The Oneida Society: Your Silverware Has a Past

Reading "The Dark Side of Birth Control" from Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts reminded me of the Oneida Society, a utopian group I learned about in an American History class a few years ago. In 1848, John Humphrey Noyes founded a commune in Oneida, New York. This group was economically self-sufficient, and their enterprises included fruit and vegetable canning, silk thread production, animal trap manufacturing, and (you guessed it) silverware. Most curiously, the group performed "communal" sexual acts, meaning although men and women were each married to one partner, they continuously circulated sexual partners and were discouraged from ever making an emotional attachment to one person. Coinciding with this idea of emotional detachment was a program of "stirpiculture," which was basically eugenics. Members who wanted to become parents would go before a committee and were matched in order to produce "even more perfect children." After being weaned from their mothers, these children were raised by the "Children's Wing," and biological parents were discouraged again from making any kind of emotional attachment. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Society)

While this practice may seem completely foreign and not even believable, the same types of ideas were used in order to further the eugenics movement in the United States. The Oneida Society was actually a predecessor to the heyday of the eugenics movement, and its members only practiced positive eugenics, not the negative kind that performs the greatest amount of racial discrimination. The American eugenics movement was overall more popular than this sequestered commune, and yet its ideas are possibly even more outrageous than the ones of John Humphrey Noyes. Looking through an objective lens at history that's 150 years old is a lot easier than recognizing the ridiculousness of practices that happened less than a half-century ago.