You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
John Humphrey Noyes founded the most revolutionary of all communal experiments in the nineteenth century and in American history the Oneida Community. As the selfordained Father of his utopian followers for thirty years, Noyes collectivized labor in the Communitys industries and abolished private property on the grounds of its Mansion House at Oneida, New York. But the defrocked preacher of Christian Perfectionism went still further: not only property, but spouses, were to be held in common in the Noyesian vision of heaven on earth. In the Communitys newspapers, including THE AMERICAN SOCIALIST and THE CIRCULAR, Noyes proclaimed that the Oneida system of Complex Marriage had eradicated the subjugation of women, the tyranny of monogamous marriage, and the burden of unwanted children. Finally, Noyes came to believe that his system made possible the betterment of human stock through a program of selective mating. Race Culture or, as Noyes eventually termed it, Stirpiculture, would become the utopian Communitys ultimate experiment: the application of scientific breeding to human beings.
John Humphrey Noyes, founder of utopian communities in Putney, Vermont, and Oneida, New York, remain one of the most enigmatic reformers of the nineteenth century. The last biography, written over forty years ago, portrayed Noyes as a "Yankee Saint," a man of progressive ideas and religious vision. Yet he has also been called a "Vermont Casanova" whose elaborate theology of Perfection is simply justified the license he took with the women in his communities. Robert David Thomas makes a convincing case that Noyes, though riven by conflict and full of contradictions, had his finger on the social and cultural problems that were bothering a great many Americans of his time. Studied out of contex...
The "free love" Oneida Community, founded in New York state during the turbulent decades before the Civil War, practiced an extraordinary system of "complex marriage" as part of its sustained experiment in creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. For more than thirty years, two hundred adult members considered themselves heterosexually married to the entire community rather than to a single monogamous partner. Free Love in Utopia provides the first in-depth account of how complex marriage was introduced among previously monogamous or single Oneida Community members. Bringing together vivid, firsthand writings by members of the community--including personal correspondence, memoranda on spirit...
None
None