Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community

by Spencer Klaw

Book Overview

Without Sin chronicles the rise and fall of nineteenth-century America's most succesful experiment in Utopian living: New York's Oneida Community (1848-1880). Founded by the charismatic Christian Perfectioniost John Humphrey Noyes, this remarkable society flourished for more than thirty years as a unique world where property was shared, men and women were equals, sex was free and open, work was to be joyous, and pleasure was felt to be "the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140239308
• ISBN13: 9780140239300
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Too easy on Noyes

This is an excellent history of the Oneida Community, but I believe the author should state it like it was: Noyes was a cult leader. While he was not as heinous as Jim Jones & Vernon "David Koresh" Howell, he is more to be reviled than respected for his role. To clarify the "free sex" thing, community members had to have permission to have sex, so it was not with "anyone they desired." People had to stay on Noyes' good side so he would permit them to have sex with those they desired. Secondly, community policy was that men did not ejaculate, because Noyes felt that the constant pregnancies typical of the time were oppressive to women. Therefore, young men who still lacked self-control were assigned post-menopausal partners, and the young women were partnered with the experienced, controlled, older men (one of whom, of course, was Noyes himself). Read this book with SEDUCTIVE POISON (about the People's Temple) by Deborah Layton and note the similarities in how cult leaders operate.

Oneida Perfectionists

A case study of utopianism is available in Spencer Klaw's Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1993). This is a fascinating, carefully researched study of John Humphrey Noyes and his followers who sought to live out his "perfectionist" teachings. Noyes, like another religious prophet, Joseph Smith, came of age in upstate New York when it reverberated with religious revivals. Noyes sampled various expressions of evangelicalism, studied a bit at Andover, and floated around in "perfectionistic" circles incubated by (among others) Methodist preachers. Noyes, however, could never tolerate structured settings other than his own. So, having thought through his views, especially concerning communal property and marriage, he launched his version of realized eschatology, the Kingdom of God fully established under his guidance. In time he recruited converts, many of them family and friends, and established a utopian community near Oneida, New York. Thoroughly communistic, the community eliminated private property--possessiveness equaled sin in Noyes' thought. Also abolished was monogamy. Thus Oneida is remembered for its "free love" milieu--though it was not quite as sex-saturated as university dormitories these days. To eliminate sin, Noyes believed you must eliminate possessive sex. Thus members of the community, with the permission of its elders, were allowed to have sex with anyone they desired. Since the sexes lived in different quarters, special rooms were constructed for their sexual liaisons. As you might expect, Noyes himself was the primary beneficiary of such sexual freedom! Young women, needing the skilled hand of the master, were usually introduced to love-making by Noyes himself. Favored members of the community, interestingly enough, also received sexual advantages. Nevertheless, the community survived for 40 years before internal problems forced Noyes to flee to Canada and the remaining residents to transform Oneida into a prosperous business community. What's interesting about this book, read in conjunction with Bryce Christensen's Utopia Against the Family, is the fact that the very things "advanced social thinkers" in our day espouse were tried by the Oneida folks. The traditional family was abandoned for such things as sexual liberty, day care for children, absolute equality of the sexes. When the Oneida experiment finally collapsed, there was an instant return to the traditional nuclear family. One suspects the same always happens simply because the family is as integral to the human condition as hearts and lungs. We can't last long without it!

Fascinating place--and book

First of all, "K", whose review also appears here, misspells the author's name--it is "Klaw". The author, who died recently at 84, was a life-long journalist and historian of journalism with a distinguished career at Columbia U and UCBerkeley. Unlike "K", I was not required to read this book, but sought it out after a serendipitous visit to the historic Mansion House of the Oneida sect in the central NY town of that name--where the action was set. This book is a well researched and well documented account of the rise and fall of founder John Noyes's Utopian world-view and of the hundreds of Americans connected to it and to him. This experiment in Utopian living was the foundation of the Oneida Community silver flatware company, among other interesting connections. Klaw's annotated bibliography is extensive, giving one everything one might want to know for further reading and exploration. As "K" reported, the book is an absolute page-turner! The Oneidans had a lot of good ideas, along with some truly bizarre ones. Read the book and then visit the historic site, which is open to the public and also rents rooms for overnight stays, in the town of Kenwood, near Oneida NY.

A little dry in the beginning, but very interesting!

OK, I admit that I was requred to read this book for my American History class...but once I started reading, I couldn't put this book down! Claw uses lots of primary sources and gives a very sympathetic depiction of the rise and fall of the Oneida colony. Claw has depicted Noyes as a man with a very strong sexual magnetism - but flip to the middle section and check out a picture of this guy. Yuck!I found the first third of the book pretty boring - the descriptions of John Noyes' childhood and early adulthood are particularly bland. Keep reading though, because the last 2/3rds of the book are mindblowing. Who knew that feminism and Christianity could co-exist? I really enjoyed the books' description of everyday life at Oneida, and the sexual politics that made the community so unique. This is not exactly a summer beach read, but it is definately a thought provoking analysis of one of America's more interesting religious "cults".