| Summary: | For pioneers of the field, it was a gateway to the male-dominated world of science; for those it purported to help, it could be yet another domestic trap. Of all the paradoxes in the paradoxical field known as home economics, perhaps the most peculiar is the practice house, with its practice baby. Colleges and universities that offered home-ec majors - and there were many in the twentieth century, including historically Black colleges, land-grant universities, and Ivy League institutions - often had a cottage or an apartment on campus where female home-ec students could keep house. Some of them were preparing for careers in education or industry, but most saw home ec as training for their inevitable futures as wives and mothers. Often, practice-house life entailed caring for practice babies, actual human ones, lent by adoption agencies, orphanages, or sometimes the mothers themselves. At Cornell University, the students called their first practice baby - borrowed in 1920, when he was three weeks old - Dicky Domecon, for “domestic economy.” Couples looking to adopt were eager to get their hands on practice infants, figuring that these dem Yet the experiments were collectivist projects, nothing like the domestic lot of most American women, or the idealized futures that home ec touted. The students shared and traded off their infant-care duties equally, relieved by immersion in demanding science courses that fed their intellects. There were no men living in the homes to play the role of husband. As Danielle Dreilinger writes in her deeply researched and crisply written new book, “The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live” (Norton), “practice homes looked less like the married, heterosexual, nuclear household for which they ostensibly prepared students than the feminist communes of a later era.” |