"Practice" Babies For "Practice" Mothers At Cornell

Bobby Domecon, the second practice baby, arrived at Cornell in 1920 as a

malnutrition case, but developed normally during his two-year stay.

Beginning in the early 1900s, collegiate home economics programs across the nation included "practice house" programs designed to help female students learn "mothercraft," the scientific art of childrearing. At Cornell each semester, eight women students lived with a resident advisor in the "practice apartment," where they took turns performing a full range of homemaking activities in a scientific and cost-efficient manner.

Response to Cornell's request for babies. Infants were leased from child welfare

organizations around the state through a contract that either side could terminate

 if the arrangement proved unsatisfactory.

In 1919, the first practice baby, named Dicky Domecon for "domestic economy," came to Cornell. Cornell secured infants through area orphanages and child welfare associations. Babies were nurtured by the students according to strict schedules and guidelines, and after a year, they were available for adoption. Prospective adoptive parents in this era desired Domecon babies because they had been raised according to the most up-to-date scientific principles.

Babies were held to a strict, scientifically engineered diet by their student "mothers."

Flora Rose, an early proponent of the program, believed that babies were essential to replicate the full domestic experience. Albert Mann, Dean of the College of Agriculture, called the apartments "essential laboratory practice for women students." As time passed, however, new research in child development pointed to the need for a primary bond with a single caregiver, and social changes in the lives of women made the practice house focus on domesticity seem old-fashioned. In addition, by the late 1960s, the ideology most prominent in the college favored hard science over practical applications. By 1969, the year the college changed its name, practice apartments were dropped from the Cornell curriculum.

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