Oneida Community
Secondary industries included manufacturing leather travel bags, weaving palm frond hats, construction of rustic garden furniture, game traps, and tourism.
Contained within the archives was the journal of Tirzah Miller,[15] Noyes' niece, who wrote extensively about her romantic and sexual relations with other members of Oneida.
Under these circumstances, he has fallen under the too common temptation of selfish love, and a desire to wait upon and cultivate an exclusive intimacy with the woman who was to bear a child through him.
Taking all this in view, he thought Charles was in a fair way to become a better man, and had manifested a sincere desire to improve, and to rid himself of all selfish faults.
In Male Continence, Noyes argues that the method simply "proposes the subordination of the flesh to the spirit, teaching men to seek principally the elevated spiritual pleasures of sexual connection".
[21] The primary purpose of male continence was social satisfaction, "to allow the sexes to communicate and express affection for one another".
[25] Noyes founded male continence to spare his wife, Harriet, from more difficult childbirths after five traumatizing births of which four led to the death of the child.
Sociologist Lawrence Foster sees hints in Noyes' letters indicating that masturbation and anti-social withdrawal from community life may have been issues.
[32] Community members who wished to be parents would go before a committee to be approved and matched based on their spiritual and moral qualities.
53 women and 38 men participated in this program, which necessitated the construction of a new wing of the Oneida Community Mansion House.
"[14][page needed] Stirpiculture was the first positive eugenics experiment in the United States, although it was not recognized as such because of the religious framework from which it emerged.
[36] Oneida embodied one of the most radical and institutional efforts to change women's roles and improve female status in 19th-century America.
[37] While domestic duties remained a primarily female responsibility, women were free to explore positions in business and sales, or as artisans or craftspersons, and many did so, particularly in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
[38] Last, women actively shaped commune policy, participating in the daily religious and business meetings.
[39] However, a woman's right to refuse a sexual overture was limited depending on the status of the man who made the advance.
"[44] Noyes argued that AMS press employed the writer after they read a Philadelphia paper article on the community and saw a chance to profit off sensationalist writing.
[44][non-primary source needed] In Anthony Wonderly's Oneida Utopia, he covers the 1848–1851 Hubbard affair as a moment where a legal conflict almost ended the group, which was only a mere "Association" at the time.
Twenty-one-year-old Tryphena Hubbard learned Noyes' ideas about marriage and sex through his manuscript Bible Argument in 1848.
[45] Early in 1849, Tryphena's father, Noahdiah Hubbard, learned of the Association's open marriages and demanded his daughter's return.
"[45] There was marriage before the community attempted perfectionism, and Tryphena's husband's supervision over her was increased along with the "disciplinary norms of the day, physical punishment.
"[45] In September 1851, Tryphena began displaying signs of mental illness, "crying at night, speaking incoherently, and wandering around."
Towner and a breakaway group eventually moved to California, where they convinced the government to create a new municipality for them, Orange County.
The founding members were aging or deceased, and many younger communitarians desired to enter into exclusive, traditional marriages.
[51] John Humphrey Noyes was informed by trusted adviser Myron Kinsley that a warrant for his arrest on charges of statutory rape was imminent.
Noyes fled the Oneida Community Mansion House and the country in the middle of a June night in 1879, never to return to the United States.
Shortly afterward, he wrote to his followers from Niagara Falls, Ontario, recommending that complex marriage be abandoned.
Complex marriage was abandoned in 1879 following external pressures, and the community soon broke apart, with some of the members reorganizing as a joint-stock company.
The five buildings of the Mansion House, separately designed by Erastus Hamilton, Lewis W. Leeds, and Theodore Skinner, comprise 93,000-square-foot (8,600 m2) on a 33-acre site.
Today, the Oneida Community Mansion House is a non-profit educational organization chartered by the State of New York.
It preserves, collects, and interprets the intangible and material culture of the Oneida Community and related themes of the 19th and 20th centuries.
