The Oneida Experiment
What We Have Discovered About Not-So-Free Love
by Frederica Mathewes-Green
In the middle of the room there was a woodburning stove. The small iron door was open on this chilly day, and the red flames could be seen leaping within as if in time to music. For there was music, too, a marching song, and the little girls who circled the stove marched around it in time. The girls were not happy.
Each girl was holding in her arms her favorite doll. These were pretty dolls with painted faces, who usually wore fancy clothes reflecting current fashion. But today the clothes had been left in a pile, and the wax figurines were exposed, hard and bare. One by one, each girl marched up to the open door of the stove. One by one, each girl threw her doll into the “angry-looking flames.”
The phrase is that of Harriet Worden, a woman who participated in the sacrifice that day and recalled the painful event long after. It was 1851, in the utopian community of Oneida, in upstate New York. What was being burned up that day was an unseemly trait that their teachers had observed developing in the little girls of the commune. The dolls had become too important to the children; these were frivolous toys, indicating an affection for worldly finery and vain display. Women of Oneida were expected to bob their hair rather than fuss it to flattering styles, and to wear efficient clothing rather than long, sweeping gowns. They were to work in the factories alongside the men, while men took their equal share of labor in the kitchen. Pretty dolls were a tantalizing, subversive distraction.
But there was another concern: Little girls were becoming attached to specific dolls. A child might choose one as her favorite, rock it and croon to it, tuck it in at night. This was a dangerous tendency.
No Private Bonds
Oneida was founded on the principle of “Bible Communism.” Founder John Humphrey Noyes insisted that, under his personally devised philosophy, there were to be no selfish attachments, no hoarding of love. The tender affection a little girl might feel for a special, beloved doll had to be burned away. So each girl marched up to the oven door with her “long-cherished favorite” in her arms, then stared as the flames consumed it. “We . . . saw them perish before our eyes.”
What was being burned up that day was the tendency for any human being to form an intense and private bond with another. Noyes could not permit this, because he had put sexual freedom at the head of his agenda; he was the inventor of the term “free love.” The Yale Divinity School student and sometime Congregationalist minister believed that “complex marriage” was God’s will, as indicated by the Scripture, “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). (This may not be how most of us imagine the angels pass the time, but the American nineteenth century was a fertile time for private interpretations of the Bible.)
“The abolition of sexual exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles,” Noyes wrote. “The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God.”
“Sexual freedom” is a term that could suggest a carefree heedlessness that did not obtain at Oneida. A man wishing to enjoy the company of a specific woman would submit his request to an appointed official who kept a ledger of such engagements. This official would then present the request to the woman who was the target of the man’s intentions, and she might agree or refuse as she chose, though agreement was the general rule. According to the records, most women had two or three visitors per week, and a popular young woman might entertain as many as seven.
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and a contributor to the Christian Millennial History Project multi-volume series. Her books include At the Corner of East and Now (Putnam), The Illumined Heart (Paraclete Press), and The Open Door: Entering the Sanctuary of Icons and Prayer (Paraclete Press). She lives in Linthicum, Maryland, with her husband Fr. Gregory, pastor of Holy Cross Orthodox Church. They have three children and three grandchildren.
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