Challenging Love, Marriage, and the Nuclear Family, 1820–1870

Abstract

Chapter 2 zooms in on the ideal of a loving two-generation family and how it was shaped and embedded in the republican society and its structures. The chapter unfolds this story from a contemporaneous critical perspective by presenting it through the eyes of John H. Noyes, the leader of the Oneida Community, which provided a religious and sexual countermodel to life in a nuclear family. Yet by looking at Noyes and his utopian and seemingly progressive commune, the chapter unfolds the meanings and significance of religion and sex in the republic, and it also shows how patriarchal patterns persisted in the new American society. The chapter draws on Noyes’s many writings and the papers of the Oneida Community in the Syracuse University Library.