John Humphrey Noyes

Early years

Noyes was born September 3, 1811, in Brattleboro, Vermont, to John Noyes, who worked variously as a minister, teacher, businessman, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives; and to Polly Noyes (née Hayes), aunt to Rutherford B. Hayes, later the 19th president of the United States.

In 1831, at the age of 20, Noyes was influenced by the preaching of Charles Grandison Finney, a leader in the Second Great Awakening. Noyes underwent a religious conversion. "My heart was fixed on the millennium, and I resolved to live or die for it", Noyes later recalled. He graduated from Dartmouth College shortly thereafter and dropped plans to study law, instead enrolling at Andover Theological Seminary with a view to entering the Christian ministry.

In the fall of 1832, Noyes left Andover to enter the Yale Theological Seminary so that he could devote more time to Bible study. In addition to attending daily lectures and practicing his preaching technique, Noyes began to dip his toe into political activism, helping to organize in New Haven one of the first Anti-Slavery Societies in the United States.

While in his second year at Yale, Noyes made what he considered a major theological discovery. While attempting to determine the date of the second coming of Christ, Noyes concluded that the event had already occurred, in 70 AD, and that therefore "mankind was now living in a new age".

This led Noyes to become increasingly concerned with salvation from sin and with perfection. He began to argue that only those who were perfect and free of sin were true Christians, and to proclaim that he "did not sin".

In 1838, Noyes married Harriet Holton. Initially, the couple had a traditional Christian marriage. In the first six years of the marriage, Harriet gave birth five times, but just one child survived, as the rest were born prematurely. These experiences led Noyes to study sexual intercourse in marriage. In May 1846, Noyes became romantically attracted to the wife of George Cragin, an early convert. He persuaded the Cragins and Mrs. Noyes to merge their unions into a "complex marriage" in which both men were married to both women, such that they could have sex together. The two couples moved into a common house that same year. Noyes spent the next few years developing his ideas on male continence. In mid-1847, he and some of his male converts began extending the scope of complex marriage to female converts, including several village widows and young women. This led to the October 1847 indictment of Noyes for "adulterous fornication". After he was arraigned in court, Noyes absconded to New York, where in 1848 he and his followers founded the Oneida Community.

Male continence and complex marriage

The Oneida community's utopian philosophy focused on the individual relationship to God; it was intended to be a sort of "kingdom of God on earth." The second focus of the community was sexual morality. Noyes found masturbation and the practice of man to sow seeds that he did not wish to grow to be unnatural. Noyes identified three functions of the sexual organs: the urinary, the propagative, and the amative. Noyes believed in the separation of the amative from the propagative, and he put amative sexual intercourse on the same footing with other ordinary forms of social interchange. Sexual intercourse as Noyes defines it is the insertion of the penis into the vagina; ejaculation is not a requirement for sexual intercourse. Noyes found ordinary sexual intercourse to be:a momentary affair, terminating in exhaustion and disgust. If it begins in the spirit, it soon ends in the flesh; i. e., the amative, which is spiritual, is drowned in the propagative, which is sensual. The exhaustion which follows naturally breeds self-reproach and shame, and this leads to dislike and concealment of the sexual organs, which contract disagreeable associations from the fact that they are the instruments of pernicious excess. This undoubtedly is the philosophy of the origin of shame after the fall. Adam and Eve first sunk the spiritual in the sensual, in eating the forbidden fruit; and then, having lost the true balance of their natures, they sunk the spiritual in the sensual in their intercourse with each other, by pushing prematurely beyond the amative to the propagative, and so became ashamed, and began to look with an evil eye on the instruments of their folly.Intercourse was spiritual; masturbation and the practice of intercourse without intention to propagate was shameful and wasteful. Noyes' theory of male continence consisted of analyzing sexual intercourse, recognizing in it two distinct acts, the social and the propagative. Noyes believed this to be practical and believed that a man should be content with avoiding the pleasure except when procreation is a desired result. Noyes believed sex limited to traditional Christian marriage practices left most young people facing sexual starvation from puberty (which according to Noyes was 14) to the age of marriage (which was about 24). Noyes' solution was that the young men in the community would practice with the women of the community who had already gone through menopause, until they were able to control their ejaculation. Only Noyes and a few other men had the skills and self-control necessary to participate in sexual intercourse with the young women of the community. Sexual intercourse was communal, it was based on consent, and all sexual unions were documented and regulated. Sexual intercourse was spiritual, and the pairing of man and woman for sexual intercourse in the community had to be approved by a committee, although most of the virgin females of the community were reserved for Noyes. Noyes did believe that women had the right to choose if and when to bear a child, which was not a common belief at the time.

Noyes also addressed the medical arguments in response to his practices:in regard to the injurious effects of Male Continence, which have been anticipated and often predicted, the Community has to report, in general, that they have not been realized. For example: It is seriously believed by many that nature requires a periodical and somewhat frequent discharge of the seed, and that the retention of it is liable to be injurious. Even if this were true, it would be no argument against Male Continence, but rather an argument in favor of masturbation; for it is obvious that before marriage men have no lawful method of discharge but masturbation; and after marriage it is as foolish and cruel to expend one's seed on a wife merely for the sake of getting rid of it, as it would be to fire a gun at one's best friend merely for the sake of unloading it.All the members of the community lived in their communal home, which made keeping track of sexual intercourse much easier. After sexual intercourse individuals were required to return to their own rooms.

The Community's practice of birth control meant that for many years the birthrate was low. Any children born into the community were raised by the community and not in the tradition of family.