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Women, Family, And Utopia: The Oneida Community Experience And Its Implications For The Present, Lawrence Foster
Women, Family, And Utopia: The Oneida Community Experience And Its Implications For The Present, Lawrence Foster
The Courier
EFFORTS TO DERIVE contemporary lessons from the past are always fraught with difficulty. Seldom has this been more true than in the case of John Humphrey Noyes and the community he founded in mid-nineteenth-century New York State. The Oneida Community and its system of "complex marriage", which both Noyes and his critics somewhat misleadingly described as "free love", have been the focus of extraordinarily wide and divergent interpretations over the past century and a half. These have ranged from extreme treatments arguing that Noyes and Oneida were part of the vanguard of sexual liberation and women's rights to comparisons of …