John Humphrey Noyes

John Humphrey Noyes 1811-86, American reformer, founder of the Oneida community, b. Brattleboro, Vt. He studied theology at Yale but lost his license to preach because of his "perfectionist" doctrine. This took its name from Mat. 5.48 and was based on the belief that man's innate sinlessness could be regained through communion with Christ. At Putney, Vt., he formed (1839) a society of Bible communists, later called Perfectionists. In 1846 they began the practice of complex marriage, a form of polygamy, but this so aroused their neighbors that Noyes was forced to flee. In 1848 he established another community at Oneida, N.Y. (and later a branch at Wallingford, Conn.), where he developed his religious and social experiments in communal living. By 1879 internal dissension had arisen and outside hostility became so strong that Noyes went to Canada, where he spent the rest of his life. His writings include The Berean (1847, repr. 1969) and many pamphlets.

Bibliography: See G. W. Noyes, comp., Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes (1923, repr. 1971) and John Humphrey Noyes: the Putney Community (1931); R. A. Parker, A Yankee Saint (1935); P. B. Noyes, My Father's House (1937); C. N. Robertson, ed., Oneida Community (1970).

Noyes, John Humphrey (1811–1886), religious reformer, founder of the Oneida Community.Born to a prominent family in Brattleboro, Vermont, Noyes attended theological seminaries at Andover and Yale. In his early twenties he developed heretical “perfectionist” religious beliefs that eventually led him to advocate a form of tightly regulated “free love.” From 1834 to 1879, he propagated his ideas through self‐published newspapers. After returning home to Putney, Vermont, in 1836, he began to form a small community, which in 1845 embraced the communal ownership of property. The community's attempt to institute a form of group marriage in 1846 led to its expulsion from Putney in 1847 and its reestablishment at Oneida, New York, in 1848.

At Oneida, community members, numbering some two hundred adults, gradually established a system of “complex marriage.” Considering themselves married to each other in an enlarged family, men and women exchanged sexual partners frequently. Exclusive romantic attachments were broken up as threats to group stability. Members lived, ate, and worked together, practiced communal child rearing, and held most property in common. Although less sex‐role stereotyping occurred at Oneida than in comparable groups, tight control was maintained by group‐criticism sessions, birth control by coitus reservatus, and an informal status hierarchy dominated by Noyes and his closest male and female associates. Beset by internal dissent and external opposition, the community discontinued complex marriage in 1879 and formally dissolved in 1881. Noyes spent his final years in exile in Canada.

John Humphrey Noyes was a serious religious reformer and an incisive social critic, but scholars and popular writers have been most fascinated by his unorthodox sexual ideas and practices, which have impressed some as prototypes for a more liberated future.
See also Antebellum Era; Protestantism; Religion; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Shakerism; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Robert Allerton Parker , A Yankee Saint: John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community, 1935.
Maren Lockwood Carden , Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation, 1969, reprint 1998.
Spencer Klaw , Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community, 1993.

Lawrence Foster