John Humphrey Noyes: Gender Roles In The Oneida Community

Next, we are going to talk about gender roles in the Oneida community.

Compared to the social purity movements of the late nineteenth century, it is easy to view the Oneida community as a less restrictive alternative to society’s increasingly negative view of sexuality. In this era, both men and women, even within marriage, were encouraged to limit their sexual activity to near abstinence. This restraint was the hallmark of devotion to Christian values.

This Victorian-era trend was part of the reason John Humphrey Noyes created the Onedia community. Part of Noyes’ goals for the Onedia community were to reestabalish “right relations between the sexes”.

Therefore, gender roles inside the Onedia community were incredibly complicated. Noyes

In his religious docterine, the Son was subordinate to the Father. He believed that the natural order called for women and men to replicate this cooperative relationship.

Noyes did not want to liberate women, he wanted to remove distinctions between the sexes that he deemed arbitrary. For example, in the First Annual Report of the Onedia Association, he explains how that when one sees a man and woman from afar, you can only tell that one is a man and one is a women based on their clothing. In the Onedia community, women wore bloomer style outfits. The report states that “When the distinction of the sexes is reduced to the bounds of nature and decency, by the removal of the shame partition, and woman becomes what she ought to be, a female man”

The freedom Onedia women experienced was the byproduct of Noyes’ larger goals. To look at the Onedia community solely through the lens of discrimination against women does not allow us to understand the full picture. Despite his ideas, at his core Noyes was the typical charismatic, narcissistic cult leader. He aimed to control his followers regardless of their gender. Social hierarchy in the Onedia community may have not been based on gender and instead based on age and notions of spirituality, but still existed, with him at the