Oneida
From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155844 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Clark (0000-0001-5011-6202) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1052-1053 |
| Publication date | 2017-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaw552 |
| OpenAlex | W2589769910 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Books about utopian societies once focused on their communal phases, stressing their subjects’ distinctiveness from the world around them. Now scholars tend to place communal movements and their members within wider historical contexts. In her lively new account of the Oneida Community, Ellen Wayland-Smith traces the community and its successor, the famous cutlery manufacturer, from its origins in 1840s Vermont to the company's early twenty-first-century demise. Readers familiar with Oneida will recognize the name Wayland-Smith as connected with the community, and the author is, indeed, descended from several key members. Central to her account is Oneida's system of “complex marriage” and the influences this had on members, their children, and their successors’ efforts to control community memory. The narrative starts conventionally, with the early life and sexual anxieties of Oneida's founder and spiritual leader, John Humphrey Noyes: his embrace of radical perfectionism, the theory and practice of Bible communism, and the emergence of complex marriage as its social and spiritual linchpin. Influences on Noyes's thinking ranged widely, from his millennial theories to his embrace of contemporary trends in science and theology. But the focus is not primarily on Noyes nor on the running of the community, ground covered by Spencer Klaw's Without Sin (1993). Instead, Wayland-Smith recounts the experiences of members and their descendants during the community's formal existence and over the century that followed. The Oneida Community's transformation into the nation's leading flatware company has been traced before, but Wayland-Smith's account is fresh and distinctive
Art history · Demise · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Utopia · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,57 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |