In 19th-century America, a number of utopian communities, oblivious to the defeatist etymology of the word utopia (Greek for “not” plus “place”, or “no-place”), were established, mostly throughout the north-east. Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), Robert Owen and a group of transcendentalists all tried their hands at creating separate communities of peace and understanding. All of these efforts failed fairly quickly.

The exception was the Oneida community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes, in the Leatherstocking region of central New York state. The region had already surrendered its secrets to the young Joseph Smith when he discovered the gold books of the angel Moroni buried in a drumlin near Palmyra, and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Oneida, which is located 80 miles to the east, provided a home for Noyes’s nascent Society of Inquiry when its members fled from Putney, Vermont in the 1840s after Noyes’ doctrine of “complex marriage” offended the local townspeople.

Ellen Wayland-Smith is a descendant of members of the Oneida community, and in her book she details the travails of her ancestors. In the 1840s, Noyes and his followers set up the Oneida Reserve, buying land that had been confiscated from Native Americans, determined to be able to practise their communistic Christianity (in which claiming a single person as one’s own was seen as antithetical to the group’s wellbeing). By the 1940s, Oneida had become among the most prestigious brands of silverware and cutlery, and its owners were mortified that the public might find out about the company’s free love beginnings. Wayland-Smith documents how, in an event known as “the burning”, members of the family authorised the destruction of the community’s records, in order to prevent the potentially embarrassing revelations from falling into the hands of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who wanted to study how complex marriage had worked.

When Noyes was born in 1811, his mother Polly prayed that he might become a “minister of the everlasting gospel”. Wayland-Smith writes that Noyes’ journal, written as a Dartmouth student in 1829, “provides glimpses of a teenager struggling with paralysing shyness in his relations to the opposite sex. He was further hampered by the conviction that his red hair and freckles rendered him physically repulsive.”

After a series of failed crushes on women whom he was too afraid to approach, and interactions with aspects of the religious revival known as the “second great awakening”, Noyes converted to a type of Christianity that was obsessed with perfection and millenarian dreams: “one senses that Noyes’s conversion simply provided the exhausted teenager with a welcome exit from the dark labyrinth of sexual desire, disappointment, and shame that marked his adolescence”.

Wayland-Smith provides details of the inner logic of Noyes’s religion, including his belief that couples should enter into complex marriage. He saw sexual intercourse as an artform, something to be freely practised. The first issue to be dealt with when encouraging community members to sleep with one another was a practical one: how to control pregnancy. Noyes argued that there were two functions to sex: reproductive and pleasure production. He saw no reason why they had to be lumped together.

Contraception was primitive in the mid-19th century. Noyes promoted the method of coitus reservatus or continence, that is, discontinuing intercourse at the moment prior to ejaculation. And, while the inevitable “accidents” occurred, Wayland-Smith documents that the number of births in the community was successfully limited. In later decades, however, she shows how Noyes, informed both by the new theories of evolution and the findings of Charles Darwin, plus his own sense of his specialness, constructed his own system that he called “stirpiculture” in which he determined which male-female pairs should breed to produce offspring. Wayland-Smith writes that “for all of its scientific pretensions, Oneida’s experiment in stirpiculture, as narrated by private diaries by its participants, presents a dark, at times sinister, tale that is at stark odds with the triumphant march toward truth and progress it imagined itself to be”.

What is elided throughout the first half of the book is any understanding of how gender was playing out among the members of the Oneida community. Women were recognised to be full, intellectual members of the group, and were encouraged to develop their minds, but concomitantly, it appears that they had little voice in decisions about who they would pair with. Children were raised communally, and individual mother-child bonding was sharply discouraged. It is not clear if the records are lost, or if Wayland-Smith chose to ignore them, but several times throughout the fascinating story of the community at its peak, I wanted to know whether women – for all their supposed intellectual freedom – had autonomy over their hearts and bodies.

In the second half of the book, Wayland-Smith devotes entire chapters to the women’s stories. In one remarkable section the cultural tensions around sex are treated in detail. They partly resulted from the Comstock law of 1873, which made it a federal offense to publish anything related to contraception or “obscene literature”. The law, which led to the arrests, imprisonments and even suicides of contraceptive advocates, retarded the sharing of knowledge of advances in contraception, condemning women to serial pregnancies. Noyes’s book about coitus reservatus was also unavailable, although medical experts of the time had weighed in that they thought the practice led to “impotence in males, sterility in females, and nervous disease in both”.

In 1890, George Noyes Miller published a bestseller, a novel called The Strike of a Sex. In it, he envisioned a future city where women segregated themselves wholly from men until such time “until the men agree to relieve them of the ‘fearful treadmill of enforced maternity’”. Miller failed to mention how the men invented such a method because to have included that detail would have subjected himself to Comstock regulations. But the book sold 35,000 copies in America and Europe.

After dealing with the gender question, Wayland-Smith provides fascinating detail about how Oneida, which by this time had started manufacturing silverware as a means of supporting itself, revolutionised advertising. It created a sort of desire economy, in which the ads for the silverware promised happiness, marital bliss and, eventually, middle class respectability if the buyers set their tables with Oneida community silverware. She also provides a sad account of how the communism of the original Oneida businesses evolved, becoming more capitalist as time moved forward. Workers continued to be treated well by the family, but the vulture capitalism of the late 20th century destroyed the company.

In presenting a biography of the Oneida community, rather than of just its founder, Wayland-Smith provides a provocative portrait of the changes in American culture. The community was able to withstand 19th-century pressures to change its sexual behaviour so that it would be more in line with an ideal of monogamous bliss. And yet, later, it could not resist the middle class pressure to conform. No longer tied to its religious roots, Oneida caved into a greater god: capitalism. Wayland-Smith provides a detailed, riveting account of yet another form of the American tragedy.

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