Oneida Community

Noyes built complex marriage on a specific reading of scripture: that the promised Second Coming of Christ had already taken place in 70 CE, at the fall of Jerusalem, and that believers who accepted this could therefore live in the resurrected state Paul described, free of sin, here and now. Ordinary marriage, on this reading, was one more form of selfish exclusivity that perfected people no longer needed. Every member of the community was understood to be married to every other, and pairing off into an exclusive couple was treated as a moral failure called special love, subject to correction in the community's system of mutual criticism, where members submitted their conduct to the group's scrutiny in turn.

Sexual union was governed by male continence, Noyes's term for intercourse without male orgasm, which he presented as a discipline that let intimacy continue without the burden of unplanned childbearing that fell on nineteenth-century women. Initiation of new members into the practice, and pairing of younger members with older, more spiritually established ones, was organised through what the community called ascending fellowship, on the theory that spiritual maturity could be transmitted this way. In its final decade the community extended the logic into stirpiculture, a committee-run breeding programme that selected which members should have children together on grounds of spiritual and physical fitness, framed by Noyes as the scientific improvement of the next generation.

None of this was practised in secret. Noyes published the theology and the practice under his own name, and complex marriage was the community's public identity for three decades, which is precisely why it drew sustained outside hostility and why it could not simply continue once that hostility reached the point of prosecution.

Noyes called the community's economic system Bible Communism: property was held in common, work was assigned across trades rather than by sex alone, and income came from manufacturing rather than agriculture, which was unusual among the era's communal experiments. An early success making steel animal traps, the Newhouse trap, gave the community capital that it diversified into silk thread, fruit preserving, and eventually silver-plated tableware, and by the 1870s Oneida was a going manufacturing concern as much as a religious household.

The end came from two directions at once. Younger members raised inside the system increasingly wanted conventional marriage rather than the arrangement their parents had built, and outside pressure, including from clergy who had campaigned against the community for years, revived the threat of prosecution that had already driven Noyes out of Vermont once. In 1879, warned that a warrant was likely, Noyes left for Canada and never returned to live at Oneida; complex marriage was abandoned within the community that same year, and many members paired off in conventional marriages soon after.

In 1881 the community formally dissolved and reorganised as Oneida Community Limited, a joint-stock company owned by the former members, which converted communal property into shares. The company dropped Bible Communism entirely and kept the manufacturing, and its descendant, Oneida Limited, remained one of the best known names in American tableware for more than a century afterward. A religious experiment in living without private property or private marriage ended, in practice, as a privately held silverware company, which is the form in which most people now encounter its name.