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This cartoon, by Joseph Keppler, appeared on the cover of the 26 February 1879 issue of Puck, America's first purely comic weekly paper.
By Robert Fogarty, Professor of History and Editor, The Antioch Review, Antioch College
By Mark F. Weimer, Curator of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, and Guest Editor, Syracuse University Library Associates Courier
By Michael Barkun, Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University
By Janet White, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Architecture and Urbanism, Cornell University
By Lawrence Foster, Associate Professor of American History Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta
By Marlyn Klee-Hartzell, Associate Professor of Political Science, Adelphi University
By Louis J. Kern, Professor of History, Hofstra University
By Mary Beth Hinton, Editor, Syracuse University Library Associates Courier
When, in 1962, I first visited the rare book collection of the Syracuse University Library to begin researching the history of the Oneida Community, I explored the foundation of what is now a distinguished and growing body of material related to America's most complex communal venture. That foundation had been laid when Lester G. Wells, then curator, acquired a full run of the Community periodicals and a substantial body of pamphlets. The "O. C. Collection" as outlined by Wells in his 1961 bibliography* provided me with enough data to grasp the details of Community life reported in their own periodicals. Since then many researchers have journeyed to Syracuse to mine those periodicals and pamphlets (in 1973 they were made available on microfilm to other libraries), and I am sure that scholars will continue to explore the primary sources gathered by Mark Weimer and opened in 1993.
There has never been a shortage of interpretations of the Community, and the essays in this volume reflect the growing sophistication of writers about Oneida. That was not always the case. For some earlier commentators the Community's leader, John Humphrey Noyes, was either saint or satyr; and the Community itself either on the flying edge of the future or regressing into another century. The approaches taken in these essays stand on a body of source material grown richer over the years; on scholarly work that has treated Noyes seriously and has regarded the Community within a wider pattern of social reform and a narrower one of personal development; and on a continuing debate in scholarly circles about the meaning and import of the Oneida Community.
Michael Barkun was among the first scholars to focus on the millennialist thought of Noyes and the impact of a "Last Days" theology on the membership. By placing Oneida within the Millerite context, he has been able to draw attention to the importance of millennialist notions not only for the Oneida Community but for other utopian communities, past and present. Both Louis Kern and Lawrence Foster have, in their distinctive ways, forced students to look closely at the intellectual character of Noyes's theology and social theory. John Humphrey Noyes thought of himself as a serious thinker, and he pondered the meaning of sexuality in closely reasoned pamphlets and "Home Talks" to the society. His views on "complex marriage" emanated from a theology shaped by a century of debate over the meaning of "perfection", by a society struggling to define its own boundaries and to reach consensus about the meaning of community and individualism. Oneida--for Barkun, Kern, and Foster--was part of a larger social and intellectual struggle, and there is still much to be learned from it today.
Yet Oneida was not just an abstract idea, as both Janet White and Marlyn Klee-Hartzell amply demonstrate; it was a growing and contradictory community. For all their talk about equality and freedom between the sexes, the members maintained some traditional domestic routines and barely reshaped the work agenda. How men and women related to one another was at the core of the Oneida experiment. Klee-Hartzell's close probing of work assignments and attitudes is part of a "gendering" process that measures social rhetoric against reality. White has been drawn to the architecture of Community life and finds that the building plan at Oneida, developed under Erastus Hamilton's hands and John Humphrey Noyes's eyes, closely resembles the plan of a medieval monastery, its spatial arrangements being dictated by religious and social logic.
Spencer Klaw's fascination with the Oneida story and his progress through Community documents that led to the publication in 1993 of Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community, shows how powerful a magnet the Perfectionists have been for researchers who try to comprehend not only the Community but also its place in nineteenth-century American society. With the opening to the public of additional source materials in 1993, Mark Weimer reminds us that the story and the personalities--both major and minor--will continue to intrigue scholars.
The Oneida Community has remained for me a constant source of wonder and interest--wonder
because it succeeded in such a bold manner for so long, and because it was able
to transform itself on several occasions; interest because of its many facets:
it played an important role in our culture's intellectual history and an inspirational
role in the history of social settlements. It contained both believers and skeptics;
it was both a conservative system and a radical one. The contradictions it embraced
continue to fascinate historians of religion, sociologists of small groups,
and political scientists of democratic institutions. The writings drawn together
here raise key questions, key issues. More will be written.
Robert Fogarty
Professor of History and
Editor, The Antioch Review
*Lester G. Wells, comp., The Oneida Community Collection in the Syracuse University Library (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Library, 1961).
Seventy years ago--in reply to a letter from Hope Emily Allen that was full of trepidation about the handling of the Oneida Community's legacy, especially by one Mrs. Smith--George Bernard Shaw wrote:
I agree with you that only a symposium could do justice to the Oneida Creek Community's history: but the difficulty seems to be that the witnesses wont sympose. This being so, there is nothing for it but to let Mrs. Smith tell her history and provoke retorts, so that we shall get the symposium in different covers instead of in one book.1
Hope Allen, a respected medievalist, was born in the Mansion House a few years after the breakup of the Oneida Community. She became the Community's archivist after her return as an adult to Oneida. Shaw's keen interest in the Oneida Community was most fully articulated in his essay "The Perfectionist Experiment at Oneida Creek", which appeared as part of "The Revolutionist Handbook" appended to Man and Superman (1903).
Neither Shaw nor Allen lived to see the first Oneida Community symposium, organized in 1984 by Hope Allen's grandniece, Sister Prudence Allen, R.S.M., and entitled "The Oneida Community: What Are Its Lessons for Today?"2 Nine years later, on 3-4 April 1993, a fuller symposium such as that envisioned by both Shaw and Allen took place as "family" members or descendants of the original Community, Mansion House residents, friends and neighbors, and committed scholars gathered in the Big Hall of the Oneida Community Mansion House to share experiences, memories, and scholarship.
The 1993 meeting, organized by Mansion House Director Richard Kathmann and funded, in part, by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, was a celebration not only of the Community's history but of its surviving archives and, perhaps most significantly, the acceptance by this generation of Community descendants of their ancestors' unique vision and experience.
The connection between the Oneida Community and Syracuse University began in 1879 when the University hosted a convention of clergy whose stated goal was the complete eradication of the Community (see Puck cartoon on the cover). With that beginning, relations could only improve, and over the past forty years they have done just that.
In 1983 the Oneida Community descendants who were entrusted with the Community's historical records transferred them to the Syracuse University Library to ensure both their preservation and their future accessibility to scholars and "family" members.
The Syracuse University Library now holds the largest collection of Oneida Community records in existence. Gathered together by my predecessors, especially Lester G. Wells and Jack Ericson, and augmented by the remarkable manuscript material received in 1983, the Oneida Community Collection contains every surviving book, newspaper, pamphlet, and example of job-printing. In addition, the George Wallingford Noyes Papers contain more than 2000 pages of typed transcripts of manuscripts that were intentionally destroyed in the 1940s by Community descendants who feared that public knowledge of the Community's history might hurt the image of the silver company. Photographs, diaries, business records, letters, sketchbooks, and stenographic reports of meetings and talks give us a vivid picture of life in the Community that is far richer than the extensive yet mostly secondary sources that had been available to scholars before 1983. Over many years the Library has provided access to the Oneida Collection not only in the reading room of the Department of Special Collections but also through microfilm and other technologies, including electronic transmission: scholars around the world can now retrieve selected digital images through the Internet.
Furthermore, Syracuse University Press has published and continues to make available critically important works relating to the history of the Oneida Community. Given this close relationship with the University, it is appropriate that selected papers from the 1993 Oneida Community Seminar appear now for the first time in this issue of the Syracuse University Library Associates Courier.
In 1924 Shaw was disappointed that the symposium would come out "in different
covers instead of in one book". Yet many books have been and will be written,
because the Oneida Community raised fundamental and universal questions about
humanity in relation to love and to work and to God. Those who live in the Mansion
House, visit the museum, and study the archives continue to ponder these questions.
The papers gathered here will, I feel, prompt further investigations, fascinations,
and celebrations of the Oneida Community. This is not the symposium,
but rather a new chapter in an evolving and enlarging multivolume study made
possible because finally, in our time, the witnesses will sympose!
Mark F. Weimer
Curator of Special Collections,
Syracuse University Library and
Guest Editor, Syracuse University Library Associates Courier
FOOTNOTES
1. The full text of the extant Hope Emily Allen-George Bernard Shaw correspondence is published here in "From the Collections".
2. An "Evening Dialogue" presented on 24 May 1984 in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution.
Note: The editors would like to thank Gail Doering, Curator of the Oneida Community Mansion House, for her help in selecting and providing background information about the photographs in this issue.
When John Humphrey Noyes was twenty, he was obsessed with knowing the nature and timing of the Last Days. As he recalled later, "My heart was fixed on the Millennium, and I was resolved to live or die for it".1 His fascination with the end of history was neither novel for his own time nor for ours--indeed, the recent events at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, suggest that we are in the throes of a period of millenarian fervor every bit as intense as that of the 1830s and '40s. Although we can see Noyes as representative, gripped like many of his age-mates with apocalyptic dreams, in his case the dreams were refracted through a quite untypical psyche.
Two psychological crises that Noyes endured in the mid-1830s turned his fashionable millenarian expectations into something very much his own. Noyes was concerned with conventional religious themes: the Second Coming of Christ, a harmonious millennial kingdom ruled over by Christ and his saints, and the abolition of human sinfulness. But for Noyes these ideas were embedded in a series of distinctly paranormal experiences that occurred during 1834 and '35--episodes of delirium, divine voices, and startlingly dramatic visions--which would probably be referred to in contemporary language as altered states of consciousness. These experiences took place before the formation of either the Oneida or Putney communities, but nonetheless left their mark on the later Noyes.
The first breakdown came in 1834. After a period of depression, Noyes had a visionary experience on 20 February--subsequently referred to as the "High Tide of the Spirit"--after which came yet another extraordinary visitation when, he later recalled, "On my bed that night, I received the baptism which I desired and expected. Three times in quick succession a stream of eternal love gushed through my heart and rolled back again to its source."2
Unfortunately for Noyes, this period of exaltation was quickly followed by a complete breakdown over a period of three weeks that spring--the so-called "New York experience" about which he later wrote at great and vivid length. He described his restless nocturnal wanderings, his inability to sleep, and his hallucinations.3 His letters of the period display a fractured syntax totally out of character for this fluent author.
Noyes emerged from these lost weeks only to suffer what appears to have been another breakdown exactly a year later, when he turned up at his sister Joanna's home in New Haven looking dreadful and making little sense.4
There were ample witnesses to Noyes's problems, particularly during the extended sojourn in New York, and it did not take long for his family to begin their own investigation. His brother Horatio, who tried to be optimistic, wrote to his sister, "Had I trusted to stories [I] should have believed him a downright madman", but he concluded, "[I] believe him still to possess his right mind".5 On the other hand, by the time Horatio saw him, John was in New Haven and presumably more coherent. Joanna heard the New York stories and concluded, "We have reason to suppose . . . that he has been deranged". She saw him in New Haven after the second breakdown in 1835, and wrote that "he seems rational now", but she thought him "deranged on the subject of religion". She wrote the family that "he would not reason at all, but denounced everything and everybody. He looked haggard and care-worn, and I felt positive after he left that he was deranged."6
So apparently did the people of Putney, where Noyes went for rest and renewal. He was well enough by then to retain a sense of humor about his scandalous reputation: "Rumors of my fantastic performances in New York had preceded me", he wrote Horatio. Neighbors crossed the street to avoid having to confront him. "They seem to have entered a combination to avoid conversation with me. . . . I am at present living under an embargo".7
Noyes's psychological problems were not simply regarded as idiosyncratic, personal travails. They were seen by him and by those around him in terms of two larger factors: the first was the long-standing belief that excessive religious zeal produced insanity. The belief in a link between insanity and "enthusiasms" went back at least as far as the seventeenth century and was far from dead in Noyes's own time. Indeed, as late as the mid-1860s, we find a writer in the American Journal of Insanity asking, "In those whirlwinds of passion and frenzied excitement which have too often gotten up under the sacred name of religion, is there no danger to the timid, the nervous, the sensitive, and especially to those who are hereditarily and constitutionally predisposed to mental derangement?"8 Noyes, as we shall see, believed there was such a danger, and later in life was anxious to show that, although he seemed to be insane, his breakdowns were only superficially pathological. This distinction was critical, for aberrant behavior in the religiously committed was usually blamed on the intensity of an individual's spiritual excitation.
The other factor was the movement known as Millerism. The Millerite movement--named after the itinerant lay preacher William Miller--had congealed around Miller's belief that Bible prophecy, correctly read, pointed to the occurrence of the Second Coming sometime between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844. No one knows how many Millerites there ultimately were. Miller himself estimated 50,000 committed adherents. What is clear is that the movement swept New York and New England in the early 1840s and cut an especially wide swath through the abolitionist and reform circles in which Noyes moved. The twenty-first of March 1844 passed, of course, without incident, but most Millerites--undeterred--rallied 'round a new date, 22 October 1844. When prophecy failed a second time, in what came to be known as the "Great Disappointment", the movement collapsed--although stalwarts within it later became the nucleus of Seventh Day Adventism, from which, by a series of schisms, the Branch Davidians in Waco eventually came.
Millerism confronted Noyes with three distinct problems. In the first place, the Millerites were the objects of much ridicule in the popular press ("mad" millenarians made excellent copy in the first great newspaper circulation wars of the early 1840s). Yet Noyes himself had had religious visions the content of which was like that of Millerism, and he feared being similarly stigmatized. Second, the Millerites were competing for Noyes's small band of followers, several of whom left the Putney Community to follow Miller's standard. Finally, the sensational character of Millerite predictions strengthened the old association between millenarian religion and madness. In light of the psychological tumult Noyes had experienced in the 1830s, any link between him and Millerism inevitably raised questions about his own sanity.
The Millerites' preoccupation with the date of the Second Coming was an issue that Noyes had been concerned with for a full two decades before Millerism. By 1833 he had resolved the question of the Second Coming to his own satisfaction by deciding that Jesus had returned and appeared to the apostles in the year A.D. 70 at the time of the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. As he put it in an 1840 letter: "[If] an angel from heaven, bearing the seal of ten thousand miracles, should establish a religion, which should fail to recognize the truth which blazes on the whole front of the New Testament, that Jesus Christ came the second time at the destruction of Jerusalem, I would call him an impostor".9 This was not merely rhetorical overkill on Noyes's part. In effect, just such an angel had already appeared to him, during the episodes of the 1830s described earlier.
Noyes had in fact "anticipated" Millerism by almost a decade through visionary experiences of an imminent Second Coming. During the 1834 breakdown, Noyes was preoccupied with apocalyptic imagery and Adventist expectations. At this time his belief that the Second Coming had already occurred in A.D. 70 was suddenly challenged by powerful visionary experiences that at least temporarily convinced him that the Second Coming was just around the corner. In a breathless letter to his mother in the spring of 1834 he wrote:
It is like the time when Jerusalem was approaching its predicted destruction. Wars and rumors of wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, signs in the sun, moon and stars, universal commotion and universal expectation seem to characterize the aspect of the moral world. Amidst it all for me, I have no fears. Do your hearts fail? [I] tell you another coming of the Son of Man is at hand.10
When Noyes wrote later about this period, in the Confessions of 1849, he acknowledged that during the "New York experience", "I received a baptism of that spirit which has since manifested itself extensively in the form of Millerism". Not once but several times during those three weeks in New York a spirit came upon him that "produced an irresistible impression that this manifestation [a physical Second Coming] was about to take place".11
Even stranger was his sister Joanna's report that during the second breakdown, in 1835, John began to talk--in her words--"about his suffering for the world, and that he is immortal . . . "12 That he briefly believed the Second Coming was imminent is clear from his own testimony. Did he also come to identify himself with Christ and see himself as the vehicle of a Millerite-style Second Advent? We can never know, for the evidence concerning the 1835 breakdown is too fragmentary.
Millerism itself produced a rich body of folklore, much of it without foundation. Millerites were said to have sold off their property in expectation of the great day; to have donned white "ascension robes"; to have stood on hills and rooftops waiting to be lifted to Jerusalem; and, finally, to have gone mad when Jesus failed to arrive. Nevertheless, Noyes regarded Millerism with the utmost seriousness. During its heyday, he lost more than a third of the members of the fragile Putney Community, and we know that some left for Millerism. More to the point, the folklore of Millerite madness raised new questions about the psychological consequences of Noyes's own religiosity.13
Noyes's response was twofold. First, he "repackaged" the events of 1834-35. He was not a madman. Rather, he was a "spiritual voyager", as he put it, an explorer of inner domains, who took the risks of madness in order to gain precious religious insights. He went to the edge of sanity so that he could bring back truths that more timid souls were afraid to seek. Second, in the Confessions, he refined the concept of insanity by distinguishing genuine insanity from behavior that mimics insanity. The former required two conditions, "an external spiritual cause", and a "morbid state of the brain to which that cause may attach itself". That, he said, was not his situation at all, for "my mind was sound". Instead, he was like a hypnotic subject, whose healthy brain was "exposed to disturbing influences" that made him appear insane to others, but "I had the objective, but not the subjective condition of insanity".14
We may speculate that Noyes's preoccupation with a structured, ordered community was in reaction against the turbulence in his youth. With himself as paterfamilias, the Oneida extended family, articulated by and controlled through complex marriage, ascending and descending fellowship, and mutual criticism, were all bulwarks against the dangers of undisciplined spirituality.15
The recent events in Waco remind us of how volatile millenarian beliefs can be, especially when they are accompanied by communal withdrawal from the larger society. Why, then, did Noyes and Oneida escape these dangers? As Carol Weisbrod's work demonstrates, the relationship between the Community and the larger society was conflict-prone, but it was neither violent nor confrontational.16
Many of the differences, of course, are differences between the America of the mid-nineteenth century and the America of the late twentieth century. But there are other, more concrete factors. For example, if the Noyes of 1834-35 had been at the community's helm, its course might have been vastly different. The Noyes of those years seems closer to David Koresh--or at least to what we know thus far about Koresh--than the Noyes of the Oneida years. By the late 1840s, the oscillations between exultation and despair, the altered states of consciousness, and the religious megalomania had passed.
As different as the Branch Davidians17 in Waco are from the communitarians at Oneida, they are linked by the thread of antinomianism, the belief that the age during which humanity needed to subordinate itself to divine law has ended and that such restraints as human conduct still required would come directly from God.
Antinomianism was implicit in Noyes's Perfectionism, with its doctrine of sinlessness, and in the institution of complex marriage, which made the forbidden permitted. Movements like Oneida and the Branch Davidians are drawn towards antinomianism for two reasons: first, antinomianism is a hallmark of genuine charismatic leadership of the kind that--albeit in very different ways--John Humphrey Noyes and David Koresh both exemplify. The gifts that followers recognize in the charismatic leader give him or her an authority that transcends custom, convention, or law. What passes for law under charismatic rule is whatever the leader pronounces. Thus, David Koresh, when asked whether he was above the law, responded, "I am the law"--a response which to him, as to earlier charismatic figures, must have seemed not arrogant but simply self-evident. In much the same way, Noyes's pronouncements overruled all other appeals.
Second, antinomianism exercises strong attractions over groups that believe themselves to be already living in the millennial age. They are apt to view law as appropriate to an unredeemed time, when sin and weakness required external controls. The millennium, by contrast, needs no distinction between the virtuous and the sinful, the permitted and the forbidden; for in such a time, the saintly by definition can only act sinlessly. To do what society forbids--particularly in areas hedged about by strong taboos, such as sexuality--is both to burn one's bridges to the corrupt world outside, and to acknowledge in one's very flesh that the rule of the saints has come.
The dangers of antinomianism are, of course, clear: the openings it offers to uncontrolled passion and violence. Noyes's organizational genius lay in his ability to build millennial antinomianism into the daily life of Oneida while instituting various procedures and forbearances that kept destructive energies in check, although sometimes just barely. It is tempting to speculate that Noyes's virtuosity in introducing and then largely controlling antinomianism was a product of his own early experiences with unrestrained millennialism and the personal disorganization it had caused.
We need look no further than the confrontation outside Waco to see the dangers of antinomianism unleashed among millenarians living communally. In failing to appreciate these dangers, which Noyes knew so well, the religious entrepreneur can all too easily release energies that neither he nor his followers can control. The vivid spiritual crises of Noyes's young manhood left him acutely aware of the need to balance expectations of dramatic future change with social structures that could contain and channel anarchic religious impulses. The Oneida Community, with its complex apparatus of social controls, constituted both a partially realized millennium in miniature--a circumscribed realm of earthly harmony--and a structure that could prevent outbursts of destabilizing millenarian fervor.
PLATES
FOOTNOTES
1. John Humphrey Noyes, Confessions of John H. Noyes. Part I. Confession of Religious Experience: Including a History of Modern Perfectionism (Oneida Reserve: Leonard and Co., Printers, 1849), 2.
2. J. H. Noyes, Confessions, 18.
3. Ibid., 38.
4. This is a particularly obscure episode, for which the only testimony is a letter of his sister Joanna. The original correspondence, like many other letters by and about Noyes, was destroyed, but a typescript copy remains among the George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection, Syracuse University Library.
5. Horatio Noyes to Mary Noyes, 17 June 1834, George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection.
6. Joanna Noyes Hayes to her family, 23 June 1835, George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection.
7. John Humphrey Noyes to Horatio Noyes, 2 July 1834, George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection.
8. "Twenty-first Annual Report of the Managers of New York State Lunatic Asylum, for the year 1863", American Journal of Insanity 21 (1864): 250-51.
9. John Humphrey Noyes to Loren Hollister, 7 March 1840, George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection.
10. John Humphrey Noyes to his mother. Although the typescript date is "May 1835", the style, contents, and surrounding material argue strongly for a date of May or June 1834. George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection.
11. J. H. Noyes, Confessions, 39.
12. Joanna Noyes Hayes to her family, 23 June 1835, George Wallingford Noyes Papers, Oneida Community Collection.
13. The fullest discussion of Millerism and insanity appears in Ronald L. Numbers and Janet S. Numbers, "Millerism and Madness: A Study of 'Religious Insanity' in Nineteenth-Century America", in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds., The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), 92-118.
14. J. H. Noyes, Confessions, 38-39.
15. In "complex marriage", all the men and women were considered to be married to each other, and the children of any birth parents were considered to be children of the entire "family" thus created. In "ascending and descending fellowship", the more spiritually advanced members were paired with those less spiritually advanced. For the latter, the fellowship was ascending; for the former it was descending. During "mutual criticism" sessions, members gathered to point out the spiritual failings of one individual and to give advice.
16. Carol Weisbrod, Boundaries of Utopia (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
17. For a more extended discussion of the Branch Davidian case, see my "Reflections after Waco: Millennialists and the State", The Christian Century 110 (2-9 June 1993): 596-600.
Architectural history has traditionally focused on formal aesthetics and the monuments of a "high culture". This approach accedes no place in the canon to the buildings of the Oneida Community. While they tend to be nicely sited, spacious, and constructed of handsome materials, they are not architectural masterpieces. The main complex combines elements from a jumble of styles; it has awkward joints where the products of three different building campaigns were unskillfully linked; and its towers are either stubby and ungraceful or capped by overwrought roofs (fig. 1).
It is, however, possible to approach the study of architectural history from another direction. One can focus not on the building as objet d'art, but on the interaction between built form and the society that produced and inhabited it. This approach asserts that buildings are interesting (though perhaps in differing degrees) because the built form a society creates for itself both reflects and influences the beliefs and behaviors of that society. Study of any building of a particular culture therefore holds out the possibility of illuminating, affirming, or challenging our perception of that culture.
This relationship between builder and built is most immediate when both the social structure and the physical environment are self-conscious creations of the same individuals, as is the case with the utopian settlement created by the Perfectionists at Oneida.1 The Perfectionists were engaged in both constructing a new social order and devising "plans for a building which shall be in all respects adapted to a Community like ours".2 By reconstructing the building history of the Community and examining it alongside the social history, it is possible not only to "read" the evidence of one to illuminate the other, but also to discover ways in which the two influenced each other.
Moreover, by comparing the social environments of one microsociety, the Perfectionists, to those of another microsociety based in the same western European culture, a cloistered community of Cistercian monks, we can begin to explore a larger question: whether the presence of particular characteristics in a social structure can be causally linked to the presence of particular types of spaces.
When we begin reconstructing the history of Oneida's physical environment, we find that its form evolved significantly from 1848 to 1881, the years the Community existed as a Perfectionist commune. Its inhabitants built, demolished, remodeled, and rebuilt with extraordinary frequency. This, as Dolores Hayden suggests, is in keeping with the tenets of Perfectionism: they extended their belief in the perfectibility of the individual to the built environment.3
Within this framework of almost continual change, four major building campaigns can be distinguished. Each accompanied a significant stage in the Community's social development. First, between 1848, when the Perfectionists relocated their main settlement from Putney, Vermont, to Oneida, New York, and 1853, when the first campaign ended, construction was undertaken primarily to meet the basic needs of the newly founded settlement. Second, between 1860 and 1864, their financial status having improved, they focused on the accommodation of "complex marriage". Third, during 1869 - 70, they replaced and expanded space allocated to children in anticipation of the stirpiculture experiment.4 During the final campaign, 1877 - 78, they expanded the facilities to relieve overcrowding when the internal tensions that would eventually destroy the Community were beginning to be felt. This article will deal with only the first two campaigns, and with only one product of each: the Old Mansion House, a wood frame structure built in 1848, belongs to the first campaign; the first block of the New Mansion House, built in 1861 - 62, belongs to the second.
In 1848 John Humphrey Noyes moved his base of operations from Vermont to a site on the Oneida Creek in upstate New York. A small group of his followers already lived there, operating a farm and a sawmill. Others relocated to join him, living at first under very crowded conditions in the few pre-existing structures on the property. Despite straitened financial circumstances, they immediately began building what came to be known as the Old Mansion House (figs. 2 and 3).
The motivation for constructing this building was threefold: the members needed additional shelter for their growing population, but more significantly, they needed spaces that would both accommodate their way of life and reinforce the commitment of their members to Perfectionist principles. Harriet Worden, an early member, remembered that the Old Mansion House was built "partly on account of their needing more room, and partly for the sake of the educational and social advantages of consolidation".5 Pierrepont Noyes, one of John Humphrey Noyes's sons, wrote many years later:
All the principles to which Mr. Noyes and the Communists were committed, as well as the practical ordering oflife in accordance with their plans, made such a unitary home absolutely necessary.6
Clearly, the Community understood that its ability to put in place the social structure it desired depended on the existence of an appropriate physical structure. This perception of a direct connection between the existence of a "consolidated" or "unitary" home, and the possibility of living according to their social beliefs, was stated explicitly in the second verse of the "Community Hymn":
We have built us a dome
On our beautiful plantation
And we all have one home
And one family relation.
There is little record of the actual design process that resulted in the Old Mansion beyond a bald statement that Erastus Hamilton, a member of the Community who had studied architecture, drew plans and supervised construction.7 We do know that John Humphrey Noyes was personally involved, as several sources record that he and Hamilton together staked out the ground for the foundations. Hamilton was ostensibly the architect for many of the later buildings as well. However, the more detailed information available for the later campaigns suggests that he functioned primarily as a recorder, using his architectural training to convert the results of Community decisions into floor plans and elevations. Given the nature of the relationship between Noyes and his followers in these early years, it is very likely that Hamilton's role was largely a matter of producing what today would be called construction documents from an architectural program8 determined by Noyes.
However it was developed, the plan of the two lower floors was straightforward, with both levels simply divided into thirds. On the lowest floor were a cellar built into the hillside, a kitchen, and a dining room. The second floor housed the printing office, school room, and meeting parlor. The First Annual Report of the Oneida Association also lists a reception room; possibly the school room was divided to create a reception area behind the door on the east facade (figs. 3 and 4). The third floor was originally to have been divided into a number of double bedrooms, with the attic left undivided as a dormitory. A lack of money and the need to finish the building before winter set in led instead to the creation of the original, much celebrated "Tent Room", in which a number of double sleeping compartments opening onto an open sitting area were created by hanging curtains on wires eight feet above the floor. As more members arrived, three wings were added; these housed primarily housekeeping facilities on the lower floors with sleeping space above.
The second-floor parlor space was the heart of the daily life of the Community, and of its spatial strategies for reinforcing desired beliefs and behaviors. The Community reasoned that a family spends its evenings together in a parlor; they defined themselves as a family; if they met in a parlor in the evening, it would make everyone feel more like a family; therefore, they needed a space large enough to hold the entire assembled membership. The space that made possible this evening ritual was actually called a parlor in the Old Mansion. In the New Mansion it came to be called "the Hall", probably because it was so much larger than a single family parlor that the term could no longer support the exaggeration.
The parlor or hall thus became symbolic of the self-identification of the Perfectionists as one large family. Explicit statements to this effect abound in Community publications, such as the 1867 Handbook, which records that the members gather in the Hall "in the same manner that a family gathers around the hearth",9 and the 1871 version, which refers to the space as the "Family Hall".10 The meeting itself provided a crucial "social and educational advantage", making it possible for all members of the Community to meet and participate in a shared spiritual and community life. The symbolic importance of the evening meeting and its role in melding Community members into one psychological unit is also frequently recognized in Community publications. One such article explained that the evening meeting called on the individual "to assume his public or organic character", to participate in a communal act that was "partly social, partly intellectual, partly industrial, and partly religious in character".11 The gathering was, in fact, a major component in the social glue that held the Community together. This function was so important from the very beginning that, at a time when some members were still sleeping in the shanties and the log cabin, when private space was severely limited, an entire third of a floor in the Old Mansion was devoted to the evening meeting "parlor".
While the space given to the parlor reflected an internal objective, the printing office embodied the external objective to which John Humphrey Noyes devoted the majority of his time: conversion of the world to Perfectionism. Noyes and others of the Community produced a steady flow of newspapers, pamphlets, and books designed to spread the good word. Again, the amount of space allocated is a clue to priorities; the Printing Office occupied as many square feet as the parlor.
The plan of the Old Mansion House can also be "read" for evidence of the degree to which the Perfectionists' professed commitment to Bible Communism and complex marriage was actually put into practice in the new settlement. Fully communal housekeeping was a reality. The single large kitchen and dining room in the original block, and the laundry with huge hot water boilers and a bakery with an eight-by-ten-foot brick oven in the wings, were obviously sized for collective use.
The physical evidence also makes it clear that with the completion of the Old Mansion, communal child raising was fully implemented. There was no space in the new structure for children to live with their birth parents. The written record tells us that when the adults moved into the Old Mansion, children and their designated attendants remained in the pre-existing structures till the next year. The physical record agrees; a separate communal dwelling, the first Children's House, was erected in 1849.
Surprisingly, given that it was introduced among Noyes's Putney followers before the relocation to Oneida, we do not see physical evidence suggesting that complex marriage was being practiced in 1848. There are no single bedrooms such as would later appear in the New Mansion House.12 Although shared sleeping spaces would not necessarily make it impossible to implement complex marriage, the physical environment of 1848 gives no indication of its having been designed with the multiple interactions of complex marriage in mind.
The floor plan could easily have been reorganized to facilitate complex marriage by dividing the Tent Room and attic into smaller, single compartments. But despite a demonstrated willingness to remodel the Old Mansion to accommodate other changing needs,13 there is no evidence that the sleeping accommodations were rearranged. The physical evidence, therefore, strongly suggests that full integration of complex marriage into the social environment was a considerably longer process than much of the written record implies.
By the time the New Mansion House was built in 1861 - 62, we do find the Community producing a physical environment conducive to the practice of complex marriage. Indeed, it is likely that part of the motivation for building the New Mansion derived from the fact that the social environment had evolved in this regard, and that the Community therefore no longer found comfortable the "fit" between itself and its physical surroundings.
Full implementation of complex marriage, was not, of course, the only motivation. There was sheer population pressure: The Circular had been discussing the need for more residential space since 1855, when the Community population had reached 170. Certainly the success of the Community's industries after the mid-1850s was a major factor. The new affluence made it financially possible not only to build a new home, but also to build it on a larger and grander scale (fig. 4).
We know a great deal more about the design process for the New Mansion House than we do for the Old. As early as 1856 the whole Community was involved in discussion of how to create what The Circular called "Community architecture--a style of building which shall be adapted to the character of our institution, and which shall represent in some degree the spirit by which we are actuated".14 Harriet Worden reported that the design of a New Mansion was hotly debated in the evening meetings. Many specific plans and diagrams were put forward, some of them "amusingly elaborate".15
Some of these schemes were described in The Circular. They fall into two general types. One group proposed various sizes of octagonal or round buildings, all with a large domed central space ringed by rooms for sleeping and other uses. Another group proposed a plan like that of the Old Mansion, generally making it larger and with what The Circular called "a new arrangement of inside details".16
The actual plan (Fig. 5) shows that the second group won. A diagram of the first floor was published in The Circular with a detailed description of the new building.17 In the main block (designated A on fig. 5) the first floor housed an office, a reception room for visitors, a library, and a guest bedroom. Above these, on the second floor, the entire space was devoted to the two-story Hall for evening meetings. To the north was a tower forty feet high (C), with its own access stair and entry (e). Between them a wing contained a first-floor "family sitting room flanked on three sides by private apartments"(B). Above it was located a double-height sitting room of the same size flanked by two stories of private apartments, access to the third floor rooms being provided by a balcony that overlooked the second-floor sitting room.
After all the community-wide discussion that generated this plan, the only real "new arrangement of inside details" is the change from sleeping spaces shared by two or more individuals, to private bedrooms for all adults. The other changes were merely expansions to a more lavish scale of elements already present in the Old Mansion: a bigger meeting hall with an elaborately painted ceiling; two more tent room configurations, in which sleeping spaces open onto a sitting area; a suite of reception spaces; and a library instead of just a school room.
The only programmatic change--the introduction of individual private rooms--created an environment obviously more conducive to the smooth functioning of complex marriage. With the double bedrooms went the last remnants of dyadic marriage customs; individuals were now spatially free to conduct their sexual lives without inconvenience or embarrassment to others.
This switch to private rooms may also be indicative of a gradual realization that the occasional opportunity for individual privacy was a necessary safety valve in the intensely communal life of a Perfectionist settlement. In 1852 The Circular proclaimed:
It is our policy in everything, to favor and make attractive the common gathering place, rather than the private retreat. The balance of inducement should always be toward aggregation and not separation.18
By 1869, however, the tone had changed: while "it is not usual for individuals to make a sitting room of their private dormitories, still it would be perfectly proper for them to do so if they chose".19 The plan of the New Mansion suggests that by 1861 the Community had come to appreciate the need for privacy, and therefore included this policy modification in the program for its new physical environment.
To summarize, comparison of the plans of the two Mansions suggests that four significant changes occurred in the social environment between 1848 and 1861: the Community got bigger, it got richer, it fully accepted complex marriage, and it developed an awareness of the need for individual privacy in the context of communal life.
It seems clear that social and physical environment were related at Oneida--but what was the nature of the relationship? Did the physical and social environments exist in a relationship of mutual causality? Might not human microsocieties possessing similar social structures tend to develop similar architectural programs? Are there instances of parallel behavior in communities that have evolved similar physical environments? I have approached these questions by identifying a second physical environment--which contains many of the same elements found in Oneida's architectural program--and then asking whether the microsocieties that inhabited the two environments also shared elements of social organization.20
Initially it may seem surprising to yoke a celibate microsociety with one in which members had multiple sexual partners; nevertheless, I have found that the architectural program for a monastery of a Roman Catholic cloistered order strongly resembles that of the Oneida Community. Though individual monastery designs are affected by such factors as historical circumstances, location, ritual requirements of a particular order, and climate, the architectural program of Christian cloistered monasteries has been remarkably constant over time and geographic range. This generic program shares a remarkable number of elements with that of the Oneida Community.
The plan of the Cistercian Fountains Abbey in northern England illustrates this similarity. At its peak the population of the Abbey may have been twice that of Oneida at its highest point,21 so although the amount of space allocated to each function is often larger at Fountains, the catalog of functions is similar. Despite the difference in size, I chose Fountains Abbey from among the many possible examples because it is located in a part of England where the climate is similar to that of upstate New York, because much of the original fabric of its buildings is still in place, and because the functional program of its rooms and spaces is well established.
The first task is to demonstrate that the plans of a typical monastery and of the Oneida Community do indeed contain many analogous program elements. A point-by-point comparison of the program and plan of the Mansion House complex after 1878 (figs. 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3) with those of Fountains Abbey (figs. 7.1 and 7.2) is presented in Table 1, which also serves as a key to the plans.22
Many of the shared elements, such as dining rooms, kitchens, sanitary facilities, and laundries, are common to most human housing arrangements and so not particularly relevant for our purposes. However, the two plans also share a number of elements that are not merely concomitants of communal living.
Both plans include reception areas that create a threshold and serve as places for interaction with the world outside. Monasteries have a porter's lodge, guest parlors, and overnight accommodations. Oneida had the office where one of the older women waited to receive visitors, a reception parlor, and a guest room (respectively labelled I, J, and K on both figs. 6 and 7). While these elements are also common to the plan of a boarding school, as is the library (L), the boarding school derives directly from the medieval monastery and replicates specific aspects of its social order. We can therefore allow for correspondence in their physical environments in areas where their social purposes overlap.
Monks and cloistered nuns gathered (and still do) daily in a Chapter House to hear the Bible read, learn of changes in work assignments, and discuss the affairs of the community. The Perfectionists had their Hall, in which they did many of the same things (F). Fully vowed members of orders and Oneida adults were typically assigned private rooms or cells (M), while both religious novices and Oneida children slept in dormitories (N) under the surveillance of novice masters or mistresses, or Children's House attendants. The private spaces in both cases are small, plainly furnished, and undecorated. The collective environments, on the other hand, are both more elaborately decorated and more generous in scale.
In both cases the accommodations of the leader are exceptional. The abbot or abbess had more space, often with more direct access to the outside, than did the rest of the community. The abbot's quarters at Fountains, a suite of several rooms with its own stair, are located on the second level, across the reredorter from the cells of the monks. It should be no surprise to learn that John Humphrey Noyes first occupied one of the three noticeably larger rooms located in the tower of the New Mansion, which had its own entrance and access stair, or that after the 1868 construction of the Children's House wing he moved to a second-floor suite covering more square feet than a communal sitting room, next to a stair leading directly to the new side entry (P).
Both the typical monastery and Oneida include an open space encircled by the main building complex, where the members of the community can be outside while remaining somewhat sheltered from the elements and the outside world. Oneida called its version of the cloister courtyard the "Quadrangle" (Q).
Medieval monasteries in cold climates, like Fountains, often had a "warming house", the only place besides the infirmary where a fire burned at all times. In some silent orders, the only time of the day when conversation was allowed was the few minutes spent gathering in the warming house before dinner. Even after the Oneida Mansion House was fitted for steam heat, a stove was kept burning in the nursery kitchen. This little auxiliary kitchen at the junction of the New Children's House and the adults' quarters was furnished with sofas and rockers, and was a favored place for conversation (R).
There is of course one element of the program of a monastery that is conspicuously missing at Oneida: the church. The Perfectionists set aside no space as consecrated or sacramental, just as they observed no holy day; Sunday was a day like any other. For the members of a cloistered order, the church is not only a ritual space, but also the place in which they do their most important public work. While a monk or cloistered nun has personal devotions and duties related to the ongoing operation of the House, his or her primary purpose is to pray for the well-being of the world. Perfectionists were also involved with their own spiritual development and with daily operations, but they too had a larger goal: to show the world the path to perfection by spreading the word in their publications. Might not the church be seen as a functional equivalent to the Oneida Printing Office (S)?
If one accepts that there is a high degree of congruence between the two architectural programs, the next step is to compare the social practices to see whether they too exhibit similarities. This does indeed turn out to be the case.
Fundamental to the social structure of both microsocieties is the discouragement of attachment between individuals in favor of attachment to the collective. In religion it is called "particular friendship"; at Oneida it was "special love". In both instances it was severely criticized. Mechanisms that worked to prevent it were found in both types of community, including rotation of work assignments, and rules governing individual social interactions.
Both built into the social system the modification of deviant behavior by means of group critique. Perfectionists judged to be in spiritual error were called to face a session of "mutual criticism", in which members of the Community discussed the individual's failings and offered spiritual advice. An erring member of a cloistered order might be called to admit his or her error during a "chapter of faults". In both environments this public critique and spiritual guidance by other members of the community could also be undertaken voluntarily.
Questions of property were dealt with in much the same way by the two groups. Upon entry to either, individual holdings were put into a common pool of capital and goods. The original sum was returned when an individual left either community, unless, in the monastic case, full vows had been taken.
Full membership in both communities was granted only after a period of study by the applicant and approval of his or her spiritual progress. In religion this took the form of the novitiate, while the Perfectionists required applicants to study by correspondence before they could be accepted into the Community.
There are further parallels: a member of an order and a woman of Oneida were both immediately recognizable by their distinctive clothing; few personal possessions were allowed in either type of community; and most members spent their days on the grounds of the institution unless sent out with a mission. Two final issues deserve special attention: political organization and sexuality.
Politically, the cloistered order and the Oneida Community were structured similarly, each having a leader who held nearly absolute authority but was advised by a council. An interesting difference emerges, however, when we look at the transfer of leadership. In cloistered orders a new leader was elected by a vote of all members who had taken full vows. This practice promoted cohesion, as the majority of the community must have declared themselves to be in support of a candidate before he or she assumed office. John Humphrey Noyes did not follow this pattern, attempting instead to name his oldest son as his successor. His attempt to establish a dynastic succession generally has been recognized as one of the causes of the Community's ultimate dissolution.
On the question of sexuality, at first glance it hardly seems possible to find two communities more un-alike than Oneida and a cloistered monastery. Stepping up a rung on the abstraction ladder, however, changes the view. In both cases control of individual sexuality was given over to the collective. Conformance to a nonstandard group norm was required, so that both communities existed in the context of a larger society that did not share that norm. The practice of celibacy and the sanctioning of multiple sexual partners are both behaviors unacceptable to society at large, though perhaps for rather different reasons. As Lewis A. Coser points out, successful utopian communities--into which category fall both the generic monastery and Oneida--recognize that dyadic sexual relations threaten allegiance to the collective, and either eliminate or strongly de-emphasize attachments between individuals.23 Roman Catholic monasticism and Noyesian Perfectionism chose different mechanisms for accomplishing analogous goals.
There are in fact so many commonalities, both in architectural program and in social structure, that one is tempted to ask just how much John Humphrey Noyes knew about medieval monasticism. There is no evidence that he ever studied or visited monasteries, however, which makes it unlikely that these similarities stemmed from an intentional recreation of the monastic model. Instead, it seems clear that they resulted from what might be called convergent evolution. As the social structure and the architectural program of both groups evolved, both found that certain ways of arranging the physical environment were most successful in accommodating and reinforcing the behaviors mandated by their social environments. Just as the desired behaviors are congruent, so are the spaces that house them.
A monastic community and the Oneida of the Perfectionists had the same ultimate goal: making it possible for members to devote their lives to a vision of spirituality, whether that be called saintliness or perfection, in order that they might work toward their own and the world's salvation. To achieve this goal, both found it necessary to create a nonnormative social environment in which untypical social behaviors were required of members. There are numerous parallels in the structures of these social environments. Though they evolved independently, the architectural programs of the institutions created to house both groups also share many elements. Without sliding into environmental determinism, we can conclude that there is a component of mutual causality in the relationship between the social and physical structures developed by the two groups. Both chose to include particular elements in their physical environment because those elements were the ones that, out of the nearly infinite possibilities, best reflected and reinforced the common elements of their social environments. These make up architectural programs of striking similarity, because they are "in all respects adapted to a Community like ours".
Analogous elements in the plans Fountains Abbey
|
||
Fountains Abbey |
Key |
Oneida Mansion |
| Tower | A | Tower |
| Dining rooms, kitchens, and sanitary facilities | B,C,D | Dining rooms, kitchens, and sanitary facilities |
| Agricultural and industrial buildings | E | Agricultural and industrial buildings |
| Chapter House | F | Big Hall |
| Communal workspace | G | Communal workspace |
| Parlor | H | Sitting rooms and classrooms |
| Gatehouse, guest parlors, and guest rooms | I, J, K | Office, reception parlor, and guest room |
| Library | L | Library |
| Areas with individual cells for monks | M | Areas with privte bedrooms for adults |
| Dormitory for lay brothers | N | Dormitories for children |
| Master of lay brothers | O | Children's House attendants |
| Abbot's quarters | P | Noye's quarters |
| Cloister | Q | Quadrangle |
| Warming House | R | Nursery kitchen |
| Church | S | Printing office |
FOOTNOTES
1. This article assumes a basic familiarity with the beliefs and practices of Perfectionism. For readers not familiar with the sect, I offer the following brief summary: John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, preached that human beings could reach spiritual perfection on earth, that he himself was free from sin, and that by following him others could ascend to the same level. Achieving this perfection required a return to the practices of the first Christians. As interpreted by Noyes, this meant living in Bible Communism, working communally, and holding all property in common. His doctrine of "complex marriage" extended this communal principle to marital and parental relationships: all Perfectionist men and women considered themselves to be married to each other, and children of any birth parents were considered to be children of the entire "family" thus created.
2. "Community Architecture", The Circular (9 November 1853), 166.
3. Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism 17901975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 197. This is still the only comprehensive treatment of architecture and community in American utopian settlements. Though I do not always agree with her conclusions, I am much indebted to Hayden for first suggesting the connections between architecture and social structure at Oneida.
4. The stirpiculture program was an attempt to produce spiritually superior beings by selective breeding. Spiritually "ascended" men and women were encouraged to produce offspring, in pairings approved and sometimes proposed by a central committee.
5. Harriet M. Worden, Old Mansion House Memories [essays published in The Circular during 187172 (Utica, N.Y.: The Widtman Press, 1950), 7].
6. Pierrepont Noyes, My Father's House: An Oneida Boyhood (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 10.
7. George W. Noyes, second-generation Oneida family member, quoted in Constance Noyes Robertson, Oneida Community: An Autobiography, 18511876 (1970; reprint, Syracuse N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1981), 13.
8. In modern architecture, a program is the list of functions to be incorporated into the design and the approximate square footage assigned to each.
9. Handbooks of the Oneida Community 1867 & 1871 Bound with Mutual Criticism (New York: AMS Press, 1976), 5.
10. Handbook 1871, 10.
11. "Community Journal", The Circular (10 February 1859), 11.
12. Moreover, the double bedrooms and Tent Room compartments on the third floor are specifically described, both in the First Annual Report and in Harriet Worden's later account, as being for "married pairs". Unmarried females shared compartments in two smaller tent rooms, and "unmarried men and boys" slept in the attic dormitory. This use of the terms "married" and "unmarried" in an official publication also suggests that complex marriage was not yet a fully accepted part of the social environment.
13. See for example the extensive reorganization of the cooking and dining facilities described in "Community Culinary Department", The Circular (13 September 1869), 206.
14. "Community Architecture", The Circular (9 November 1856), 166.
15. Worden, Old Mansion House Memories, 105.
16. "Community Architecture", The Circular (9 November 1856), 166.
17. "An Oneida Journal", The Circular (5 September 1861), 123.
18. "The Tent Room", The Circular (25 April 1852), 94.
19. "The Upper Sitting Room", The Circular (11 January 1869), 347.
20. This is not a cross-cultural argument; the working assumption is that the social structures of different cultures are inherently so different that this type of comparison would not be valid, though the possibility opens up another area of research.
21. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Fountains may have housed five to six hundred, while Oneida's highest count (in 1878 and including only the adults) was 309. The Fountains figure is from R. Gilyard-Beer, Fountains Abbey (London: HMSO, 1989), 9; the Oneida number is from Robertson, Autobiography, 23.
22. The plans shown in figs. 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 are essentially the plans published by Hayden in Seven American Utopias. I've corrected them in some places. The plans shown in figs. 7.1 and 7.2 are from an untitled pamphlet on the Abbey published by English Heritage (the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission of England) for the National Trust in 1986 and reprinted in 1989.
23. Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1974), 138.
Efforts to derive contemporary lessons from the past are always fraught with difficulty. Seldom has this been more true than in the case of John Humphrey Noyes and the community he founded in mid-nineteenth-century New York State. The Oneida Community and its system of "complex marriage", which both Noyes and his critics somewhat misleadingly described as "free love", have been the focus of extraordinarily wide and divergent interpretations over the past century and a half. These have ranged from extreme treatments arguing that Noyes and Oneida were part of the vanguard of sexual liberation and women's rights to comparisons of Noyes with Hitler, arguing that he and his community were highly repressive and destructive of human potential.1 Elsewhere I have argued that most treatments of Noyes and his communal experiments at Oneida can best be compared to a Rorschach test or to a mirror reflecting the hopes, fears, or preoccupations of the writers.2 The Oneida experience was so complex and multifaceted that it seemingly can generate as many interpretations as the famous elephant that the blind men of Hindustan attempted so imperfectly to describe.
This brief essay in no way claims to identify what the significance of the Oneida Community experiment for the present really is or should be. Rather, I am drawing upon twenty-five years of reflection on the Oneida Community to present what to me have been some of the most salient issues raised by the Oneida experiment, which may have implications for dealing with our present sense of crisis in community life and relations between the sexes. I hope and trust that these brief thoughts will stimulate further sharing of the rich and divergent perspectives of others who have also sought to understand the Community and its ongoing significance. Although some of the specific forms Noyes introduced at Oneida may not be especially appealing to many of us today, even to Community descendants, I believe that the philosophy underlying Noyes's efforts at religious and social reconstruction may still have considerable contemporary resonance.
The most striking feature of John Humphrey Noyes's career to me was his keen sense of the responsibility of the intellectual or creative person for the social consequences of his ideas. Noyes was breaking down old and outmoded beliefs and ways of action, but he did not leave his followers to drift without guidelines. He provided new, if highly unconventional, standards and practices, and he took responsibility for seeing that these worked, or if not, that they were discarded or modified. Viewed externally, Oneida contained many bizarre or even dangerous features, tending toward antinomianism and the breakdown of all social controls. But from the internal perspective, Oneida, with its restraints and necessary emphasis on the subordination of the individual to the common good, revealed a strong stress on authority, security, unity, and self-control, and an internal consistency in its continuing search for a middle ground between the untenable extremes of libertinism and repression that were then agitating external society. Because Noyes commented shrewdly and with great perspicacity on the strengths and weaknesses of almost all the major efforts of his day at achieving religious and social reconstruction, his writings provide an unusually sensitive barometer of contemporary social and intellectual concerns. Whitney Cross is correct in asserting that Oneida "is veritably the keystone in the arch of burned-over district history, demonstrating the connection between the enthusiasms of the right and those of the left."3
From this starting point, let me reflect on some of the perspectives that John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community may provide on utopia, family, and women.
Underlying Noyes's whole life and sense of mission was a deep-seated concern to overcome the social and intellectual disorder he experienced both in his own life and in the world around him. The areas of New England and western New York where Noyes had his formative emotional and intellectual experiences were undergoing rapid economic growth, unstable social conditions, and sharply conflicting religious movements. As a precocious and strong-willed yet socially maladroit and painfully shy child, Noyes was particularly jarred by the cacophony of ideas and causes that surrounded him. Ultimately, he reached the extraordinary conclusion that he was uniquely responsible for achieving a new religious and social synthesis--both for himself and for others. As he declared in a letter in 1837, "God has set me to cast up a highway across this chaos, and I am gathering out the stones and grading the track as fast as possible".4
Although Noyes rejected using the term "utopian" to apply to his efforts, since he argued that he was engaged in a practical, not impractical, effort to help establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth,5 Noyes's emphasis on the "millennium" is clearly "utopian", if the term is not used pejoratively. As Noyes put it, the first order of priority was to establish "right relations with God", a common set of values or principles.6 In a striking statement in 1853 about the "principles" that he and his followers held, Noyes observed: "Our fundamental principle is religion".7 Note that this statement does not say anything about the specific content of their religious principles--including specific beliefs about God, Christ, or other topics--but refers only to the form of those beliefs. In effect, he is saying that his followers believed in "having a religion", that is, in having a common basis of belief. A spirit of solidarity and unity might be deemed essential--or, to put it differently, some common basis for social order had to be accepted as a given--but the specific ways in which core religious and social principles were to be expressed in practice could vary greatly, depending on circumstances.
The essential principle underlying Noyes's religious approach was what he described as the "anti-legality of the Gospel", or in other terms, the notion that faith has higher priority than works. The article "Paul Not Carnal", printed shortly after Noyes's conversion to "perfect holiness" in New Haven in February 1834, conveys this belief, which underlay the rest of his life.8 Like Luther, Noyes had driven himself to try to achieve impossible standards of legalistic perfection; and like Luther, Noyes eventually came to the conclusion that the perfection God demanded was based not on external works but on internal attitude. Actions in and of themselves were neither good nor bad, except in terms of what they meant to individuals and to God.
Such beliefs left plenty of room for misunderstandings and self-deception, as Noyes discovered during the next decade of struggling with the resultant problems in himself and among other Perfectionists who wanted to be freed from moral restraint without taking responsibility for their lives. At Brimfield, Massachusetts, in 1834, for example, the Perfectionists Mary Lincoln and Maria Brown decided to show that their piety could overcome carnal desires by sleeping chastely in the same bed with a visiting evangelist. Noyes, who had been at Brimfield earlier with the same evangelist, had felt so threatened by the atmosphere there that he had left precipitously before the "Brimfield bundling" scandal broke, making his way home some sixty miles through bitter cold and snow to his home in Putney, Vermont, in less than twenty-four hours.9
As early as 1839, Noyes recognized the necessity for adequate controls over behavior, cautioning: "Observe that the doctrine here delivered, is not that 'believers under the Gospel dispensation, are delivered from the obligation of personal obedience to moral law' but that the external application of the moral law, which worketh, not obedience, but wrath, is exchanged for the internal administration of it, which secures its fulfilment."10 In effect, both at Putney and Oneida, external social restraints were eventually given less importance than internal self-restraint, though complex means of control also were instituted.
If one sets aside the specific practices at Oneida and focuses instead on the basic philosophy that underlay the Community, Noyes's stress on setting up a common value base first and on being flexible in attempting to realize underlying values in practice seems compelling to those interested in profound and long-lasting social reconstruction. Although Rosabeth Kanter in Commitment and Community has argued that successful communities are characterized by effective "commitment mechanisms", this argument largely puts the cart before the horse in my opinion.11 The first order of business, instead, must be to find a common sense of mission and priorities. Only then can an individual or group seek effectively for ways to implement those priorities. Similarly, in implementing a set of priorities, it is essential to keep always in mind the underlying spirit rather than rigidly to follow preconceived schemes about what must be done. Even during its last decade, when one might have expected the Oneida Community to have ossified, external observers such as Charles Nordhoff commented about the extraordinary flexibility of the Community in everything from work assignments to recreation to meal schedules, and its strong desire to avoid getting locked into routines.12 This was one of the Community's greatest strengths. It was always ready to find the best possible way to achieve its underlying goals in practice.
A second topic on which Noyes's thought and the experience of Oneida can inspire present-day reflection has to do with the issue of "family". When Noyes talked about "family", he meant far more than the word normally denotes. Not only for Oneida, but to a considerable extent for the other millenarian groups I have studied such as the Shakers and Mormons, the word "family" was expanded to include the entire face-to-face, Gemeinschaft-type community.13 Noyes argued that the nuclear family by itself was too limited. He saw himself, instead, trying to create an "enlarged family", overcoming the isolation and selfishness that were an almost inevitable concomitant of the nuclear family in a highly individualistic society.14
As Noyes put it so eloquently: "Our Communities are families, as distinctly bounded and separated from promiscuous society as ordinary households. The tie that binds us together is as permanent and sacred, to say the least, as that of marriage, for it is our religion. We receive no members (except by deception or mistake) who do not give their heart and hand to the family interest for life and forever. Community of property extends just as far as freedom of love."15 And as the Community hymn put it: "[W]e all have one home and one family relation".16 Abel Easton was exaggerating but little when he described Oneida as "a home the like of which has not been seen since the world began".17
One of Noyes's most intellectually provocative articles was his 1854 piece on "The Family and its Foil".18 In it, he asserted that "marriage", in its present form, was antagonistic to the "family". By this rather startling statement, he meant that existing patterns of marriage, which grew out of romantic love, frequently separated a couple geographically, emotionally, and socially from their "family"--that is, their parents and larger kinship and community ties. Such marriages based on romantic love contributed to the fragmentation of social relations. As Noyes saw it, love attachments confined to individuals were a form of "egotism for two", part of the same disruptive and antisocial individualism that was represented by the spirit of rampant acquisitiveness in antebellum America.
How were the disruptive aspects of such romantic love to be dealt with constructively? Further individualistic fragmentation--for instance, free love outside a community context--was no solution. Instead of causing community disruption, powerful sexual forces of attraction should be given natural channels and harnessed to provide a vital bond within society. Noyes wanted all believers to be unified and to share a perfect community of interests, to replace the "I-spirit" with the "we-spirit". If believers were fully to love each other while living in close communal association, they must be allowed to love each other fervently and physically, "not by pairs, as in the world, but en masse". The necessary restrictions of the earthly state, governed by arbitrary human law, would eventually have to give way to the final heavenly free state, governed by the spirit in which "hostile surroundings and powers of bondage cease" and "all restrictions also will cease". A perfect unity in all respects would result. Each would be married to all--heart, mind, and body--in a complex marriage.19
The appeal of such an approach--and its severe limitations--are not hard to discern. The mystical desire for total union with and submersion in the universe is one of the most fundamental drives underlying religious experience. In its often distorted forms in human sexual intercourse, it has incredible complexity and power as well. The anthropologist Victor Turner has eloquently and evocatively analyzed the role of rites of passage and the liminal or transitional state between two modes of being or ways of living in the world.20 The raw power and intensity of emotion released during the transition state when neither the old nor the new status is in effect can be extraordinary. A profound state of communion can result from the breakdown of existing structures. Equally noteworthy is the potential for destructive expression and self-delusion in such states. To sustain a community such as Oneida that sought, in effect, to keep the fluidity and emotional intensity of such a transitional state over a long period of time is extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. Yet Oneida shows, if any community can, that there can be great appeal in "the pursuit of an impossible ideal" in which all arbitrary distinctions between individuals are broken down as part of an effort to realize a higher union.
On a more mundane level, Noyes's analysis of the family makes a key point for us today. All too often, we talk about "the family" as if it existed in isolation from the larger society. We talk about "family breakdown" and assume that individuals bear primary or even sole responsibility for such failure. Noyes, as well as some of the most articulate recent critics of the family such as Stephanie Coontz in her recent book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, make the critically important point that the nuclear family is not and cannot exist in isolation from the larger social order. Larger social problems often exacerbate, even cause, difficulties in the nuclear family. And no effort to improve the family can be successful unless it is placed into the larger context of overall social reconstruction.21
A final topic on which the experiences of Noyes and the Oneida Community raises significant questions for us today is the issue of women and their roles. If reestablishing "right relations with God"--a sense of common values that could link together an "enlarged family" or community--constituted the first priority for Noyes, then his second, closely related goal was reestablishing "right relations between the sexes".22 As an extremely shy young adult, Noyes had struggled to understand his own impulses and to determine why so many of the Perfectionists with whom he associated were engaged in such erratic and often self-destructive sexual experimentation. The existing marriage system was unsatisfactory, he concluded: "The law of marriage worketh wrath".23 Unrealistic and unnatural restrictions were being placed on relations between the sexes. In marriage, women were held in a form of slave-like domestic bondage, while their husbands toiled away in an uncertain and highly competitive external world.24 Romantic love and the monogamous family merely accentuated the disruptive individualism present in other areas of society. Most serious of all, men acted as though they owned their wives, as though their wives were a form of property. Noyes felt, instead, that sexual and emotional exclusiveness between the sexes should be done away with. Within the ideal order he was attempting to set up, sexual relations should be fundamentally restructured so that loyalty was raised to the level of the entire Community.25
The details of this remarkable effort at reorganizing marriage and family relations have been treated in many accounts and need not concern us here. What does need to be stressed, however, is both the systematic and the institutionally radical character of Noyes's innovations. Once basic community loyalty and the necessary institutional supports had been established over a period of nearly a decade, Noyes proceeded to introduce the practice of complex marriage and a variety of other radical changes that attempted to do away with all nonintrinsic distinctions between the sexes. Women were formally freed to participate in almost all aspects of Community religious, economic, and social life, in contrast to the far greater restrictions that they faced in the outside world. Within the limits deemed necessary to maintain the primary loyalty to the larger communal order, all individuals were encouraged to develop their highest capacities. Few societies in human history have done more to break down arbitrary distinctions between the sexes than did Oneida.26
It might initially seem paradoxical that this significant revision in sex roles and women's status at Oneida should have been accomplished in the face of John Humphrey Noyes's formal belief in the superiority of men over women. The chief reason this could occur was that Noyes's primary concern was not with male and female authority patterns per se, but rather with establishing his own personal authority over all his followers, both men and women. So long as Noyes's male and female followers unquestioningly acknowledged his paternalistic, God-like authority, he was prepared to be flexible in delegating that authority and making major changes in the interests of both sexes.27 No one way of organizing relations between the sexes was sacrosanct; the underlying spirit rather than any specific external form was Noyes's concern. In effect, therefore, both men and women at Oneida shared a common personal and religious commitment that radically undercut normal social restrictions. Woman's primary responsibility was not to her husband or to her children, but to God--and all souls were ultimately equal before God.28
Even though Noyes may have succeeded in resolving many problems that he and his followers faced by setting up a close-knit community, the question still remains how his activities related to the larger society and its concerns. In particular, several points need to be made about Noyes's response to the contemporary women's rights movement. One is that Noyes was genuinely sympathetic to many of the basic goals of antebellum feminists. He not only argued that relations between the sexes were out of joint, but also felt that a major reason for that disruption was the restricted role assigned to women. As a former abolitionist with ties to William Lloyd Garrison, he explicitly compared woman's status to that of a slave and used other language as vivid as that of the most militant feminists.29 Such writing was more than mere rhetoric unsupported by action. Noyes saw himself as a figure with a mission to free women (as well as men) from servitude to stereotyped behaviors and attitudes, and he made specific and often highly controversial changes at every level of community life to end discrimination against women, encourage their participation, and reestablish harmonious relations between the sexes.30
Yet while Noyes was in general agreement with much of the feminist diagnosis of the illness affecting relations between men and women, he was in sharp disagreement with its prescription for cure. Feminist stridency and emphasis on conflict between the sexes as a method of social change particularly repelled him and his followers. A note in the Community newspaper in 1850, for example, mentioned a women's rights convention in Ohio at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke and compared married women's legal status to that of slaves. The paper editorialized: "There is an oblique pointing at the truth in this statement, but it is far from probing the real depths of the case. . . . What is really wanted is to be able to live under the government of God, to establish mutually satisfying relations between the sexes."31 The point was to achieve the necessary and desirable changes in the right manner, one that would contribute to restoring harmonious relations between all parties involved in the conflict.
Like conservatives such as Catharine Beecher who helped to articulate and establish the Victorian synthesis, with its emphasis on the family, domesticity, and women's power in the home sphere, Noyes felt that the whole social order was threatening to come apart. New and more satisfying roles for men and women must be established, but this must be done in such a way that the divisiveness and conflict that were already so rampant in society could be minimized. Noyes achieved such a new synthesis for himself and his followers by creating a communal family at Oneida. The larger society, in the meantime, achieved much the same effect by making use of the nuclear family in conjunction with larger institutional agencies for social control such as churches, schools, and asylums. The specifics of their programs might differ, but in a curious way both Noyes and the larger Victorian society were alike in seeking to use essentially conservative means to achieve ways of life that differed greatly from those that had come before.32
Does such an approach have any continuing resonance for us today? A decade ago, many feminists would have said "No". It appeared to them that Noyes was, at best, attempting to co-opt and weaken serious efforts to improve women's status. With the passage of time, however, a certain mellowing seems to be occurring, at least among some feminist writers who have become increasingly aware of the difficulty of "having it all", trying to engage in high-powered and successful careers and, at the same time, to sustain a full and rewarding domestic life. Under such circumstances, feminist writers such as Ellen Wayland-Smith and others have been more impressed by how much rather than how little the Community was able to achieve.33 Without directly reentering the debate again at this time, let me simply argue that perhaps the greatest value of Oneida for contemporary feminists is that it raises and highlights many of the difficult questions of women's roles, without providing any definitive answers to them.
For more than three decades at Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes and his followers struggled with complex issues of social organization, not simply in theory but also in practice. They attempted to modify extremely deep-seated sexual attitudes and behavior patterns, and they did make important (if ultimately temporary) changes in the relations between men and women. On the other hand, Noyes and his followers certainly did not achieve an egalitarian millennium (nor was that their intention). Those historians who would treat the Oneida experiment as a "failure" simply because it did not achieve absolute "perfection" (in whatever sense perfection is being defined) are unrealistic in their expectations and their understanding of the way in which social change takes place. Noyes was a doer as well as a thinker. He sought, as much as possible, to approximate what he conceived to be the ideal community, but he was also aware of the limitations and strengths of the human beings with whom he was working. John Humphrey Noyes, his communities, and his philosophy deserve the kind of serious scholarly attention that they have only recently begun to receive.
PLATES
1. Oneida Community members at their Summer House, ca. 1866.
2. Oneida woman and child, ca. 1860.
FOOTNOTES
Note: This essay incorporates some information that first appeared in my article
"Free Love and Feminism: John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community",
Journal of the Early Republic 1 (Summer 1981): 165-83.
1. Among the analyses suggesting that Noyes and Oneida may have been a prototype for the future, see Robert Allerton Parker, A Yankee Saint: John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935); Victor F. Calverton, "Oneida: The Love Colony", in his Where Angels Dared to Tread: Socialist and Communist Utopian Colonies in the United States (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), 245-87; Mulford Q. Sibley, "Oneida's Challenge to American Culture", in Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie, eds., Studies in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), 41-62; and Richard A. Hoehn, "The Kingdom Goes Joint Stock: Learning from Oneida 100 Years Later", Christian Century 98 (28 January 1981): 77-80. Among the critical accounts, see especially Erik Achorn, "Mary Cragin: Perfectionist Saint", New England Quarterly 28 (1955): 490-518, which compares Noyes to Hitler; Ernest R. Sandeen, "John Humphrey Noyes as the New Adam", Church History 40 (March 1971): 82-90; Marlyn Hartzell Dalsimer, "Women and Family in the Oneida Community, 1837-1881" (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1975); and Louis J. Kern, "Ideology and Reality: Sexuality and Women's Status in the Oneida Community", Radical History Review 20 (Spring/Summer 1979): 181-205.
2. Lawrence Foster, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1991), 75-76.
3. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1950), 333.
4. George Wallingford Noyes, ed., Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes, Founder of the Oneida Community (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 308. This was part of Noyes's controversial letter to David Harrison of 15 January 1837 that was published in The Battle-Axe and Weapons of War, a countercultural newspaper of the 1830s. For the context of Noyes's early life, see also John Humphrey Noyes, Confessions of John H. Noyes, Part I: Confession of Religious Experience, Including a History of Modern Perfectionism (Oneida Reserve, N.Y.: Leonard, 1849); Parker, Yankee Saint; and Robert David Thomas, The Man Who Would Perfect: John Humphrey Noyes and the Utopian Impulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977).
5. For Noyes's criticism of the Fourierists for their impractical "utopianism", see George Wallingford Noyes, ed., John Humphrey Noyes: The Putney Community (Oneida, N.Y.: The Author, 1931), 168.
6. Noyes outlined the fourfold and integrally interconnected problems he was attempting to correct in "The Bible Argument Defining the Relations Between the Sexes in the Kingdom of Heaven", in First Annual Report of the Oneida Association (Oneida Reserve, N.Y.: Leonard, 1849), 27-28.
7. Bible Communism: A Compilation of the Annual Reports and Other Publications of the Oneida Association and its Branches (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Office of The Circular, 1853), 6.
8. The Perfectionist 1 (20 October 1834): 11. This article is most readily available as reprinted in John Humphrey Noyes, The Berean: A Manual for the Help of Those Who Seek the Faith of the Primitive Church (Putney, Vt.: Office of the Spiritual Magazine, 1847).
9. For treatments of the Brimfield episode, see G. W. Noyes, ed., Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes, 195-210; and Parker, Yankee Saint, 35-38.
10. The Witness 1 (25 September 1839): 78.
11. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972). For a discussion of the limitations of Kanter's criteria for "success" and "failure" of communities, see Jon Wagner, "Success in Intentional Communities: The Problem of Evaluation", Communal Societies 5 (1985): 89-100.
12. Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875), 286.
13. For a summary of this argument, see Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 237-40.
14. John Humphrey Noyes went so far as to maintain in his History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1870), p. 23, that the main idea underlying the efforts of both the secular and religious associationists in antebellum America was "the enlargement of home--the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations". (Italics in original removed.)
15. Handbook of the Oneida Community (Wallingford, Conn.: Office of The Circular, 1867), 64.
16. Nordhoff, Communistic Societies, 299.
17. Alan Estlake [Abel Easton], The Oneida Community (London: George Redway, 1900), 56.
18. The Family and its Foil", The Circular (16 November 1854), 594. See also "Becoming as Little Children", Spiritual Magazine 2 (22 December 1849): 339.
19. "Bible Argument", 21-22; Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 626-27.
20. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). For an application of Turner's approach to new religious movements, see J. Gordon Melton and Robert L. Moore, The Cult Experience: Responding to the New Religious Pluralism (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982). Also suggestive in this context are Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken, 1969); and Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Revitalization Movements", American Anthropologist 38 (April 1956): 264-81.
21. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
22. "Bible Argument", 27-28.
23. Ibid., 25.
24. Slavery and Marriage, A Dialogue: Conversation Between Judge North, Major South and Mr. Free Church (Oneida, N.Y.: Oneida Community, 1850); "The Family and its Foil"; and Bible Communism, 79-80.
25. See "Bible Argument"; Bible Communism; Handbook of the Oneida Community (1867), 64; and Handbook of the Oneida Community (Oneida, N.Y.: Oneida Community, 1871), 56.
26. Parker, Yankee Saint; Maren Lockwood Carden, Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1969); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality; and Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias--the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) discuss the ways in which sex roles and daily activities were modified at Oneida. Even Dalsimer's critical account, "Women and Family in the Oneida Community", 242-77, shows that significant changes were made in women's work at Oneida.
27. The overriding concern that Noyes had with his own personal authority and control is stressed in Spiritual Magazine 2 (11 July 1842): 57-59, and by George Wallingford Noyes, ed. John Humphrey Noyes, 25-33. Also see Thomas's observation in his The Man Who Would Be Perfect, and Richard De Maria, Communal Love at Oneida: A Perfectionist Vision of Authority, Property, and Sexual Order (New York: Mellen, 1978).
28. "Woman's Slavery to Children", Spiritual Magazine 1 (15 September 1846): 109-10.
29. The important linkage between Noyes and Garrison is analyzed in John L. Thomas, William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), 228-32.
30. "Woman Suppression", The Circular (27 March 1854), 298. The optimistic tone of this article is also characteristic of many of Noyes's other statements on this topic.
31. Susan C. Hamilton, "Communism, Woman's Best Friend", The Circular (27 May 1854), 298. This line of argument is repeated on numerous occasions.
32. For a suggestion of the striking similarities between Noyes's approach and that of conservatives such as Catharine Beecher, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), especially 151-67.
33. Ellen Wayland-Smith, "The Status and Self-Perception of Women in the Oneida Community", Communal Societies 8 (1988): 18-53, makes use of the perspectives of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theories and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982) to argue that Noyes put forward an essentially "feminine" model for his female and male followers. Using extensive primary writings by women at Oneida, she concludes that by putting into practice a society emphasizing an ethic of connection and self-sacrifice to maintain the good of the group, Noyes helped bolster women's self-perceptions, allowing them a richer and more fully integrated experience than most women in the outer world found possible.
After reconciliation with God and the reorganization of sexual relations, John Humphrey Noyes placed labor as the third great challenge to be dealt with by those living in a state of perfect holiness on earth. He claimed that his holy community would "mingle the sexes" in work assignments to an unusual degree not found in mainstream American society of the nineteenth century. But in fact, most women in the Oneida Community were assigned traditional female work roles.
As in every major area of Community life, John Humphrey Noyes enunciated the principles that would guide Community labor. In social treatises he explained how communal work would differ from, and improve upon, work in the "outside world". First, communal labor would increase economic strength "by placing the individual in a vital organization, which is in communication with the source of life, and which distributes and circulates life with the highest activity. . . . " Noyes's second principle held that the amount of work necessary in a holy community would diminish, due to its "compound economics". Third, Noyes critiqued "the present division of labor between the sexes [which] separates them entirely. The woman keeps house, and the man labors abroad. Men and women are married only after dark and during bed-time. . . ." He predicted that with the introduction of "loving companionship in labor, and especially the mingling of the sexes", labor would become "attractive", like "sport, as it would have been in the Eden State".1
To what extent did the Oneida Community alter the sexual division of labor, which Noyes's theory promised? In what follows I will examine women's work at Oneida and will attempt to answer such important questions as: who did what work, where, with whom, for how long each day, under what working conditions, and under whose direction?2
The Oneida Communists organized their numerous work activities into "departments", each headed by a superintendent. In 1875 Charles Nordhoff reported forty-eight separate work departments in the Community, ranging in importance from "silk-manufacture" to "clocks" and "stationery".3 Because some work departments were more critical to Oneida's economy than others, it seems unlikely that all forty-eight department heads participated equally in economic coordination and decision-making. Such a large committee would have been too cumbersome. The Circular of 8 May 1856, mentions a fifteen-member "Central Board" that made business decisions. Probably Noyes's handpicked male "central members" advised him on economic affairs, and after the decisions were debated and made, the entire Community accepted them as accomplished fact.
The Community also institutionalized several important work practices: using "bees", or collective efforts, to accomplish urgent or onerous work; having children help with light tasks; splitting up the working day into several different segments interspersed with recreation and fellowship; and rotating jobs. The latter practice insured a flexible labor supply and provided refreshing change in job assignments. Although some members, including women, changed jobs frequently, others did not. As the Community became more prosperous, it added hired help; by 1870 it had more than 200 employees on its payroll.4
An examination of sources reveals five categories of work at the Oneida Community, listed according to the proportion of women employed in each:
1. Traditional women's work: kitchen, housekeeping, laundry, sewing and mending, nursing, early child care, and nursery school teaching. In these areas of work women predominated as both workers and supervisors. They made most of the decisions in these work departments.
2. Light industry: fruit canning and packing, silk-spooling factory, traveling-bag manufacture; and Community support activities: print-shop, bookkeeping, and phonography (a kind of shorthand). In these activities young women predominated as workers and were supervised by both women and men.
3. Industry: animal-trap manufacture and machine shop, as well as various specialized areas including dairy, dentistry, transportation, and gardening. In these labors men predominated as both workers and supervisors, but a few women worked in these areas too.
4. Heavy farm work, carpentry, sawmilling, lumbering, sales work, and peddling: Community men and male hired laborers did all these traditionally male jobs.
5. Ideological administration: John Humphrey Noyes dominated this department
with the help of a few men and women (mainly his wife, sisters, and favorite
lovers) whom he personally selected to assist him.
TRADITIONAL WOMEN'S WORK
Women ran the Oneida kitchen. Depending on how much food they could afford to eat, the Oneida family took two to three daily meals in a common dining room. Women planned, prepared, and served food. Two women planned the menus for the family and did the actual cooking for a month at a time; then they were replaced by two more women. Realizing the enormous responsibility this job required, the Oneida Communists wisely rotated this task among the women, and incidentally assured themselves a variety of taste experiences. One Oneida woman commented that the women especially appreciated being relieved of kitchen tasks, and felt that this explained the reason "we women of thirty are mistaken for Misses [because] we are saved from so much care and vexation".5
In addition to the cooks, five or six women assisted in the kitchen with the paring, slicing, and cooking of the food. Two to four men, beginning at 4:30 a.m., built the kitchen fires and lifted the heavy pots and pans. In the dining room a group of young women, ages twelve to thirty, waited upon and cleared the tables, usually on a part-time basis, in addition to other tasks they performed in the Community. After dinner several women washed the dishes "in a pan of water, in a completely manual and timelessly traditional fashion".
A man, however, rinsed the dishes because the Community boasted an "ingenious device . . . operated by a catch and foot-treadle", by which whole racks of dishes were lowered into a large box full of hot water.6 It is not clear whether this contraption required unusual strength or mechanical knowledge, but a Community man, Mr. Mills, originally invented it and supervised its operation for the first few years, probably long enough to institutionalize it as a man's job. A separate department of the Community did the baking, headed by a man with a young woman assistant. Clearly, then, the Oneida kitchen was women's province. Women performed most of the menial work associated with feeding the Oneida family; men worked in the kitchen either as supervisors, as in the case of the head baker, or as those performing tasks that required unusual muscular strength.7
The housekeeping corps required to maintain the high standards of cleanliness of the Oneida Community was entirely female. Many women had specific tasks. For example, Mrs. S. had charge of the furniture, Miss K. took care of the carpets, Mrs. N. mended bedding materials, Mrs. A. washed the glassware and silver for the dining room, another woman filled and trimmed the lamps. Each morning a group of women circulated through the Mansion House, airing and making beds and tidying individual rooms. Women cleaned their own rooms as well as the men's. The Circular reported an incident in which a man complained that he could not find his nightshirt, "surmising that there had been some carelessness . . . in arranging his room" by the woman who made his bed. On bath day he discovered that he had put his other clothes over his nightshirt.8 When it was necessary to undertake large housekeeping projects, such as oiling and waxing floors, Oneida women organized a "bee" and swept through the house in a collective attack.
Laundry at the Oneida Community was a formidable task. In the early years an equal number of Community women and men drew lots for Sunday washday and, in a series of teams, carried water, rubbed, pounded, boiled, rinsed, and hung out the clothes. After the Sunday washing, six to eight women and girls spent the week sprinkling, ironing, and folding the clothes. Harriet Worden recalled, "The women remember several instances when the weather was freezingly cold, and their dresses, wetted by the pattering of soapsuds, became frozen stiff; and occasionally numerous icicles formed a crystal border around their skirts". She remembered fondly the Sunday washdays, full of "merriment and fun", and "the hum of conversation, singing together".9 In the early years, laundry was a Community task, commonly shared, but enormously time-consuming.
In 1863 the Oneidans constructed a separate wash-house with steam engine and boiler, washing machines, centrifugal wringer, mangle, and a drying room for bad weather. At least one Community commentator believed that because the men came to know from firsthand experience the oppressive drudgery of the laundry, "improvements and conveniences have since been successively introduced . . . "10 Although some Community members looked back nostalgically to the early washday bees and lamented that "our children seem destined to grow up in total ignorance of the wash-tub", most agreed with Harriet Worden when she wrote that "we feel reconciled . . . [and] were glad when the release came and gave us a chance to devote ourselves to education and industries more profitable and better adapted to our tastes".11 After the introduction of machinery into the laundry, men did some folding and mangling of large items such as sheets, tablecloths, towels, and pillowcases; women and girls sprinkled, starched, and ironed the wearing apparel of the entire Community, then returned the clothes to the Mansion House to be sorted and distributed to the shelves or their respective owners.
Despite some limited male participation, members of the Oneida Community definitely viewed laundry as women's work. An amusing article reported an imaginary conversation between articles of clothing who discussed indignantly the "new-fangled devices [which had robbed] them of the attention they formerly had from the women". "Old Sheet" chaired the meeting and inquired, "Did [the women] not get up early every Monday morning and devote the first labors of the week to us? Did they not rub and scrub and rinse and wring until they wore the skin off from their fingers? And did they not sometimes make the men cross and blues as bedlam in view of the rival attentions given to us on washing day?" The article went on to toast "the Steam Engine--a family institution--suggested originally by our Grandmother's teakettle--now at last reaching its highest distinction as the washer of dirty clothes and liberator of women".12
All of the clothes in the Oneida Community were homemade and organized in the following manner: women designed and made their own clothes in their after-work hours; a tailor shop presided over by a man made the shirts, coats, and trousers of the Oneida men. For the greater part of the Community's history, a children's dress department staffed by women sewed the numerous articles the Community children required. When, after the stirpiculture experiment began in 1869, there were more children, making the children's clothes was an especially formidable task. The Oneida Circular respectfully described Miss Matthew's responsibilities and working conditions as head of the children's dressing department where she had two regular assistants and seasonal bees to help her with her work: "[S]he it is who cuts and fits, turns, rips and sews for the children from morn till night. . . ." The article puzzled, "[H]ow she can bear in mind . . . fourteen hundred different articles of children's wear--frocks, petticoats, chemises, drawers, waists, aprons, jackets, pantaloons, etc.--and know where they all are and keep them all in repair, passing along what one child outgrows to another smaller, and never getting tired, and never out of patience--is a pleasing mystery. We solve it thus: it is her mission, and therefore she thrives in the business, and the business thrives with her".13
Oneida women assumed roles as "mothers" to alter and mend the clothing of one child and of one or more men of the Community, in
