Algemeen Oudheid en Middeleeuwen 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-1900 1901-2000 2001-nu Stalinisme Maoïsme Neoliberalisme Socialisme Neomarxisme en Kritische theorie Algemeen Complottheorieën Irrationaliteit Irrationaliteit (Bijgeloof en religie) Leugens, desinformatie, propaganda Klokkenluiders"From the very outset, the Oneidans were determined to erase the arbitrary distinction between “women’s work” and “men’s work,” public and domestic spheres, that in the outside world kept the sexes separated." Ellen WAYLAND SMITH - Oneida - From free love utopia to the well-set table, p.161
Ellen WAYLAND SMITH[Het dikke boek is geschreven door een familielid van de stichter van de Oneida Community, een utopische christelijke commune gesticht in 1848 in de VS.]
"John Humphrey Noyes and his followers, Edmonds wrote, had been Christian Perfectionists, religious dissenters and reformers in the best American tradition Intent on forming a community resembling the early church as described in the Acts of the Apostles and calling themselves Bible Communists, Noyes and his followers pooled all their possessions and lived and worked together as an extended family, striving to become one body in Christ through total selflessness."(6)
"John Humphrey Noyes and his followers energetically embraced capitalism and the technological wizardry of the modern era, from the steam engine to the telegraph, as the wings that would bring to fruition the New Jerusalem."(7)
"Edmonds went on to explain in The First Hundred Years that, while the Oneida Community had dissolved as a social and religious entity in 1880, the bold “experiment in human relations” initiated by Noyes Sr. was carried forth in the economic sphere by Noyes’s son Pierrepont and his fellow Community descendants, who took the “old principles of sharing and equality” inherited from his father and applied them to the industrial production of silverware." [mijn nadruk] (7)
"Only a year before, in 1947, a more complicated retrospective ceremony of sorts had taken place: a group of Oneida Limited officers emptied a vault full of documents, diaries, letters, and papers dating from the Community days and loaded them into the back of a truck, which they proceeded to drive to the town dump. There, they burned everything." [mijn nadruk] (10)
[Wat dus betekent dat er dingen geheim gehouden moeten worden. ]
"For if the original Oneida Community had been an association devoted to re-creating the spirit of universal fellowship uniting the Apostolic Church, their definition of communism had gone well beyond anything imagined by Peter or Paul. Relinquishing selfish ownership of property meant nothing, John Humphrey Noyes insisted, unless Christians also relinquished selfish ownership, including sexual ownership, of persons in the form of marriage.
“I call a certain woman my wife,” Noyes penned in an 1837 letter to a friend outlining his sexual theology. “She is yours, she is Christ’s, and in him she is the bride of all saints.” Only “Complex Marriage,” the open and equal sexual union of all Community women with all Community men, could approach the holy unity enjoyed by the saints in heaven. Far from being “one of the most iniquitous systems ever devised and propagated under the name and garb of Christianity,” as one apoplectic clergyman fumed against the group in 1849, the ideal of nonprocreative sex among multiple partners was touted by the Bible Communists as a religious sacrament of the highest order.
Such an unorthodox sexual arrangement, which the Oneidans practiced as an integral part of their peculiar brand of Christianity for a full thirty years, from 1848 until 1879, was understandably a thorn in the side of later generations of descendants like my great-grandfather Lou, who, having been born during the turbulent period of the Community’s breakup in 1880, narrowly missed being born out of wedlock. In the wake of the Community’s final dissolution, this younger generation—“apologetic or grieved at the radical beliefs of their forefathers,” according to one outside observer at the time—embraced monogamy with puritanical zeal, desperate to shed the stigma of being a band of bastards and fornicators in the eyes of the world."(10-11)
"That story told the tale of a social experiment in which three hundred people had, for the space of thirty years, blasted traditional gender roles, rejected the age-old truism that a woman’s primary function was to bear children, and reimagined traditional family structures, breaking open the “selfish” circle of father, mother, and child to build a more inclusive and—in their view—more authentically Christian community of interconnecting relationships" [mijn nadruk] (13)
"Yet just as John Humphrey had steeled himself, like Macbeth, to “jump the life to come” in favor of worldly pursuits, religion came knocking. In the fall of 1831, at his mother’s prompting, Noyes attended a religious revival in Putney and, against all expectations, experienced conversion. The year was the watermark for religious revivals that had been sweeping across the Northeast for over a decade."(24)
"If these depictions of divine rapture sound sexual, it is because they were. Indeed, one of the well-noted aftereffects of the spiritual ecstasy circulating at these revivals was a surge in sexual activity between attendees.(...) In the popular imagination, a distinct association existed between revival behavior and relaxed sexual mores" [mijn nadruk] (29-30)
"The revival’s sexual shenanigans were not pure nonsense, Noyes later theorized, but signs—crude and untutored, to be sure, but signs nonetheless—of the coming fulfillment of Christ’s gospel of Love on earth.
But Noyes had not yet reached the point of fusing sexual and religious inspiration. For the moment, the two remained opposed impulses: his mother’s ascetic piety in pitched battle with his father’s full embrace of worldly pleasures."(32)
"In November 1831, determined now to devote himself to God, John Humphrey Noyes entered Andover Theological Seminary."(32)
"In New Haven, he threw himself into the cause of antislavery, working among the African American community there and, in the winter of 1832, helping to found the New Haven Anti-Slavery Society. Noyes also joined forces with the New Haven Free Church, one of a number of splinter groups inspired by Finneyite revivals that arose in opposition to the Calvinist orthodoxy of the mainstream churches. Despite his rather conventional bourgeois upbringing, Noyes now sought his natural companions among the unchurched and the disenfranchised. He found they offered a palliative to the professional religious “scholars” he frequented in the cosseted world of the seminary, who, he felt, stifled true religiosity."(33)
[Duidelijk een dwarsligger, die man. En erg geïnteresseerd in vrouwen / in seks :-), verlangens waar hij als gelovige lang tegen vocht uiteraard.]
"To have a soul touched by sin, tarnished by “polluted images,” spotted with imperfection, was, quite literally, unbearable to him."(35)
Allerlei christelijke stromingen worstelden daarmee, met 'het vlees', met soms verrassende oplossingen:
"The Perfectionist claim to be sinless was nothing new; for centuries, the heresy of antinomianism, or the belief that Christians are freed by grace from any obligation to the earthly law, had been a thorn in the side of institutional Christianity. The thirteenth-century Brethren of the Free Spirit, for instance, was a mystical sect that believed that their members constituted an elite cadre of immortal, perfected supermen, the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, who represented the culminating stage of Christian history. Beyond law, and thus incapable of sin, these heretics engaged in promiscuous sex as a token of their oneness with the divine essence and as an affirmation that, to them, all was permitted.
Though the Brethren were dutifully hunted down and burned at the stake by the church, their spirit continued to crop up, here and there, throughout early modern Europe. In seventeenth-century England, amidst the tumult of the Glorious Revolution, the “Ranters” (so-called for their boisterous bouts of drinking, whoring, and cursing) emerged as yet another sect seduced by the allure of sinlessness. Proclaiming the mystical oneness of God, the Ranters argued that the very concept of sin was theologically inconsistent: if God was one and indivisible, then to label anything within His creation “sinful” was blasphemy." [mijn nadruk] (37-38)
[Je kunt altijd wel iets slims verzinnen om af te wijken :-) ]
"Given his desperate need to feel himself justified in the eyes of others (and since his conversion, in the eyes of the Supreme Other, God), Noyes found in this latest branch of the Christian Perfectionist tree precisely what he was looking for."(39)
"Noyes had now lost his position and his reputation, and his friends were “fast falling away,” he would recall in later years. But he was not completely friendless, claiming at least one supporter: a young woman named Abigail Merwin, who, having heard of Noyes’s reputation through the Free Church, requested an interview with him." [mijn nadruk] (44)
"In other words, Noyes took the unbearable image of himself as the target of a social mockery and turned it on its head: others’ disdain served only to measure his divine election and the “eminence” toward which “God [was] calling and leading [him].” Persecution, whether social or religious, would only serve to magnify the glory of Noyes’s eventual triumph."(46)
"In Abigail Merwin, Noyes had a muse to guide him along his journey toward the eminence God had marked out for him. But if every Christian odyssey requires its Beatrice, it demands as well a ritual passage into the underworld. And so, stripped of his preaching license, cut off from Yale, and slipping into the role of an outcast, by the spring of 1834 Noyes began his descent."(48)
Hij gaat in New York wonen en komt terecht in een van de slechtste wijken met veel prostitutie en zo meer.
"Noyes was, of course, no innovator when it came to describing his religious vision in unabashedly sexual terms. Christian mystics had always figured the face-to-face meeting of the believer and his God as a spiritual marriage, a blending of bride and bridegroom in ecstatic oneness."(51)
"Through this ingenious fantasy of sex with the godhead, Noyes was able to reverse the traumatic expulsion from Eden, the source of human shame and sorrow, while indulging in the sublimated satisfaction of his strongest sexual urges."(53)
"But as the official spokesperson for New Haven Perfectionism, Noyes had bigger bogeys to fight than images of six-winged seraphs and monks in sackcloth. Throughout Christianity’s checkered history, splinter cults and sects who claimed to be beyond sin as taught by the church had invariably engaged in sexual experimentation (or, at the very least, had been accused of it by their enemies) to prove that they were not bound by earthly law. This latest branch of the sinless tree was no exception." [mijn nadruk] (59)
"Sitting next to a Perfectionist beauty named Hannah one evening, Noyes received an unexpected kiss from the admiring girl as they parted for bed. Noyes—who, despite his fantasies of sex with God, remained physically chaste—panicked at this carnal invitation and, without communicating his intentions to anyone, left the next morning, making “a bee-line on foot through snow and cold—below zero—to Putney, sixty miles distant.”"(61)
[De angst voor wat je het meest aantrekt... ]
"But if Noyes vehemently disapproved of the sexual experimentation rampant among New York Perfectionists, the question of sex in heaven—or angel sex, as he chose to think of it—was another matter altogether. At the time of the Brimfield Bundling, Noyes was actively mulling over in his own mind the relationship between men and women among the saints of the invisible world and came to the conclusion that sexual intercourse between spiritual soul mates was an integral part of resurrection life." [mijn nadruk] (62)
"Frustrated by jealousy over having to share Abigail with an earthly husband, Noyes had to invent a system in which exclusiveness was banned and all were wed to all. Unable to eliminate his rival, Merit Platt, Noyes would do the next best thing: eliminate the very notion of sexual rivalry altogether."(66)
"it fell into the hands of Theophilus Ransom Gates, an itinerant preacher and editor of The Battle-Axe; or, Weapons of War, a Philadelphia news sheet dedicated to the ideal of Christian free love. Gates—who would be immortalized locally when, in 1843, he and a cohort of free lovers streaked naked down the aisle of the Shenkel Church in North Coventry Township in Chester County during Sunday services—believed marriage a curse and an apostasy. He advocated instead a more open arrangement whereby “one Battle-Axe would go to the home of another, state his or her call to a saintly marriage union, and the pair might live together for a day or a lifetime before a new inspiration parted them.” Noyes’s letter clearly struck a chord, and Gates wasted no time in publishing it in the August 1837 edition of his newsletter." [mijn nadruk] (67)
"The public reaction was swift and severe. The Advocate of Moral Reform, a journal published by a New York–based women’s reform group bent on eradicating prostitution, lambasted Noyes for “invading” the “domestic constitution,” trampling the nuclear family in the dust while “unbridled license stalks among the ruins, smiling at the havoc she has made, and feasting on the last bleeding remnants of chastity and virtue.”"(67)
"Noyes was at his nadir when a wealthy young convert named Harriet Holton sent him a gift of eighty dollars that allowed him to pay off his debts in Ithaca. Over the next six months, Noyes struck up a correspondence with his admirer and, in a letter dated June 11, 1838, against all expectations, proposed marriage to this fellow Vermonter. (...) Noyes’s partnership with a woman who would provide him with both spiritual and financial support in his endeavor to found God’s kingdom was a stroke of business genius: a quintessentially American blend of religious fervor and economic practicality that was to characterize Noyes—and his utopian undertakings—all his life."(69)
"And yet Noyes’s vision of a community in which “exclusion, jealousy, and quarreling” would disappear, and all enjoy “free fellowship” in one universal family under God, oddly enough found a sympathetic ear in nineteenth-century America. At the height of his powers, Noyes would command a following of nearly three hundred souls who saw, in his vision of a golden age communitarian paradise, an attractive alternative to the stingy, competitive regime of private property and monogamy that held sway in the profane world outside their doors."(72)
"Brushing himself off from Abigail Merwin’s rejection and armed not just with the loyal support of his new wife, Harriet Holton, but also a recently acquired printing press, John Humphrey Noyes left Ithaca at the end of the summer of 1838, ready to begin building the rudiments of God’s new earth smack in the middle of Putney, Vermont. But first Noyes would need to secure his troops."(72)
"By 1841 the stage at Putney was set with the principal actors of the drama about to unfold: John Humphrey and Harriet Noyes, George Washington Noyes, Harriet and John Skinner, Charlotte and John Miller, and George and Mary Cragin. The gathered faithful called their loose association the Society of Inquiry, and in a constitution adopted in February 1841, they declared their purpose was to “make an open and united confession of this our belief and more effectually assist each other in searching the Scriptures and in overcoming sin.”"(79)
"John Humphrey Noyes had his own version of the millennial timeline, and it, too, identified America as the hotspot of sacred history."(84)
[Zoals steeds veel Amerikaans chauvinisme.]
"A large-scale market system, driven by the mercurial law of supply and demand and now rooted in an impersonal cash nexus, replaced the localized, family-centered barter systems characteristic of precapitalist America. The “rough parity of circumstances” that had previously bound communities together gave way to jarring inequalities in status and fortune.
Contrary to popular assumptions that the American spirit has always embodied capitalism’s rough-and-tumble individualism, nineteenth-century Americans were initially horrified by the specter of individual self-seeking and competition run amok that they glimpsed in the new economic system, where, as Adam Smith had suggested, each should follow his own “enlightened self-interest” and the invisible hand of the market would take care of the rest. The bogey of market “selfishness” became a cultural byword and taboo, a threat to personal and civic virtue alike. “We call it a Society; and go about professing the totalest separation, isolation,” fumed the social critic Thomas Carlyle in 1843. “Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, called ‘fair competition,’ … it is a mutual hostility.”" [mijn nadruk] (86)
[Dat is essentieel: het kapitalisme doorbreekt de solidariteit en gemeenschapzin en vrouwen worden geacht dat als brave huisvrouwen op te vangen en de sociale moraal te hoeden. Religie speelt daarom bij die vrouwen een enorme rol.]
"Catharine Beecher, sister to the reform-minded novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame, saw the woman-centered home as instrumental in balancing out the moral contamination of the male marketplace. As men toiled in the sweat of their brow to bring home earthly bread to nourish the body, women were entrusted with the care of immortal souls. The woman’s “great mission,” Beecher urged, “is self-denial, in training [her family’s] members to self-sacrificing labors for the ignorant and weak: if not her own children, then the neglected children of her Father in heaven."(88)
"The fact that John Humphrey Noyes’s new community preached the virtue of selflessness was, then, another mark in his favor, and a particular lure to those who felt traditional community ties stretched thin by the new economic and social order."(89)
"Official communism of property was established in March 1845, when the group signed a constitution “for the purpose of sustaining the gospel of salvation from sin and gaining the advantages of union and combined capital.”" [mijn nadruk] (90)
"In creating a communal home of “combined capital” in which private financial holdings were dissolved, Noyes was harking back to one of the oldest myths in Western literature: the dream of a lost golden age of peace and plenty, before the introduction of law and private property."(91)
"Still, early modern Europe witnessed sporadic attempts to bring about God’s kingdom in the here and now, restoring a state of primitive communism on earth. These outcroppings of millennial zeal were more often than not quashed by the church."(94)
"Noyes’s utopian enclave had some competition in New England during the heady decade of the 1840s: the sprouting of a number of communitarian experiments, largely inspired by the theories of French iconoclast and businessman-cum-philosopher Charles Fourier. Fourier located the source of all human misery in society’s misguided adherence to competitive capitalism and the nuclear family as the core economic and social units of life. Human passions—in their natural state benign and constructive—had been warped beyond recognition by modern civilization, which pitted individuals and their families against one another in competitive strife. Fourier proposed that economic and social life be organized instead around a series of productive communes, or phalanstères. Here people of all classes would live and work side by side, eliminating the inefficiency of single-family households and the geographic divide between work and home. Fourier’s system retained some basic tenets of individualism; private property was upheld, and a commune member’s remuneration would vary according to his capital and skill. Yet by allowing each member to follow his individual “passional attractions” in the most efficient way possible, productivity would soar, and the commune would guarantee the spiritual and material welfare of the entire group." [mijn nadruk] (96)
"Fourier’s phalanx system would harmonize and coordinate human efforts toward the greater good of the whole, replacing competition with cooperation. [Albert] Brisbane went on to write a series of columns for Whig reformer Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in 1842–43, in which he touted the advantages of associationism and introduced the concept to a wider American audience." [mijn nadruk] (97)
"At the height of the Fourierist vogue, between 1843 and 1847, twenty-four communitarian phalanxes were founded across the United States. The most famous of these experiments was Brook Farm, an agrarian utopia staked out in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, by the Unitarian minister and transcendentalist adherent George Ripley. Designed as a combined working farm and school where manual and intellectual labor were equally rewarded, Ripley’s bold endeavor attracted the interest of such New England intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who would give an ambivalent fictionalized account of his time at the short-lived commune in his 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance). Brook Farm blended the transcendentalist belief in personal spiritual growth with a commitment to “social progress,” a concept its members defined with only the broadest of strokes." [mijn nadruk] (98)
Noyes vond het maar niks, zoiets moest ingebed zijn in een basis van geloof in god.
"But what Noyes was after was a much more radical and, ultimately, more mystical state of union than anything imagined by early apostolic Christianity or Fourier’s acolytes. To grasp his intentions we must go back to the Christian mystics and their vision of the godhead as one and indivisible, a unity in which all partial or surface identities are dissolved.
In the mystical tradition, the union between Christ and his church, or between God and the individual believer, was often expressed by analogy with sexual union."(100)
"Noyes had the audacity (or perhaps simply the honesty) to take the mystics at their word: far from falling outside the divine orbit, the sexual organs were, in fact, “the medium of the noblest worship of God.” Not just a metaphor, sexual union was a practical way for souls to bind themselves to one another in the common medium of Christ’s body. The marriage law that held sway in the world, then, and the nuclear family that attended it, worked to constrict and diminish love, which in its fullness and by its very nature was expansive, rippling out in ever more inclusive circles." [mijn nadruk] (101)
"Drawing on current debates within the fields of biology, chemistry, and physiology, Noyes was able to link sex to immortality through the little-understood, apparently magical workings of electricity."(102)
"The initial forays into multiple sexual partners were tentative and, surprisingly, did not originate in Noyes’s quarter. It was George Cragin who wrote a letter to Harriet Noyes declaring his love for her as a sister in Christ; Harriet, divulging the letter to Noyes, admitted her attraction to Cragin."(108)
"The time for the consummation of the Noyeses and the Cragins’ foursquare agreement would arrive sooner than expected. One day in May 1846, as Mary and Noyes were strolling in the woods together, they were overcome by the desire to proceed to a “full consummation” of their engagement."(109)
"Whether or not Noyes’s vision of sexual sharing at this early stage of his experiment involved the abolition of the taboo on incest—in other words, whether he slept with his sisters Charlotte and Harriet—is a question that has never been definitively answered."(111)
"According to Noyes’s theory of “Bible secretiveness,” which affirmed that certain secrets of the Resurrection were to remain hidden from the uninitiated until God should declare them ready to receive the truth, the passage into Complex Marriage was kept rigorously secret, not only from the town of Putney but also from most of the association’s thirty-five members outside Noyes’s inner circle."(112)
Maar natuurlijk kwam het dorp Putney er toch achter en 'all hell broke loose'.
"Eventually, although a tense truce was reached with the villagers, it was decided the best strategy was for the association to abandon Putney. And so, between the spring and fall of 1848, all of its members converged on the property of fellow Perfectionist Jonathan Burt in the rural outpost of Oneida Creek, in central New York." [mijn nadruk] (124)
"While at Putney, members of the Society of Inquiry had continued to live in their own homes, joining the larger group for prayer and study in the main Noyes compound during the day. But as Noyes’s vision of his social experiment developed, he came to believe it was essential to bring all members of the group to live as one family under a single roof. Current society, with its system of isolated domiciles housing each individual family separately, only fueled “egotism and exclusiveness,” Noyes argued. In the resurrected life, on the contrary, “unity of hearts will prefer unity of accommodations,” he predicted. By the end of their first year in Oneida, the original Putney nucleus had expanded to eighty-four members—too many to fit into the existing structures of the original Burt dwellings. And so, during the summer and fall of 1848, the fledgling Community built themselves a proper home." [mijn nadruk] (127)
"If Brooklyn was the seat of Bible Communist theory, Oneida provided the practical workshop where Noyes’s radical restructuring of family relationships was put to the test. The most immediate change in traditional social arrangements undertaken at Oneida was the institution of a “Children’s House,” physically separate from the main dwelling quarters of the adult members, where the young could be raised collectively by rotating teams of teachers and nurses. The Community converted one of the original houses on the property into a lodging for children aged two to twelve and another into a nursery for infants. In general, infants roomed with their mothers until the age of one and a half, when they were weaned and transferred to the Children’s House."(130)
[Dat lijkt zowaar op de situatie bij Skinner, als het om de kinderen gaat. Alleen de laatste zin niet.]
"While primarily interested in grounding his antimarriage beliefs in holy scripture, Noyes was canny enough to include a section in the “Bible Argument” lambasting marriage as contrary to human nature and thus as largely to blame for the misery, vice, and illness rampant in contemporary American society."(132)
"If the shift to communal child rearing met with little resistance from members (apart from the complaints of a few clingy mothers), the transition to Complex Marriage was considerably more delicate. Married couples joining the Community, in particular, had difficulty ridding themselves of what the communists called disapprovingly “the marriage spirit.”(...) Some were less pliant in transitioning to the new system.(...) Other men were, apparently, indifferent enough about giving up exclusive claims to their legal spouses but took exception when they perceived a competitor moving in on a sexual partner they had come to regard as their own particular “spiritual bride.”"(133-134)
"But if the Community used the stick a good deal in controlling sexual relations, the carrot was an equally essential part of the smooth functioning of the system. Good behavior—a member’s humble and good-natured submission to the Community’s rulings about sexual pairings—was often richly rewarded."(136)
"One of the thorniest problems confronting the early Community was how to introduce virgins of both sexes into what they delicately called the “social life” of the group. Young men presented a particular difficulty, as their insatiable desire for sex made them an unpredictable force in need of serious restraint."(137)
[Dat is dus een vooroordeel, een sociale constructie.]
"The Community’s original plan—to marry young pairs off once they were deemed sexually mature—yielded less than satisfying results. Such pairings had led to what Noyes called the “spiritual collapse” of several young wives, whom Noyes felt were not adequately protected from the “untamed lion” of their new partners’ aggressive sexual urges. Another tack was tried: introducing young men to sex via the older, more experienced women."(137)
"Following the new system, John Humphrey Noyes himself introduced young women to sexual intercourse at or shortly after the onset of puberty; though surviving Community records are scarce, passing references in diaries and letters suggest the average age of female induction was thirteen. Boys were introduced a few years later and had their first sexual experiences with older women, preferably past menopause, to avoid accidental pregnancies. Though Noyes admitted that such a system of pairing old and young might be regarded as unnatural by the outside world, he bade his followers persevere"(139)
"Before long, the “marriage question,” as social pundits would delicately refer to it, had become a national preoccupation.
As the abolitionist movement gained prominence on the national stage, reformers committed to advancing women’s rights struck upon a natural analogy between the institution of slavery and the institution of marriage. Under the existing laws of coverture, a woman upon marriage forfeited her right to an independent legal identity and entered into the position of a dependent: she could neither own property nor control her wages; neither sue nor sign contracts; if she committed a crime, her husband was held legally responsible and could administer chastisement as he saw fit. In the case of divorce, a woman had no legal rights over her children. She was, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton would starkly declare in her 1848 “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments of Women,” for all intents and purposes “civilly dead.” As a tie that locked women into a position of legal and financial dependence on their husbands, critics thus argued that marriage differed little from the tie binding master and slave: “The rights of humanity are more grossly betrayed at the altar,” Stanton commented bitterly in an 1851 letter to her abolitionist cousin, Gerrit Smith, “than at the auction block of the slaveholder.”
It was shocking enough to many a conservative in midcentury America that respectable middle-class women were demanding legal and economic equality within the institution of marriage. But Stanton and her crew were soon joined by—in their enemies’ eyes, if not in their own—even less savory allies: a motley band of philosophers and activists promoting the outright abolition of marriage and its replacement by the practice of free love."(141)
[Wauw. Dit vat heel goed samen hoe beroerd de situatie voor vrouwen in huwelijken was in de 19e eeuw.]
"In her 1854 book, Marriage, [Mary Gove]Nichols rehearsed publicly the analogy between slavery and marriage that, six years earlier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been forced to tiptoe around at the Women’s Rights Convention. Nichols challenged her so-called fellow feminists to admit to themselves that their call for independence was necessarily a call for the abolition of marriage"(145)
"Indeed, while Noyes’s unconventional positions on the questions of work and marriage often mimicked the outside world’s similar calls for reform of these exploitative relationships, the liberalist argument for “self-ownership” was entirely foreign to the spirit of Bible Communism. Certainly, the Oneidans agreed, a person could not “belong” to another person: as institutions invested in the ownership of persons, slavery and marriage were both ethically dubious. But no more could a man be said to “belong” to himself. Humans were all dependents of God and achieved true liberty only by rigorously subordinating their will to His."(149)
"And yet for all its severity and its biblical defense of women’s natural inferiority, Oneida proved itself a practical workshop for gender equality in ways undreamed of by actual feminists of the period. Its female members enjoyed a range of professional, emotional, and sexual and reproductive freedoms that would have shocked even the most ardent leaders of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement."(154)
"Legal and religious tradition in the West had for centuries defined the chief purpose of sexual intercourse as the propagation of the species, regarding nonpropagative sexual activity with suspicion, if not moral revulsion. Having handily disposed of the institution of marriage, Noyes, in “Bible Argument,” proceeds to demolish this misguided prejudice, as well. Dividing the sexual act into two branches, the “amative” and the “propagative,” he boldly declares that of the two, the practice of sex for pleasure and social fellowship is unquestioningly superior to its practice for the production of children."(155)
"During the twenty-one years that male continence was in effect at Oneida and its sister colonies, regulating the sexual commerce of some two hundred adults, there were no more than thirty-one accidental pregnancies (or what Noyes in one communication to his flock referred to as “involuntary, unwholesome impregnation”).
Freed from the physical burden of perpetual pregnancy and, as well, from confinement to the drudgery of housework and childcare to which she was formerly condemned, woman could finally take her place by man’s side as his true helpmeet. According to the Bible Communists, the nineteenth-century tendency to assign men to work outside, whether in field or town, while women were forced to labor within the dark enclosure of the home was an entirely unnatural arrangement."(159)
"From the very outset, the Oneidans were determined to erase the arbitrary distinction between “women’s work” and “men’s work,” public and domestic spheres, that in the outside world kept the sexes separated."(161)
"Nor was Oneida’s desegregation of sex-specific work restricted to manual labor. The Community ruled itself by ad hoc appointed committees, which were generally staffed with both men and women. Women could be journalists, editors, typesetters, bookkeepers: they had an active voice in the day-to-day intellectual, practical, and political life of the Community largely denied their sisters in the outside world."(163)
"Labor was “free” at Oneida, as they were fond of saying, rather than compulsory, with members gravitating toward the work to which, whether by inclination or training, they felt best suited. Frequent job rotations kept the labor from becoming monotonous."(169)
"The average Oneidan’s workday lasted about six hours, although sometimes less, and was remarkably varied and supple."(171)
"Oneida’s decision to embrace the twin dynamos of industrialization and full-blown market capitalism gaining ground in America in the first decades of the nineteenth century was by no means an obvious choice. America had been founded on the pastoral ideal of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer and the artisan craftsman."(175)
"Under Jefferson’s ideal, hired work, or labor for a wage, was viewed as degrading, insofar as it rendered the worker dependent on his employer and deprived him of the freedom and self-ownership white Americans held to be the basis of civic and political personhood. (Black slavery was an accepted economic fact of life that, because blacks were not legally considered persons, fell entirely outside the sphere of such tender moral and political considerations.) But by 1860, the number of wage earners in the country for the first time surpassed the number of the self-employed. “Hired labor,” as a class, found itself ideologically homeless in a nation dedicated to the ideal of economic independence." [mijn nadruk] (188)
"Free labor had its critics, notably among those who feared that what they called “wage slavery,” by analogy with black chattel slavery, would destroy America’s traditionally classless society and push the country down a slippery slope toward the retrograde European caste system."(189)
"As their industries took flight, it became clear that the Oneidans would no longer be able to supply the necessary labor from among their own numbers. Maximizing their capital investment and securing a steady market share in these volatile commodities was going to require more than the four-to-six-hour shifts that they had agreed upon as providing optimal spiritual and physical benefit to their members. It would require the Oneidans to dip into that indefatigable and endlessly renewable resource that they had, for so long, resisted: wage labor.(...) By 1867, all of the assembly-line jobs in the silk-twist and trap factory were filled by “hirelings,” local outsiders specifically engaged for the task. By 1875, Oneida employed over two hundred hirelings in its various industries."(193-194)
"Half of the hirelings were “silk girls,” most of them mere children between the ages of ten and sixteen. Adopting the same schedules and pay scale as the Northeast’s burgeoning textile manufacturing industry, the Oneidans had the silk girls working the same grueling ten-to-twelve-hour days that Elizabeth Hutchins had experienced during her brief stint at the Willimantic machine-twist factory. The girls were hired and fired at whim, according to the shifting seasonal demands of the market. The Oneidans, to be fair, were attentive to the problem of “how to work [the girls] economically and yet not oppressively,” but their solution—to give the girls fifteen-minute recreation breaks at 10 A.M. and 4 P.M.—hardly appears lavish. The silk girls’ relentless work schedule stood in stark contrast to the Community members’ participation in the machine-twist enterprise." [mijn nadruk] (195)
[Religie voorkomt duidelijk geen uitbuiting van anderen buiten de eigen gemeenschap.]
Over het systeem van wederzijdse kritiek.
"To “communize the self,” to borrow Noyes’s phrase, was the extraordinary task Oneidan men and women set for themselves. In reading the official Community literature, as well as private diaries and letters, one moral failing in particular surfaces again and again as being stubbornly resistant to the process of communization: sticky love, or sexual possessiveness. These sticky attachments to individual lovers blocked the circulatory works of the Community body by obtruding a toxic, indigestible ego (or pair of egos) into the free-flowing stream of universal love." [mijn nadruk] (214)
"Neither same-sex eros, it should be noted, nor its possible consummation ever arises in the Community literature—presumably because John Humphrey Noyes’s theory of magnetic male and female poles rendered such an arrangement anatomically as well as theologically unthinkable."(224)
[Typisch. ]
"Submitting oneself endlessly to Mutual Criticism and separating oneself again and again from sticky attachments were clearly excruciating experiences for Community members. One star-crossed tale of sticky love that became immortalized in Community lore was the affair carried on between my great-great-grandfather Charles Cragin and a young woman named Edith Waters."(235)
"At its best, the Oneida Community’s practice of Mutual Criticism, and its mortification of sticky love, kept alive in its members a keen sense that they were participants in a more elemental unity that transcended their limited, finite existence as individuals. The banal weight of daily cares—of stinging jealousies and clutching desires and gnawing regrets, creeping in their petty pace from day to day—was burned off in the pure fire of universal love. But at its worst, the Community’s ruthless dedication to communizing the private life of its members could, quite literally, turn to nightmare."(238)
"Tirzah Miller liked to have sex.(...) Tirzah was by many accounts the most sexually sought-after woman in the Community. That she was a “powerful social magnet,” as one Community elder commented of her, there can be no doubt. Tirzah’s diary is littered with bewitched men, broken hearts, and sulking lovers caught in the snares of sticky love."(238)
"The fact of Tirzah Miller’s libido being in permanent overdrive was a lucky thing for John Humphrey Noyes. For, beginning in 1869, he had chosen Tirzah to be the cornerstone of an ambitious new plan he was hatching for the Community: a eugenics experiment, whereby the highest spiritual members would cross-breed to produce a new race of super-Perfectionists. After twenty years of struggling to achieve perfection through the labor-intensive processes of Mutual Criticism and self-discipline, perfection would now be “fixed in the blood,” blueprinted at the cellular level."(240)
"Noyes’s bold experiment, the first (if not the only) practical eugenics trial in America, was different, it should be said, from the garden-variety eugenics societies that would spring up in the early decades of the twentieth century in England and the United States. For groups like the British Eugenics Society and, in the United States, Charles Davenport’s American Breeders Association, the goal was always the rather pedestrian one of preserving Anglo stock from contamination by the lower classes and races. Under the misleadingly mild motto that “Eugenics Is the Self-Direction of Human Evolution,” the International Eugenics Conferences held in New York in 1921 and 1932 favored immigration restriction and forced sterilization to weed out genetic undesirables." [mijn nadruk] (241)
"Noyes coined his own term for this ambitious project: stirpiculture, from the Latin stirpes, or “race.”"(249)
"In fact, Noyes contemplated having children by Tirzah and her sister Helen (both of them his nieces), as well as by Constance Bradley Noyes, his daughter.
In the end, despite Noyes’s evident enthusiasm for the idea, the surviving documents provide no evidence that such sister-brother or father-daughter unions were ever consummated at Oneida."(252)
"Still, following his own precepts of “breeding in and in,” Noyes fathered ten of the sixty-two Community children born during the eugenics trial between 1869 and 1879, while another nineteen were his blood relatives."(254)
"For all of its scientific pretensions, Oneida’s experiment in stirpiculture, as narrated in private diaries by its participants, presents a dark, at times sinister, tale that is at stark odds with the triumphant march toward truth and progress it imagined itself to be."(255)
"Theodore [Noyes] was one of twelve promising young Oneida men who had been sent off to Yale in the 1860s, some enrolling in the medical school and others in the newly founded Sheffield Scientific School, one of the first institutions of its kind in the United States, supplementing the traditional liberal arts curriculum with courses specifically in the sciences and mathematics. Though recognizing the risk he was taking in allowing the new generation such unprecedented contact with outsiders, Noyes, like many nineteenth-century Americans, was confident that the exciting new vistas opened by science would only confirm the truths of revealed religion. Science and religion would work hand in hand in humanity’s progressive march toward perfection.(...) Noyes senior hopped eagerly onto the scientific bandwagon, explaining the part medical physiology would henceforward play in Oneida’s overall resurrection plan."(283)
De invloed van het evolutionisme van Darwin en Spencer e.a.
"One book that made the rounds among the younger generation at Oneida in the 1860s and 1870s was the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.(...) The author of Vestiges airily attributes evolution to the intelligent design of a benign creator and appoints the human species undisputed ruler of all animate creatures."(288)
"In Comte’s generally skeptical system, which flourished in American universities during the 1870s, John Humphrey Noyes’s claims to divine inspiration as God’s spokesperson on earth were so much mumbo jumbo.
This strain of skepticism eventually came to permeate the heart of Oneida’s young generation. In 1871, a small coterie of “positivists,” led by Daniel Bailey, Theodore Noyes, and my great-great-grandfathers, Charles Cragin and Joseph Skinner, began to form at Oneida."(289)
"Theodore Noyes managed to hold out a bit longer. But a little over one year after Joseph Skinner’s defection, in July 1873, Theodore admitted that he too had concluded that he was an agnostic, if not an atheist, and that he could no longer believe in his father’s divine commission. To his father’s great chagrin, Theodore decided the only honest option was to leave the Community, at least for a trial period.(...) Within a week, Theodore pleaded for readmission..."(291-292)
De kwestie van de opvolging van Noyes senior.
"When they had first moved to the howling wilderness frontier of Oneida Creek in 1848, John Humphrey Noyes and his band of Perfectionists had been in the vanguard of national movements that questioned the sanctity of marriage and the nuclear family. Feminists, free lovers, and anarchists had all worked, in varying ways and with varying degrees of success, at reforming traditional monogamy. But by the early 1870s, the national sentiment on questions of marriage had dramatically shifted. Moral conservatives were circling the wagons in defense of marriage and the nuclear family."(308)
"Congress complied, passing the nation’s first antiobscenity law on March 3, 1873. What came to be called the Comstock Law prohibited the circulation by U.S. mail of all obscene materials, including information regarding contraception and abortion. It also gave postmasters the right to inspect mail and seize suspicious material. Ever prudent, Oneida responded by cutting out all reference to their birth control practices from their publications and by ceasing to print and distribute Noyes’s popular essay Male Continence.
But Comstock was not done with his crusade against obscenity. Increasingly, he saw the free love movement propagating a breakdown in the American family."(309)
"Oneida could hardly escape being caught in the net of the “moral belligerence” that, as historian Nancy Cott has argued, was the prevailing atmosphere surrounding questions of marriage in the 1870s."(310)
"Oneida’s own nemesis appeared in the person of John Mears, a Protestant minister from nearby Hamilton College who was enraged by the “systematic concubinage” being practiced at Oneida. Heartened by a recent decision handed down by the courts in Reynolds v. the United States that gave Congress the power to criminalize bigamy in the Mormon territory of Utah, Mears wrote a screed in The New York Times on April 10, 1879, in which he excoriated the New York senators and representatives in Congress for opposing Mormon polygamy in Utah while countenancing Oneidan Complex Marriage at home. In short, the ambient national mood boded ill for the Oneidans’ unconventional definition of what might constitute a family."(311)
"Noyes’s sudden decision to desert his flock stunned the Oneidans, but this was, after all, part of a well-established pattern with Noyes."(315)
"The tongue was indeed a fire; the backbiting and infighting, whispered accusations, and panicked rumors in the wake of Noyes’s waning leadership were consuming Oneida. A scramble to fill the power vacuum at Oneida ensued"(317)
"A house divided if ever there was one."(319)
"If a more democratic distribution of political power was key to the Hinds-Towner reforms, of equal if not primary importance was the demand for the decentralization of sexual control in the Community. The right of “first husband”—the right to introduce virgins into Complex Marriage—had from the very beginning of the Community been Noyes’s chief prerogative. For years, Noyes’s unquestioned control of the Community’s sexual relations helped keep a lid on sexual rivalry among the male members. Indeed, as Theodore Noyes would later explain, without his father’s sexual dominance holding the Community together, the center would not hold." [mijn nadruk] (319)
"Suggestion number 8 on Mr. Hinds’s list was, then, an explicit demand that individual preference be given free rein in the matter of Complex Marriage: “[E]very member is to be absolutely free from the undesired sexual familiarity, approach, and control of every other person.” In other words, Noyes’s de facto control of who slept with whom, along with the general rule of ascending fellowship, by which the sexual lives of the younger members, in particular, had previously been controlled, were to be completely abolished in favor of individual preference." [mijn nadruk] (321)
"The young people within the Community tended to side with Wayland-Smith’s option to restore monogamy"(325)
[Ik vind het opvallend dat jonge mensen vaak conservatief zijn op dit punt. Misschien zijn die gevoeliger voor individualisme en precies in die tijd kwam het economisch liberalisme op.]
"The liberal-democratic political tradition operating in the “outside world” took a rights-based approach to the social contract. Individuals were, ipso facto, free and equal under the law—although, in practice, natural inequalities in the distribution of talent and character led to vast disparities in individuals’ social and economic fates. The radical economic individualism of the market revolution had rallied Americans behind this definition of the autonomous, free-willed individual as the basic unit of society. In the sweeping reconceptualization of “work” and economic relations that followed the abolition of slavery, the ideology of contract-based “free labor” rushed in to justify the existence of growing class divisions within industrial society. According to this vision, both the workplace and the polity were composed of free, contracting agents following their own self-interest in the open market, with only themselves to blame for economic failure.
Oneidan communism had never held any truck with rights-based individualism, and the pages of its journals are filled with eloquent and repeated arguments for what Oneidans called an “organic” rather than rights-based society." [mijn nadruk] (329)
[Dat is een goede samenvatting van die visies. ]
"But by the 1870s, as the Community was unraveling, the idea of an organic society based on such mystical notions of shared “life,” chivalry, and honor, rather than the hard-edged calculations of contractual obligation, had begun to seem hopelessly romantic. The communitarian ventures of the heady 1840s, utopian efforts to provide a cooperative countermodel to the rising economic and social isolation of market man, had all ended in failure."(331)
[Helaas deugt het alternatief evenmin of nog minder. ]
"Better for the Oneidans to give up their position on Complex Marriage than risk the continued existence of the Community itself."(334)
"At ten o’clock, then, on August 28, 1879, Complex Marriage came to an end. Most ushered in the change without fanfare. Francis Wayland-Smith, for instance, passed the day leading up to the moratorium quietly with Cornelia Worden, the mother of his son Gerard. Others kept up a more frantic pace in saying their sexual good-byes. Tirzah Miller, according to her diary, had sex with James Herrick in the morning, Erastus Hamilton in the afternoon, and Homer Barron in the evening in a frenzied last hurrah before the iron curtain of monogamy once again descended."(335)
"The commission’s report made it clear that the only solution to the stalemate was a financial parting of the ways. And so a joint-stock proposal was placed on the table, turning the Community into a corporation that would pay shares to its holders, once and for all dissolving financial ties between warring members. On August 31, 1880, an “Agreement to Divide and Reorganize” was presented to the family at Evening Meeting for approval, and, the following day, 203 members signed it into effect. The Oneida Community now became, officially, the Oneida Community, Limited."(346)
"The Community’s industries—upon whose profits the 203 souls who had signed the “Agreement” would henceforth depend—had evolved over the years. Trap making was still the principal moneymaker for Oneida Community, Limited, or OCL, followed by the silk business. The Community still carried on a small but profitable fruit-canning enterprise on the Mansion House grounds. The greatest shift in their economic composition had been the addition of iron spoons to the Community’s roster of manufactures."(347)
"Cragin jumped right to it: in traditional Community fashion, he sought out an industry specialist, a spoon man who had previously worked for the Hall and Elton silverware company, to help him design the necessary machinery. By June, the once-abandoned factory was fitted up and ready to produce “one thousand gross per week of ungraded tinned iron spoons.”"(348)
"As if overcorrecting for their years of communist sharing, the newly separated households clung to their private property with an odd tenacity. “It was difficult to borrow a hammer,” one man reminisced about early postbreakup days. And it was said that anyone who borrowed so much as a pin from a neighbor was punctual in returning it."(351)
"No one member—up to and including John Humphrey Noyes himself—enjoyed access to more or better resources than any other. At the breakup, this artificial bubble of equality vanished overnight. Stock shares provided former Community members with annual payouts, and stipends helped in the support of children. But the economic fortunes of the ex-members varied widely, depending on such factors as how much money or property one’s family had contributed upon joining the Community and how well-connected or engaged in the Community’s manufacturing ventures one had been. For women—who, despite the Community’s lip service to gender equality, had never penetrated into the upper echelons of business management—much depended on how they made out in the marriage lottery by which couples were patched together at the end of Complex Marriage." [mijn nadruk] (353)
[Je ziet alle nadelen die men altijd zag aan monogame huwelijken weer terugkomen. Zeker ook voor vrouwen.]
"Noyes lived out his final years in Niagara Falls in a house he called the Stone Cottage, surrounded by a loyal coterie of followers and steady stream of visitors from his previous life in Oneida. Throughout the slow unraveling of his life’s work at Oneida, and up until his death in 1886, Noyes remained oddly cheerful and detached."(358)
"John Humphrey Noyes died in his bed at the Stone Cottage on April 13, 1886. His son, the heir apparent who had, in the end, failed so utterly in his mission to carry on his father’s spiritual dynasty, was by his side."(361)
"Following the breakup, his mother, who had had three children by three different fathers, was left without a husband. And so, with the protective walls of Bible Communism in ruins around them, the nine-year-old Pierrepont was left to brave the icy winds of social opprobrium alone. Along with his half-brother Ormond and half-sister Stella, Pierrepont moved into an apartment with their mother on Turkey Street near the trap shop—the home of the very Irish toughs who, several years earlier, had taunted him. His mother sold books door to door to round out their meager yearly payouts from the Community while, to add a few dollars a month to the family income, Ormond worked in the trap shop and Pierrepont labored part-time for a carpenter."(365)
"In order to overhaul Oneida and forge the company silverware into a recognizable nationwide brand, Pierrepont knew he would have to assemble a team of expert businessmen, salesmen, financiers, and marketers—and the first place he thought to recruit was from among the now far-flung ranks of his early stirpicultural brothers."(382)
"The Oneida Community, which had prided itself on emancipating its members—and its women, in particular—from the chains of social competitiveness and fashion, had been reborn from its ashes by cashing in on these very same middle-class fantasies in its twentieth-century female consumers. As the money-mad decade of the 1920s rolled out, Oneida’s ads appealed in an ever more unabashed manner to American consumers’ aspirations to class distinction and chic." [mijn nadruk] (394)
"This concession to worldly values was, apparently, a sacrifice the Oneida family was willing to make in order to keep itself afloat. Under the auspices of the newly solvent company, and with so many of the former stirpicults having returned home from their far-flung business ventures to set down roots, the 150 or so members of the Oneida family were looking at a friendly future. They christened their new community Kenwood."(396)
[Ik vind de verdere ontwikkeling in de richting van een kapitalistisch bedrijf niet zo interessant. Erg aan het scannen, nu.]
Het zoeken naar een eigen weg binnen dat kapitalisme leidt tot discussies over socialisme.
"Pierrepont rigorously rejected Sinclair’s socialism, along with his confidence that overthrowing the capitalist mode of production would magically end human misery. “Absolute equality—the dream of Socialism—has been declared impracticable by political economy, undesirable by philosophy, and utterly condemned by history,” Pierrepont noted in a 1909 article for The Quadrangle." [mijn nadruk] (404)
"Paying their workers wages slightly above the market rate, or in any event above the rate at comparably sized factories, was Oneida management’s first pledge of commitment to overcoming the divide between labor and capital. Next was the establishment of a “bonus wage,” whereby wages were adjusted in order to keep pace with the rising cost of living. Oneida also evolved what was termed a “contingent wage,” which was essentially a manner of profit sharing."(407)
"At a time when capitalists all over the country were scrambling to stymie socialist agitation and to prevent the federal government from stepping in to regulate labor relations, Pierrepont’s efforts to uplift the workers in both their work and private lives, all the while instilling the good capitalist values of thrift, teamwork, and perseverance, were far from revolutionary."(411)
"Kinsley’s insight pierced deeper than he knew. When he took over the company in 1895, Pierrepont Noyes had sought to rehabilitate his father’s vision of a socialist utopia to fit the capitalist realities of the twentieth century. As for the Oneida Community’s sexual theories, they were quite obviously outside the realm of rehabilitation. And so, stripping his father’s legacy of anything that touched, even lightly, on the question of sex, Pierrepont proceeded to package up the rest into a socially acceptable mixture of masculine chivalry, Yankee business sense, and Christian charity (with some tantalizing ads of pretty flapper girls thrown in for good measure). That was a story that would sell spoons—as Pierrepont, with his keen advertiser’s eye, was quick to recognize." [mijn nadruk] (442)
"For Pierrepont’s mission was not only firmly to establish Oneida Community, Limited, as an economic powerhouse and a leader in the field of industrial relations; he also, less overtly, sought to replace the topsy-turvy gender dynamics that held sway under his father with a more stable, and ultimately more conventional, model at Kenwood. While sexist in his theology, John Humphrey Noyes had nonetheless granted women in the Community a remarkable amount of freedom, from their eligibility for “brain” work, for which the outside world deemed them unfit, to their relative freedom to control their reproductive lives.(...) Oneida was a place where, decidedly, men were not in control and where gender boundaries were dangerously fluid. Pierrepont’s anxiety and Kinsley’s comment were to some extent prompted, no doubt, by what historian Michael S. Kimmel has identified as the “masculinity crisis” of the turn-of-the-century American male.(...) Teddy Roosevelt’s famous 1898 charge in the Battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War set the tone for manliness at the turn of the century; indeed, the soon-to-be president, throughout his eight-year command in the White House, never tired of speechifying about the virtues of physical courage and athletic prowess in the making of real American men." [mijn nadruk] (443-444)
"The image of the rugged athlete on the field became the very type and symbol of the honorable man in the public arena, he “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” who never shrinks from doing “the rough work of a workaday world” in pursuit of a worthy cause." [mijn nadruk] (445)
[En zo is het helaas nog steeds. De gevolgen voor vrouwen zijn voorspelbaar:]
"But the corollary of Oneida’s “making of men” involved the explicit unmaking of women: exorcising the ghost of female equality, whether sexual, physical, or intellectual, and putting woman firmly back in her place as man’s domestic helpmate. In a June 1917 entry in her diary, Edith Kinsley recorded some candid sociological observations about the Oneida descendants under the heading “Kenwood Mores.” As opposed to the old Community’s emphasis on women’s emancipation from childbearing and housework, Kenwood had returned to traditional gender roles with a vengeance. The habit of granting women full suffrage, as had been the case in Community days, Kinsley noted, “is quite abolished; it is lost. Women are inferiors, dependents. They take small part in business and cannot intrude with equality into sports.”" [mijn nadruk] (448)
"Van de Warker’s admission that he could find no proof of a causal connection between birth control and ill health in Oneida’s members was an anomaly; the mainstream American medical establishment in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, was consistently anti–birth control in its outlook. Fusing moral and medical arguments, these doctors offered hard scientific evidence for the deleterious effects of contraception on human health, thus appearing to corroborate its sinful nature: according to Boston gynecologist Augustus Kinsley Gardner, condoms were not only “bulwarks against love” but prone to causing painful lesions on the genitals. Bucking nature inevitably led to physical degeneracy." [mijn nadruk] (457)
[Ik geloof niet zo in dat harde wetenschappelijke bewijs, dat moest alleen maar elk moreel tegenargument de mond snoeren als irrationeel. ]
"With the passing of the Comstock Law in 1873, contraception would, quite literally, go underground in America. A handful of vocal opponents continued to advocate for its legalization, as a matter both of women’s rights and of the right to free speech—and not infrequently with tragic results." [mijn nadruk] (458)
[Conservatisme alom. ]
"But the first widely publicized challenge to Comstock’s stranglehold on free speech came in 1914, when Greenwich Village bohemian and anarcho-socialist Margaret Sanger published a pamphlet entitled Family Limitation, giving graphic descriptions of a variety of contraceptive techniques. Sanger’s pamphlets provoked her indictment under New York’s antiobscenity laws, but the true test came when Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. Convicted of violating the state’s law against distributing contraception, Sanger appealed and won a historic victory when, in 1918, Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals ruled that contraceptives could be legally distributed if under the direction of medical doctors.
While Judge Crane’s decision did nothing to decriminalize the distribution through the U.S. mail of contraceptive devices or even written mention of contraceptives, his concession to allow doctors to dispense birth control marked a turning of the tide in the American politics of contraception. Sanger was canny enough to realize that, by converting white, male establishment doctors to the cause of contraception, the birth control movement would be granted the medical-moral legitimacy it required in order to advance its aims.
And indeed, by 1918, the issue of birth control had spread beyond Sanger and her small circle of radical activists to become the pet cause of a handful of committed medical men who insisted that birth control—and the “obscene” topic of human sexuality in general—was not a matter of private vice or virtue but fell under the purview of medicine and public health. Through the voices of these men, the American medical establishment for the first time placed its moral authority behind the separation of sex from reproduction that, since John Humphrey Noyes’s time, had been the dearest wish of birth control advocates of all political stripes, from social-purity reformers promoting “voluntary motherhood” to socialists seeking to relieve working-class poverty to feminist sex radicals claiming a woman’s right to sexual pleasure."(460)
[Artsen als morele autoriteit, waarom? ]
"n February 1926, Dr. Dickinson paid a visit to Kenwood, and he and Hilda entertained a cordial correspondence over the next several months.(...) Dickinson’s momentary lapse into the territory of sexual autobiography makes more sense when we understand that, since the beginning of his practice, the good doctor had been living a kind of parallel life as a sex researcher, taking down detailed sex histories of his female patients and, even less orthodoxly, devoting a portion of his sessions to sketching their genitalia (the art of sketching had been his passion ever since he was a child). By the end of his career, Dickinson had collected more than 5,200 sex histories. He had a pet theory that women’s varying sexual response was a function of physiological differences in their genital anatomy and was determined to prove it by producing and cross-referencing detailed sketches and, later, photographs of thousands of vulva."(468)
"Oneida Community, Limited, continued on its upward rise throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Even the Depression didn’t seem to set sales back by much. With the aid of austere wage cuts—for management as well as workers—Oneida squeaked through 1933 with a profit margin, something no other silver company in America managed to do."(476)
"Oneida Community, Limited, continued on its upward rise throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Even the Depression didn’t seem to set sales back by much. With the aid of austere wage cuts—for management as well as workers—Oneida squeaked through 1933 with a profit margin, something no other silver company in America managed to do."(478)
[Niet erg principieel, maar de principes waren al lang overboord gegooid natuurlijk.]
"When the war was over, Oneida had proved itself prescient. Despite the very real possibility that the change in women’s work patterns during the war could have shifted gender relations and opened up a path toward equality, the opposite was in fact the case. Women were unceremoniously requested to vacate their jobs to make way for the returning servicemen and go “back home for keeps,” where they belonged. Far from being loosened, rigid gender identities now tightened their grip."(493)
"And so again, in Oneida’s postwar advertisements, the home figured front and center as the woman’s proper domain."(494)
"In the intervening years, the aging Dr. Dickinson had also been cultivating a protégé and hopeful successor in the field of sex research: a young zoologist from Indiana University named Alfred C. Kinsey."(500)
"By late 1946, Kinsey was writing up the results of his investigations in a study entitled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a 735-page report that, when it was finally released on October 16, 1947, sent shock waves through the American academic and scientific establishments, as well as the population at large. Whether motivated by horror or admiration, people bought Kinsey’s book"(503)
"The record preserves no written response from the Kenwood family to Dickinson’s query. But when, just a few months later, G. W.’s entire vault full of Oneida Community documents was hauled out and burned—without a word breathed, without so much as a wisp of a rumor handed down to posterity as to who had authorized and carried out the auto-da-fé—it was undoubtedly response enough. This time, the Kenwood family had put the recurring specter of inquisitive gynecologists to rest for good."(505)
"Oneida Limited and the Kenwood community of descendants who ran the company continued to prosper for nearly half a century after the Burning. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, my family spent every Christmas and summer in Kenwood, whose neat, tree-lined streets were populated with aunts and uncles and cousins of varying degrees."(512)