[Editor’s note: This is the third part of a biweekly series that will run

this year chronicling significant events in the university’s history.]

In 1950 the largest house on the campus wasn’t a dorm or a fraternity, it was Guerneaux Hall, a white-framed building with a white picket fence and expansive front lawn that resembled a typical suburban family-of-four home more than a college housing complex.

From 1927 through the 1960s, home economics students were required to live and work with their peers in this building, better known to most students simply as, the “practice house.” For five weeks each, ten women would occupy the house preparing for their likely futures as housewives by applying lessons they learned in class to real-life, performing chores such as cooking, cleaning, preparing menus and keeping a budget.

But beyond the specific curriculum of the class, the house instilled a very strict discipline within the women living there. Drilled in the details of conducting family meals, having guests and hosting parties, Margaret Wildman, a 1952 home economics graduate, still remembers the details of setting a table.

“If you’re waiting a table, you always pass from the left side with the left hand,” she recalled. “But you’d never pass a beverage. You place and refill a beverage from the right side with the right hand. The left hand is behind the back, out of the way.”

No details were spared in the lessons, Wildman said. Knives were always placed an inch away from the edge of the table, and glasses were always placed at the tip of the knife. Large flowers were always amassed in large groups.

“It was very meticulous,” Wildman said. “They were teaching perfection.”

Students were even expected to make their beds according to a specific routine that would be checked daily by the live-in teacher affectionately referred to as the “house mother.” And every five days one lucky student would be chosen to scrub the porch, she said.

While all the students graduated well-versed in the details of running a household, for some students the methodical approach was a little too much.

“I’m very independent so it was a little hard for me,” said 1950 graduate Christine Alexandre. “It was so structured that it just got to be a little too tedious. There was such a prescribed routine.”

The routine was even stricter when it came to the house rules. Women were expected back in their dorms by 10:45 on weeknights and 12:45 on weekends. Before leaving the house, all women had to file their destination and contact information in a log with the house mother, Wildman said.

Beer was used more often for conditioning hair than drinking, and the women in the house occasionally indulged in liqueur – but only as an ingredient in an ice cream dish for their formal dinner. Typical fun involved chit-chatting with the nine others living in the house and playing bridge, Wildman said.

Still the house couldn’t help but attract attention with ten eligible women learning how to be housewives, especially after World War II when flocks of single GIs came back to the campus. The practice house soon developed a reputation as a place where fledging future housewives could practice pleasing their men in more ways than just preparing their meals. An innuendo-laced 1950 Terrapin yearbook article recounts an anecdote of a student hoping to practice some of the finer points of “keeping house.”

“We came here to practice keeping house. We were just engaged,” explained a 1950 graduate to the house mother in the article.

However, relations within the house were rarely this open. While women were graciously invited inside, their suitors were strictly prohibited past the main lobby, Alexandre said.

“It wouldn’t be any fun without George,” the student complained in the article.

Even outside the house’s white picket fence, the department dean enforced high standards of ladylike behavior. If a student were caught in D.C. without wearing a hat, white gloves, pantyhose and heels, her grade would be docked points.

While today’s standards of grading exams and term-papers may seem more straightforward, grades were taken very seriously within the practice house as women were graded constantly on their behavior and appearance, Alexandre said.

“Overall I felt that this should have been something that was more or less common sense, but this is where I made some of my lowest marks,” she said.

Still, Alexandre thinks students today would have struggled even more with the house’s lessons.

“Nowadays kids are so involved in TV and entertainment that maybe they need some practical training,” Alexandre said.

Contact reporter Ben Slivnick at slivnickdbk@gmail.com.