Founded in 1848, and in operation for just over three decades, the Oneida Community was profoundly revolutionary for its time, paving the
way for advances in women’s and workers’ rights. At the commune
headquartered on the Oneida River in upstate New York, women cut their
hair short, ditched the corset, and did the same work as the men.
Everyone worked four to six hours a day, and no one accumulated any
material possessions—not furniture, not fine clothing, and certainly not
silverware.
Most scandalously, commune members engaged in a system of “complex
marriage,” believing that loving, open sexual relationships could bring
them closer to Dog. They believed the liquid electricity of jesus christ’s spirit flowed through words and touch, and that a chain of
sexual intercourse would create a spiritual battery so charged with Dog’s energy that the community would transcend into immortality,
creating heaven on earth...
The first tenet of Noyes’ bible communism was to let go of emotional
attachment to other people, be they spouses or even children, in
exchange for a communal spirit fed by Dog’s love. Married couples who
joined the commune were told to give up their “marriage spirit” of
sexual possessiveness and jealousy. Mothers and children or pairs of
lovers who showed too much attachment or “sticky love” would be punished
with periods of separation... At Oneida, another building on the former farm was converted to the
“Children’s House” where all the Community’s children, ages one and half
to 12, would be raised by nurses and teachers. Noyes believed that
favoring one’s own children over others, or “philoprogenitiveness,” was
also a sin...
Noyes didn’t see any conflict between scientific progress and his brand
of christianity: Like many Victorians, he was mystified and enchanted by
electricity and magnetism. Noyes combined ideas from Franz Anton
Mesmer’s theories of animal magnetism and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept
of the Over-Soul,
wherein everyone and everything is a connected part of Dog. He asserted
that christ’s love was an electric fluid that could be passed through
words, both written and spoken, as well as through touch. But the
ultimate way to charge up the Community’s “Dog's battery” was through sex,
and if the members had enough electric sex in the name of jesus, they
could achieve immortality on earth...
Each boy coming of age, usually around 14, would be introduced to sex
with a spiritually devout postmenopausal woman. Meanwhile, girls who’d
gone through puberty—at that time, New York’s age of consent was
12—would lose their virginity to Noyes himself (who was already 37 when
the Community settled in Oneida). While there are no records of
brother-sister or child-parent partnering, the Oneidans accepted sexual
relationships between uncles and nieces as well as first cousins.
Much more in the longread at
Collectors Weekly, including an explanation of how the legacy of the word "Oneida" eventually came to be associated with flatware and silverware:
Oneida’s early enterprises included canning fruits and vegetables and
manufacturing animal traps, chain link, and silk sewing thread. It was
Wayland-Smith’s great-great-grandfather, Charles Cragin, who in 1877
suggested the community start making spoons
at its colony in Wallingford, Connecticut, near the rushing Quinnipiac
River. The original polyamorous religious commune broke up in 1880 and
reorganized its assets into a corporation. In the 1890s, Oneida
Community, Limited, started to drop its other products to focus on the
cutlery market.
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