Oneida was founded on the principle of “Bible Communism.” Founder John Humphrey Noyes insisted that, under his personally devised philosophy, there were to be no selfish attachments, no hoarding of love. The tender affection a little girl might feel for a special, beloved doll had to be burned away. So each girl marched up to the oven door with her “long-cherished favorite” in her arms, then stared as the flames consumed it. “We . . . saw them perish before our eyes.”
What was being burned up that day was the tendency for any human being to form an intense and private bond with another. Noyes could not permit this, because he had put sexual freedom at the head of his agenda; he was the inventor of the term “free love.” The Yale Divinity School student and sometime Congregationalist minister believed that “complex marriage” was God’s will, as indicated by the Scripture, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). (This may not be how most of us imagine the angels pass the time, but the American nineteenth century was a fertile time for private interpretations of the Bible.)
“The abolition of sexual exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles,” Noyes wrote. “The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God.”
“Sexual freedom” is a term that could suggest a carefree heedlessness that did not obtain at Oneida. A man wishing to enjoy the company of a specific woman would submit his request to an appointed official who kept a ledger of such engagements. This official would then present the request to the woman who was the target of the man’s intentions, and she might agree or refuse as she chose, though agreement was the general rule. According to the records, most women had two or three visitors per week, and a popular young woman might entertain as many as seven.
The purpose of the ledger, however, was not to restrain the free exchange of sexual favors. Nor was it to track the fathers of children born in the community. Such a task would have been nearly impossible in any case, but considering the era and the circumstances, astonishingly few children were born. Noyes understood that for a scheme of sexual freedom to succeed and not be overwhelmed by progeny, non-procreative sex must be absolutely required. This was accomplished through Noyes’s command that men utilize a primitive method for the prevention of pregnancy. It was effective: Over a twenty-year period, only thirty-five children were born in the community of a hundred adults.
The purpose of the ledger was not to restrain sexual freedom, but to ensure it, by monitoring whether any couples were becoming overly attached to each other. There was always the terrible danger that a man and woman might fall in love and begin consorting with each other to the exclusion of others. Such incipient selfishness had to be stamped out.
Noyes phrased it this way: “The new commandment is that we love one another . . . not by pairs, as in the world, but en masse.” When a man confessed that he had fallen in love with a woman in the community, Noyes responded sharply, “You do not love her, you love happiness.”
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