adopt, it may take them many years to do so. Sometimes we hear this so often it becomes almost a tired mantra.

What Wake Up Little Suzie offers is the explanation for why adoption was so prevalent in the 1950's and 1960's and why it disappearing in recent times. Ricki Sollinger recounts the many pressures on women pregnant out-of-wedlock to relinquish children for adoption in years gone by. One story that has stayed with me, is the account of a father who rather than admit his daughter was away from home in a home for unwed mothers, instead chose to tell his friends and neighbors she was dead.

Ricki than describes birthmother homes which functioned as mechanisms to pry babies out of the reluctant arms of their mothers and into the hands of the adoption industry. Most of these homes have long since shut down, but they were a fixture of the fifties and the sixties.

One of the more shameful (and sickening) aspects of the whole process was the way that non-white and their children were treated. Unlike white women, they were discouraged from trying to place their children for adoption because they were told that "no one will want your baby". Adoption agencies had little use for children other than healthy white infants.

Finally, Ricki describes how the sexual revolution of the sixties is what ended the pro-adoption climate.

My major criticism of the book is that I think, at times, Ricki offers an incomplete picture. She talks about how the system coerced women into relinquishing, but fails to deal adequately with the fact that even in these times, fewer than 50% of all women pregnant out of wedlock placed children for adoption. Despite, the stigma that existed, more women than not ended up keeping their children. She places too much blame on the adoption industry. It sometimes seems as though the adoption industry created the entire problem. In fact, the adoption industry arose because social mores in white middle class America were very much against single white women keeping babies and raising them. The industry offered an alternative, rather than being part of a conspiracy.

Ricki deals little with the role that religion and moral values played in the whole adoption scenario. Morality and the shame of being pregnant out of wedlock (whether there should have been such shame or not)drove the whole process.

I recommend the book because its scathing and accurate portrayal of how the adoption industry functioned in the 1950's and the 1960's is history that no one involved in adoption should ever be allowed to forget. For adoptive parents like myself, its often painful, but necessary reading.

Markg91359@aol.com

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

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!

Quite a tome of research, but with a definite pro-abortion slant. Pro-lifers will be surprised, amused and puzzled by some of the material presented as fact. Joe Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League must have laughed when he read the several references to his work. Randall Terry is his own man, definitely not a follower of Scheidler. This knowledge would color any other "objective observations" covered in the book.

The essays in this book bring together a wide range of perspectives on reproductive rights and freedom of choice, many of which are not always part of the "mainstream" dialogue about these issues. Essays are well-written and engaging, and the book makes a wonderful reference tool.

This book is an important look at where abortion rights have been and where they are going, without making judgments about people who disagree. The essays give broad look into the pro-choice movment of today.

To my mind, a book (whether fiction or non-fiction) deserves 1 star if it is just garbage, with no redeeming qualities at all. By that standard, this book is clearly not garbage. It is serious and scholarly, it is thought-provoking and it is well written by someone who clearly has expertise in the field. Beyond that however, I had some major problems both with her premise and her remedy (or, perhaps more accurately, her absence of a remedy).

Her central premise is that by phrasing the issue of childbirth in terms of choice, we do a disservice to poor women, because when they have children, we can then accuse them of having made a bad "choice"; whereas if we think of childbirth as a "right" as we did in the 60's, then, presumably, no negative stigma would attach to poor women having babies, since they were simply exercising "rights" rather than exercising "choice".

I disagree with this analysis on a number of levels. The problem is not "choice" vs. "rights", as if it were simply an issue of nomenclature; the problem is that we happen to live in a society and in a governmental system which is simply too democratic and too capitalist (read: too unsocialist) to ever be able to solve the problem she bemoans. And frankly, I'm not sure that I even agree that it's a "problem" in the first place.

My family and friends are not close to the socioeconomic class which Ms. Solinger is concerned with. Some of our friends have no children, some have 1, 2, 3, or 4 or more. And yet, whenever I hear them discussing whether or not to have another child, the issue ALWAYS arises: Can we afford to have another child? The couple in question may decide that they can afford to, but the point is the the discussion always comes up, and reasonably so. If we felt that we couldn't afford another child--or even one child--then we wouldn't have one. And what's the matter with that?

And yet, why should that issue be any different for poor people than for middle or upper class people? At one point near the end, the author says "it seems most Americans embrace a proposition that is profoundly problematic in a democratic society, that motherhood should be a class privilege." The problem with this lament--and indeed the problem with most of the book on this point--is that the supposed solution to this "problem" is nowhere to be found.

In the first part of the book, it seemed that Ms. Solinger was primarily unhappy with societal attitudes towards poor women who have children, which explains her dissatisfaction with the term "choice" over the concept of "rights". On that score, it is my view that even if the nomenclature changed, societal attitudes would not change one iota. However, by the end of the book, she seems to be saying that it is not fair, not right, not democratic, that economic stumbling blocks should get in the way of poor people's ability to have children. In other words, there was a shift from an argument about attitude towards an argument about economics. (See in particuar the final chapter about "motherhood as a class privilege" which is more or less the guts of the book.)

But where is she going with this argument? Though she never comes right out and says so in so many words, the implicit answer is obvious--she wants the government to subsidize the poor woman's "right" to bear children. But this is simply unworkable in America at least to the degree she would like. And where does it end? As I understand her preference, it is that every poor woman should be given a "livable" stipend by the government for each child, and then presumably we should multiply that stipend by the number of children, without limit. After all, it would be completely inconsistent with her argument to advocate some kind of arbitrary cutoff as to how many children a woman can have. After all, it childbirth is a "right", it goes without saying that you cannot impose an arbitrary cutoff as to how often that "right" can be exercised.

Last year, Ann Critenden wrote "The Price of Motherhood", which is subtitled "Why the most important job in the world is still the least valued." In that book, she presents a whole smorgasbord of proposals which would put more money in the pockets of women and more specifically, mothers. On the last page of the book, she acknowledges that if even a few of the proposals were enacted, the result would be, in her words, "a massive shift of income to women". Nearly all of her proposals would be paid for by the government in the form of enormous tax increases. Throughout much of the book, she waxes rhapsodically about Sweden and their "enlightened" system.

I mention this because I feel that Ms. Solinger's book falls into the exact same category. While not being quite as blunt as Ms. Crittenden, she is in essence saying the same thing--the government should pay for the costs of bearing and raising children of poor women and pay them alot more than it does now. The problem is that we do not live in a quasi-socialist society like Sweden with its crushing tax burdens. Nor is that bad thing. In any society as free and laissez-faire and democratic as America, it is a guarantee that people will fall on all ends of the spectrum. But if she really wants the government to step in to the massive degree which is implicit in her argument, then perhaps she simply doesn't like our form of government. And perhaps that is her real complaint-not whether we speak in terms of "choice" versus "rights."

Impressed by her earlier work in "Wake Up Little Susie" I purchased Ms. Solinger's reccent work with anticipation of equally dynamic thought. In this work, she suggests herself and other feminists have failed to permanently secure public policy victories previously gained because of replacement of "rights" with choice in the name of political expidiency.

Within the context of "choice" freedom is merited out to those groups of women that meet the dominant society's preferences. Race and ecconomic status have been used by politicians and political pundits to divide women from eachother---and most importantly, from being recognized as full citizens under the law.

The book's interweaving of abortion access, adequate welfare provisions, and ethical adoption is admirable, but it stands to be overshaddowed by critical ommissions and simplifications.

Identifying herself as a pro-choice woman of the baby boom generation, Solinger then audaciously claims the "Back Alley Butcher" was a PR creation, since conditions without legal abortion were never as bad as fellow feminists had suggested. Charging the phrase was rooted in political expediency, she somehow overlooks that a nation allowing women to be slaughtered and maimed wholesale in lieu of competent medical care can be easily seen to wage war on the very right of women to be treated as human beings and citizens.

This text gives the impression Solinger did not actually bother to test her political theory (adopted for whatever reason) against the gargantuan presence of illegal-abortion related injury and fatality statistics. Even though she has repeatedly reminded the reader of her staunchly pro-choice credentials, the information in this portion of the book sounds like an anti-reproductive rights broad side and therefore actually undercuts her own argument.

It is profoundly difficult to heed Solinger's call for a radical feminist overhaul of public policy when misinformation from the very classist and racist forces she opposes are held as sound historical research. Prior to the legalization of abortion, poor women of color were more likely to die from illegal procedures than their white affluent sisters.

In conclusion, this book would be acceptable when used in conjunction with a medium-sized reading list, but should never be studied as a single text on reproductive public policy.

I consider myself pretty aware when it comes to reprodcutive rights issues, but after reading "Begger & Chooser" I realized that there was a lot I didn't know.

I think Solinger does an amazing job of presenting a historical account of how the the politics of choice have moved from a rights based issue to a consumer issue. But, I was a bit frustrated and disappointed that she didn't offer any ideas of how these problem can and should be addressed.