ABSTRACT
Historian Rickie Solinger examines maternity homes for unwed mothers from 1945 to 1965 and subsequent social programs and shows how they led to different social meanings of unwed childbearing. On the one hand, these homes encouraged white women to relinquish their babies, spawning a flourishing adoption market. On the other, these programs subjected Black women to repressive social welfare policies, which assumed they would keep their babies and aimed to prevent them from having more.
