An Ordered Love

Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias--The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community

Louis J. Kern

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807840740, 9780807814437
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

An Ordered Love is the first detailed study of sex roles in the utopian communities that proposed alternatives to monogamous marriage: The Shakers (1779-1890), the Mormons (1843-90), and the Oneida Community (1848-79).

The lives of men and women changed substantially when they joined one of the utopian communities. Louis J. Kern challenges the commonly held belief that Mormon polygamy was uniformly downgrading to women and that Oneida pantagamy and Shaker celibacy were liberating for them. Rather, Kern asserts that changes in sexual behavior and roles for women occurred in ideological environments that assumed women were inferior and needed male guidance. An elemental distrust of women denied the Victorian belief in their moral superiority, attacked the sanctity of the maternal role, and institutionalized the dominance of men over women.

These utopias accepted the revolutionary idea that the pleasure bond was the essence of marriage. They provided their members with a highly developed theological and ideological position that helped them cope with the ambiguities and anxieties they felt during a difficult transitional stage in social mores.

Analysis of the theological doctrines of these communities indicates how pervasive sexual questions were in the minds of the utopians and how closely they were related to both reform (social perfection) and salvation (individual perfection). These communities saw sex as the point at which the demands of individual selfishness and the social requirements of self-sacrifice were in most open conflict. They did not offer their members sexual license, but rather they established ideals of sexual orderliness and moral stability and sought to provide a refuge from the rampant sexual anxieties of Victorian culture.

Kern examines the critical importance of considerations of sexuality and sexual behavior in these communities, recognizing their value as indications of larger social and cultural tensions. Using the insights of history, psychology, and sociology, he investigates the relationships between the individual and society, ideology and behavior, and thought and action as expressed in the sexual life of these three communities. Previously unused manuscript sources on the Oneida Community and Shaker journals and daybooks reveal interesting and sometimes startling information on sexual behavior and attitudes.

Part I: The True Plan of Life: Nineteenth-Century American Attitudes toward the Self and Sexuality

Chapter 1: The Problem of the Self

It is allowed, that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men, inclines them to please others; and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice. Religion is the best motive of all actions, yet religion is allowed to be the highest instance of self-love.

—Jonathan Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

The problems presented by sexual behavior, sexuality, and sex roles were, of course, not unique to Utopian societies. They were problems of vital interest as well to the broader social context of which communitarians formed a part. This concern was an expression of a profound malaise about the place of sex in human life, the socially most acceptable form of relationship between men and women, the proper balance between the social and personal dimensions of human experience, and the nature and direction of the progress of civilization. Utopians, through their frank espousal of definite solutions to problems such as abortion, prostitution, and the rising incidence of divorce, helped to keep these matters before the public eye and, through the opposition they generated by their proposed solutions, served to clarify the positions taken on these questions by the broader society. Nevertheless, both Utopians and their opponents remained essentially ambivalent in the attitudes and feelings that underlay their particular stands.

At bottom, sexual questions were an integral part of a broader ethical-social problem that went to the heart of nineteenth-century American culture. This was the question of the role of the self in society and culture. What were the individual’s rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis social institutions? How should conflicts between individual desires and social needs be decided? What role could the individual play in the progress of civilization? The exceptional interest exhibited in sexual questions in the nineteenth century reflected the realization that such questions were intimately bound up with interpersonal relations and that certainly no other social act was more closely linked to the individual self. The realization that sexual relationships and concepts of sexuality were in a state of flux, and that therefore basic assumptions about the relationships between the self and society were also being questioned, only heightened that interest.

Perhaps the best way to approach this background to the sexual questions of such immediate interest to Utopians and their opponents alike is through a conceptual reading of the literature (mainly admonitory and hortatory) of those who sought to defend society from what they perceived as destructive changes in sexual behavior and concepts of sexuality.

At the heart of much of this writing is the concept of “selfishness,” with its concomitant concern with the nature of the “true” or norma-tively positive self. This concern was associated with the Puritan tradition in America and represented a confluence of the religious tradition of the Reformation (and especially the England of the Puritan Revolution) with the rationality of eighteenth-century utilitarian ethics.

The Reformation presented the problem of the self in its modern form: the assertiveness of self (autonomy) versus the agony of self (responsibility). As one student of the period expressed it, “The Protestant reformation begins a vast new experiment in the culture of the self and the systems of self-direction.”¹ With its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, the authority of ecclesiastical institutions was undermined; and in its place arose the idea of the sufficiency of individual understanding and intuition to establish religious truth. At the same time the terror of the isolated self, the burden of salvation resting squarely on the shoulders of each individual, created ambiguous feelings about the moral autonomy of the self.

A recent study by Michael Zuckerman contends that the relationship between the individual and society “became markedly more tortured in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Something seems to have come unhinged in the ways people were wont to live with one another and in their aspirations for, and anxieties about, group life. Something seems to have driven them simultaneously to seek a new purity of personal identity and covenanted community alike.”² Zuckerman argues that the dynamic tension between the values of self and community, rooted in an excessive concern for morality and purity and a hypersensitivity to sin and purification in this period, issued in a new conception of selfhood: “In many ways it was from the concern for distinguishing, say, the saved from the damned or the civilized from the savage, and upon the structures of guilt which were built on that concern, that the modern idea of the self emerged.”³

In the eighteenth century the focus of the problem of the self shifted dramatically. With the acceptance of an increasingly secular basis for morality and individual behavior, the autonomy of the self was taken for granted. The social nature of the problem—the responsibility of the individual not to God or to the church but to his fellows—became paramount. Utilitarian ethics, following the lead of Hobbesian psychology, accepted selfishness as the irreducible essence of human nature and the primary motive of all conduct. Even those who rejected a secularized approach shared the belief of Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith that self-interest was the driving force behind all ethical and social behavior.

Jonathan Edwards, for example, maintained that “self-love” was “the entity of the thing” and that therefore a sentient being would presume to be good only that “which agrees immediately and directly with its own being.”⁴ Self-love for Edwards becomes essential to both social and religious life, personal well-being, and moral obligation: “Self-love is a man’s love to his own good. … Any good whatsoever that a man any way enjoys, or anything that he takes delight in—it makes it thereby his own good. … ‘Tis impossible that a man should delight in any good that is not his own, for to say that would be to say that he delights in that in which he does not delight.”⁵ The essence of this eighteenth-century position is sensibility, the source of what Edwards called the “affections,” or the broadly conative quality of the mind. Self-love, grounded in the affections, was the force that moved the will to action. Without it man remained inert and passive and thus incapable of relating to God.⁶

Less religious figures shared Edwards’s moral position, but preferred to call the foundation of the morality of self-interest the passions. “Passions” was a broadly conceived term that included not only all aspects of bodily pleasure, but also such intangible desires as the need for honor and power. But whereas the Edwardean system assumed that rational pursuit of self-love would naturally lead to pure love (or love of God), since an individual would always choose that which was most perfectly capable of satisfying his affectional nature, secular thinkers assumed that there would be conflicts between individual desires.

By the late 1740s, Americans had developed a social ethic of enlightened self-interest based on the frank acceptance of individual acquisitiveness. The persistence of an older value system, however, tempered the ethic of self-interest. Traditional values led, on the one hand, to an insistence on the need to restrain the excesses of private interests in order to preserve public order and, on the other, to a belief that the virtue of benevolence (the desire to promote the good of others) would moderate the new ethic in practice.⁷

The Madisonian political system of “checks and balances” is representative of the most widely accepted eighteenth-century solution to the problem of social egotism. Single-minded pursuit of self-interest was deemed to be the nature of man. The secular solution was to balance individual interests through the very operation of self-interest itself. If each individual were to pursue his own self-interest vigorously, a rough equilibrium would be established. “Ambition,” Madison wrote, “must be made to counteract ambition.” Within the context of a Lockean social contract, the social egoism of individuals, or its organized expression in “faction,” could be directed toward constructive ends. As Madison expressed it, “The inference ... is that the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects:’⁸

The question of personal autonomy as opposed to religious or ethical responsibility was of prime importance to the conception of self and selfishness. The latter term seems to have been first used in 1640, and its initial use—”a carnal, selfish spirit”—suggests that it was linked to matters of bodily pleasure from the outset. The related terms “self-pollution” and “self-abuse,” synonyms for masturbation that came into use about 1628 and 1728, respectively, provide additional evidence that the sexual self was increasingly coming to be considered an ethical problem. During the early years of the eighteenth century, masturbation came to be a problem of social significance,⁹ and the corresponding assertion of the self to provide ballast for the unsteady skiff of human sexuality found expression in such terms as “self-determination” as a synonym for “free will,” which was first used in 1683, and the even more apposite “self-control,” coined by the moralist Lord Shaftesbury in 1711.¹⁰

In the sexual life of Enlightenment Europeans, the need for such control or balance was apparent in the Continental peregrinations of the erotomanic Jacques Casanova de Seingalt (1725–98) and the phenomenal sexual exploits of James Boswell (1740–95), which issued in almost incessant afflictions with gonorrhea. It was even more immediately manifest in the life and philosophic speculations of the Marquis Donatien de Sade (1740–1814), whose excesses not only asserted the right of the individual to nullify the self-interest of others (if not their very existence), but also maintained the absolute freedom of the individual even to the point of the destruction of the self through the degradation and enslavement of the will.

The Enlightenment assertion of the value of the individual and the function of the assertive self in maintaining a balance, an equilibrium in the life of man, remained important in the nineteenth century. But below this lay another layer of meaning, which revealed the intellectual distance separating the nineteenth century from the eighteenth. The problem was no longer simply a concern that the independent self develop the internal powers to control its own desires and physical responses, or moral balance within the self; it was now a question of egoism out of control, the social threat of the autonomous individual. The image of the self-sufficient individual, who owed little or nothing to society, gave rise to a literary figure, part romantic innocent and part solitary outcast, that was the dialectic focus of the cultural myth embodied in the Daniel Boone saga and the Leatherstocking Tales.

Timothy Flint’s biography of Boone was one of the essential elements in creating the vision of the Kentucky frontiersman that came to predominate in the popular mind of Jacksonian America. Boone was depicted as at once one of nature’s noblemen and an opponent of civilization. “He presents himself to us,” Flint wrote, “as a new man, the author and artificer of his own fortunes, and showing from the beginning rudiments of character, of which history has recorded no trace in his ancestors.”¹¹ But the backwoodsman as “solitary individual” has an antisocial streak, too. He has removed to the Kentucky wilderness to find a life in which “the indulgence of none but natural desires and pure affections would not be deadened by the selfishness, vanity, and fear of ridicule, that are the harvest of what is called civilized and cultivated life.”¹²

The Boone myth is part of a broader literary tradition reflecting the cultural transition from a value system emphasizing innate moral values common to all men to one based on the power of the individual will to master the passions and shape the unique moral individual. As the sense of control and power, the dynamic force of the will in organizing the personality, grew with the spread of democratic ideology and the acceleration of industrialism in the Jacksonian era, the eighteenth-century value system based on virtue passed over into the character-oriented one so characteristic of the nineteenth century. As Marvin Meyers has brilliantly demonstrated, however, Jacksonian Americans remained ambivalent about the dramatic changes their society was undergoing. They expressed their anxieties about social, economic, and cultural change in a body of nostalgic literature that emphasized the purity of the agricultural life industrialism was destroying, the temptations and galling restraints of civilization, and a sentimental longing for a more clearly defined and, in their oversimplified formulation, less demanding moral code.¹³

The anxiety generated by the new normative system based on character (the psychological fear of standing alone as the isolated, naked self) and fundamental doubts about the capacity of the individual to create the moral self in a rapidly changing world came together in the mythic concept of the frontiersman. The traditional formulation of the myth allayed fears of moral incapacity, and assuaged guilt feelings arising from the sense of having betrayed parental values, by combining character and virtue in the person of the frontiersman as culture hero.

The moral nature of the mythic Daniel Boone confirms this cultural expression. He is faced with an archetypal environment that heightens his isolation, the necessity for moral self-creation, and the consequent temptation to pride and self-absorption. He survives in the primitive world of the id because he is “a man of the kindliest nature, and of the tenderest affections.”¹⁴ In other words, he is a man of virtue. His innate moral capacity finds expression in benevolence, which serves as a check to self-interest. At the same time, however, in a world in which the self is in perilous danger of drowning in the pool of its own reflection, mere virtue is not sufficient to salvation. To overcome “the heathen rivalry and selfishness of the present generation,” the force of character, the “utmost exertion of self-possession and fortitude,” will be required.¹⁵

That preoccupation with individual “force of character” was clearly a dominant concern in nineteenth-century America. This was indicated by two key phrases, “self-culture” (which became part of American speech patterns through an address of William Ellery Channing in 1837) and “self-made man” (which ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• An Ordered Love
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraphs
• Introduction
• PART I: The True Plan of Life: Nineteenth-Century American Attitudes toward the Self and Sexuality
• PART II: Hymenius Bound: Shaker Sexuality in Ideology and Practice
• PART III: Celestial Marriage: Mormon Sexuality and Sex Roles in Ideology and Practice
• PART IV: “In the Eden of Heart-Love”: Sexuality and Sex Roles of the Oneida Community in Ideology and Practice
• PART V: Distinguishing the Church from the World: Sectarian Communitarianism and Nineteenth-Century America
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index