Oneida Utopia

With a disparaging dismissal of earlier historical work on the Oneida Community as “the colorful tale of a Rasputin-like leader running a religious sex cult,” Anthony Wonderley retells the community's history, stressing the collective dynamics of the group over its leader and effectively contextualizing it in nineteenth-century American culture (p. 219). He links the perfectionism of John Humphrey Noyes with that of Charles Grandison Finney, and the emergence of communal organization at Oneida to the Fourierist communities. Converts joined the community, attracted by Noyes's antinomian theology and vision of creating a sinless kingdom of heaven on earth as well as by the charismatic dynamism of the man himself. From the beginning it combined spiritual fellowship and secular communalism, and was at once a challenge to and a reinforcement of the gender and social relations of the era. As Richard White has observed, “home and competence linked to manhood and womanhood” and “the production of homes was the ultimate rationale for the economy, and for the nation itself” (The Republic for Which It Stands, 2017, p. 137). The horticultural phase of Oneida saw the first communal dwelling—the 1848 Mansion House—and the industrial phase the much expanded 1862 Mansion House. Oneidans built a communal home that expressed their core values and collectivized the domesticity of outside society. With the institution of collective marriage and later stirpiculture (Noyes's term for the selective pairing of couples to have children), however, they challenged orthodox gendered mores and sexuality. Paradoxically, Oneida was both orthodox domestically and heterodox sexually. Despite his condemnation of prurient accounts, Wonderley is compelled to observe that “sexual communism would become the keystone of communistic living in the Oneida Community” (p. 28). His account of the transition of the community to an industrial basis, separating the sexes in the workplace in the 1850s that brought an end to the halcyon early years of gender equality, the collapse of the community with the widespread loss of faith and disaffection with controlled reproduction in 1880, and the communal transition to welfare capitalism under Noyes's stirpicultural son, Pierrepont, provide a balanced account of the group's history and its increasing integration into the national economy and culture

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