Another influential and controversial community was Oneida, founded in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes, the Vermont-born son of a U.S. congressman. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Noyes briefly studied law but soon experienced a conversion at a religious revival and decided to become a minister. Noyes took the revivalists’ message that man could achieve moral perfection to an atypical extreme. He preached that he and his followers had become so perfect that they had achieved a state of complete “purity of heart,” or sinlessness.
In 1836, Noyes and his followers formed a small community in Putney, Vermont. Like the Shakers, Noyes did away with private property and abandoned traditional marriage. But in contrast to Shaker celibacy, he taught that all members of his community formed a single “holy family” of equals. His community became notorious for what Noyes called “complex marriage,” whereby any man could propose sexual relations to any woman, who had the right to reject or accept his invitation, which would then be registered in a public record book. The great danger was “exclusive affections,” which, Noyes felt, destroyed the harmony of the community.
After being indicted for adultery by local officials, Noyes in 1848 moved his community to Oneida, where it survived until 1881. Oneida was an extremely dictatorial environment. To become a member of the community, one had to demonstrate command of Noyes’s religious teachings and live according to his rules. Members carefully observed each other’s conduct and publicly criticized those who violated Noyes’s regulations. By the 1860s, a committee was even determining which couples would be permitted to have children—an early example of “eugenics,” as the effort to improve the human race by regulating reproduction came to be known.