Free Love in the Burned Over District
Even in the wake of the intense revivalism of the Second Great Awakening, and evangelical encouragement of female religiosity and domesticity (however contradictory and unexpected the results), the Oneida Community was not alone in its critique of marriage.* In the First Annual Report, one of the first publications to announce the beliefs and practices of the Oneida Community, Noyes's criticism of marriage could have been voiced by any antebellum free lover, Fourierist, or "infidel": "The law of marriage 'worketh wrath.' 1. It provokes to secret adultery, actual or of the heart. 2. It ties together unmatched natures. 3. It sunders matched natures. 4. It gives to sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces the natural vices of poverty, contraction of taste, and stinginess or jealousy. 5. It makes no provision for the sexual appetite at the very time when that appetite is strongest." Noyes's contribution was his extensive Biblical justification for free love, informed by his heretical belief in spiritual perfection. His twin goals were to "establish union with God" and to lay "the foundation of a new state of society, by developing the true theory of sexual morality."
Given the Oneida Community's location in the "Burned Over District," how did its neighbors respond? Lawrence Foster explores this problem in his edition of Free Love in Utopia by George Wallingford Noyes. Foster argues that complex marriage required some adjustment, so Noyes and the Oneida Community maintained "private marriage at first as a matter of expedience until individual exclusiveness could be voluntarily and completely broken down under proper oversight." Some of Noyes's first local converts were Henry Seymour and Tryphena Hubbard. To appease her parents, the young couple married, but Noyes spent much of the first years of the Oneida Community fending off her angry relatives.** After this experience, as Foster points out, Noyes backed away from local and national evangelism in favor of "a tightly knit, internally unified community." The community was already homogenous, which undoubtedly helped relations with local elites. The "First Annual Report" shows that its white membership hailed from New England or New York, and most were former Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians (with one Quaker for good measure). In addition, the Oneida Community engaged in some good PR by hosting separate "strawberry festivals" for their white and Native American neighbors.
One of the highlights on the Mansion House tour is a tiny bedroom, containing little more than a single bed, a bureau, and a chair, located off the main living area. It was here that a community member, with Noyes's permission, could express her/his non-exclusive love, attraction, and fellowship with a believer of the opposite sex. If you can't visit the Mansion House, I highly recommend perusing the digitized documents and photographs available through the Syracuse University Library.
*John Spurlock argues that the broader free love movement expressed middle-class values about the relationship between love and marriage.
**Tony Wonderley, Curator at the Oneida Community Mansion House, also writes about this episode in "The Hubbard Place and the Oneida Community," The New Circular, June 2013, Issue 2.
Comments
That it later mutated into a multinational silverware manufacturer, now, that's interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Limited
;-)
As far as books for your course, Heath, I'd highly recommend Noyes' _History of American Socialism_. It's public domain, so free to download to a kindle or read online on google books. It shows not only the huge number of utopian communities, but also the huge number of people who believed in them, even if most were short lived. It also shows how many many people believed in this overlap between the Kingdom of God and cooperative ownership of property. I rely on it a great deal in my research.