Oneida Community

Oneida Community, utopian religious community that developed out of a Society of Inquiry established by John Humphrey Noyes and some of his disciples in Putney, Vt., U.S., in 1841. As new recruits arrived, the society turned into a socialized community.

Noyes had experienced a religious conversion during a revival in 1831, when he was 20 years old. He then gave up law studies and attended Andover Theological Seminary and Yale Divinity School. His acceptance and preaching of the doctrine of perfectionism, the idea that after conversion one was free of all sin, was considered too unorthodox, and he was denied ordination. He also became convinced that the Second Coming of Christ was not an event of the future but had already occurred within a generation of Christ’s ministry on Earth. But it was Noyes’s ideas concerning sexual union that made him notorious. He considered sexual union very important but rejected monogamy and the idea that one man and one woman should become closely attached to each other. The application of his views led to the practice of complex marriage in his community, in which every woman was the wife of every man and every man was the husband of every woman. Noyes also believed that Socialism without religion was impossible and that the extended family system devised by him could dissolve selfishness and demonstrate the practicality of perfectionism on Earth.

In 1847, at a time when revivalist belief in a new coming of Christ was at its height, Noyes proclaimed that the Spirit of Christ had earlier returned to Earth and had now entered into his group at Putney. This proclamation, together with the practice of complex marriage, aroused the hostility of the surrounding community, and the group left Putney to found a new community at Oneida, N.Y.

For the next 30 years Oneida flourished. The community, which in the early years numbered about 200 persons, earned a precarious existence by farming and logging before the arrival of a new member who gave the community a steel trap that he had invented. Manufacture and sale of Oneida traps, which were considered the best in the land, became the basis of a thriving group of industrial enterprises that included silverware, embroidered silks, and canned fruit.

The community was organized into 48 departments that carried on the various activities of the settlement, and these activities were supervised by 21 committees. The women worked along with the men; for practical reasons they cut their hair short and wore trousers or short-skirted tunics. Though marriage was complex, the Perfectionists denied the charge of free love. Sexual relations were strictly regulated, and the propagation of children was a matter of community control. Those who were to produce children were carefully chosen and paired. Children remained with their mother until they could walk but were then placed in a common nursery.

The central feature of the community was the custom of holding criticism sessions, or cures, a practice that Noyes had discovered in his seminary days at Andover. They were attended by the entire community at first and, later, as the community grew, were conducted before committees presided over by Noyes. For those subjected to criticism it was a nerve-racking ordeal, yet the sessions probably had some therapeutic value as a means of releasing feelings of guilt and aggression. The criticism sessions were also a shaming technique that enforced social control and were a highly successful device for promoting community cohesion.

Hostility mounted in the surrounding communities to the Perfectionists’ marriage arrangements, and in 1879 Noyes advised the group to abandon the system. As the reorganization of the community began, the entire Socialist organization of property in Oneida also was questioned. Noyes and a few adherents went to Canada, where he died in 1886. The remaining members set up a joint stock company, known as Oneida Community, Ltd. which carried on the various industries, particularly the manufacture of silver plate, as a commercial enterprise.