Practice Mothers

During the first half of the twentieth century, “practice houses,” or home management houses, thrived in home economics departments of land-grant universities around North America. Practice houses were domestic settings where young women could get hands-on training and experience in all the latest methods and technologies to efficiently manage domestic space and activity. They were also part of a larger trend of professionalization of home economic activities, intimately related to scientific rhetoric. This article discusses the Department of Home Economics’ practice house at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where during the 1930s and 1940s, thirty-three “borrowed” children (from the city’s department of child welfare), referred to as practice babies, were tended to by a monthly rotation of women students who themselves were supervised by a house mother. The article situates the practice babies at the intersection of two historical trajectories, that of home economics itself and that of child-rearing advice, and draws attention to the ways in which the babies, and the women who cared for them, were mutually and jointly gendered. The narrative of the rise and fall of the practice babies in Winnipeg contributes to the literature on changing ideologies of scientific motherhood with an argument for feminist scholarship to develop a more ethnographically grounded linkage of children to women.