Complex marriage

John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community in upstate New York in 1848 on the doctrine he called complex marriage, which held that every man in the community was married to every woman and every woman to every man, so exclusive pair bonding, along with the private property in a spouse it implied, was abolished as a form of selfishness incompatible with the perfected Christian life the community believed itself already living. Bible Communism, the community's own compilation of its founding theological reports, presents complex marriage as the logical extension of holding all property in common: if believers had already given up private ownership of goods and land for the community's shared benefit, Noyes argued, consistency required giving up exclusive ownership of a spouse as well, since the New Testament nowhere specifically institutes monogamous marriage as a permanent Christian requirement. In practice, any adult member could request relations with any other consenting adult member through an intermediary system intended to prevent exclusive attachments, which the community's leadership actively discouraged and at times formally intervened to break up when a couple showed signs of preferring each other over the wider community, since special love for one partner was itself treated as a doctrinal failure.

Complex marriage required a practical method for separating sexual relations from reproduction, since a community practicing shared partnership among dozens of adults could not sustain uncontrolled childbearing, and Noyes supplied one in a technique he called male continence, in which men were trained to engage in intercourse without ejaculation, a discipline he taught as a skill any committed man could learn and presented as more considerate to women than the withdrawal or abstinence practiced elsewhere in reform circles of the period. Spencer Klaw's history of the community describes how this technical foundation let Oneida later launch a formal breeding program called stirpiculture in the 1860s, in which a committee approved specific pairings believed likely to produce spiritually and physically superior children, treating reproduction itself as a matter for communal planning rather than individual couples, a step considerably beyond simply permitting shared partnership. The system held for roughly three decades under Noyes's direct leadership, but mounting outside pressure, including threatened prosecution and Noyes's own flight to Canada in 1879, forced the community to abandon complex marriage that year and reorganize in 1881 as an ordinary joint stock company, Oneida Community Limited, ending the marital practice while its manufacturing business continued under conventional ownership.