From 1919 to 1969, college home economics programs around the country
had so-called practice houses or practice apartments where young women
learned the domestic arts: cooking, cleaning, running a household.
The
college students learned mothering skills by caring for "practice
babies" - infants lent by local orphanages to live at the school.
Lisa Grunwald researched the practice and used it as the premise for her novel
The Irresistible Henry House. She says she discovered this use for orphan babies while working on an
anthology of letters written by American women when she found a snapshot
of "the most beguiling baby with this roguish grin." She learned he had
been a practice baby at Cornell University.
"He had been cared for by about a dozen women who took turns being his practice mother," Grunwald told NPR's Michele Norris.
By the 1950s, there were 40 or 50 colleges and universities
throughout the country who had this program in place, or something very
similar, Grunwald says.
The baby Grunwald
came across was named Bobby Domecon, short for "domestic economics." All
of the babies at Cornell took the last name Domecon, and all of the
practice babies at Illinois State University had the last name North or
South, depending on the building they were raised in.
Grunwald says the babies would come from the orphanage as young as
possible, and the mothers would take rotations caring for them. The
rotations depended on the college — sometimes one mother would have a
baby a week at a time or 10 days at a time. In others, a mother would
put the baby down for a nap, and another student would be there when it
woke up. But it was always on a very careful schedule.
"When
I first read about this, I thought it was sort of weird and a little
bit creepy," Grunwald says. "But, in fact, at the times in which this
took place, everything was considered a possible opportunity for a
scientific approach, and child care was no exception. The practice
houses really embraced the idea that you could learn mothering the same
way you learned cooking or learned chemistry — everything was learnable,
and systems were really important."
Many of
the babies arrived at the universities suffering from malnutrition, and
they were quickly plumped with good health after their stint in those
programs.
Grunwald says she found little evidence of controversy around the practice, with the exception of a 1954
Time magazine
article, where the Illinois state child welfare division found out a
child was being raised on campus this way and was extremely disturbed by
it.
Grunwald also wanted to find out the long-term effects on someone who
is raised this way. She says she talked with various experts and
psychiatrists.
"They told me about attachment
disorder," Grunwald says. "If a child doesn't form one really tight
bond in the first years of life, it sometimes happens that he or she can
develop attachment disorder."
But there was no evidence, because the babies weren't followed and studied as they grew up.
"It
was really the reason I wanted to write it as fiction because the
alternative didn't seem very viable," Grunwald says. "They were returned
to their orphanages and they were adopted in due course, the way most
children were adopted, which was, at the time, very anonymously.
"While
there is some evidence that some parents really wanted a Domecon baby —
because he or she had been raised by scientific methods — there doesn't
seem to have been any way of tracking them or following them. There was
never a study done, there were never even records kept."
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