The Status and Self-Perception of Women in the Oneida Community

IN 1848 JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES led some 45 religious followers to Oneida, New York and, over the next thirty-three years, this small band, along with other recruits who soon brought the community's membership to over two hundred adults, created one of the most famous and successful socialist experiments in American history.The Oneida Community was based upon two key doctrines articulated by Noyes: "Bible Communism," an attempt to recover the spirit of early Christian community in which "all who believed were one," and the Perfectionist belief that people could become "perfect followers of Christ."In pursuit of its Utopian ends, the Community not only collectivized all property but attempted to eradicate the possessive spirit of traditional monogamous marriage by ushering in a controversial system of "complex marriage" between men and women.These very same practices, however, have made the Oneida Community the subject of countless scholarly analyses over the past several decades.Perhaps nowhere has this scholarship been more evident than in the broad area of women's studies, where the singular position of women within the Community has piqued the interest of reseachers.The areas of community life that had particular bearing on the position and potential liberation of women were those involving complex marriage, "ascending" and "descending" fellowship, and the community practice of selective breeding ("stirpiculture").Under complex marriage, whose goal was to effect a more complete unity of all God's children, theoretically any man and woman could engage in sexual relations.However, the reality was not the free love state it would seem to suggest.Men initiated