“Her Faults are Decided and Well Known”: Mutual Criticism as a Means to Perfection in the Oneida Community

Estrella Salgado, WPAMC ’25

Holding a slim book aloft, I read aloud, “E. is remarkably outspoken and impulsive, and so her  faults are decided and well known. She is a fine specimen of the vital temperament, has great  exuberance of life and animal spirits—would live on laughing and frolic—is ardent in her  affections, and lively in her antipathies.”¹

“Is this a horoscope?” joked our professor from the driver’s seat. I did feel a kinship with this  nineteenth-century Miss E., but it was something altogether more exciting—an excerpt from  Mutual Criticism, an 1876 publication from the Office of the American Socialist, located in Oneida, New York. 

I had been fortunate to purchase the book in that very town. About eighteen hours earlier, our  vans had pulled up to the Oneida Community Mansion House on—abandoning a fear of  clichés—a dark and stormy night. Perhaps due to my “vital temperament,” I was thrilled by the dramatic opportunity for place-based education. After setting my luggage in the guest room, I slipped out to explore the sprawling home where John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) once led a radical religious experiment.

Wandering down the halls, I made my way through the library, a cabinet of curiosities, a community hall, and a sitting room. Here, Noyes would have pontificated on his theory that Christ had already returned in 70 A.D., thus making it possible to achieve Christian perfectionism—a life free of sin. For example, in Noyes’ view, “free-love, or complex marriage, combined with community of property, would annihilate the very sources of adultery,  whoredom, and all sexual abuse.” Complex marriage was strictly governed, and Community members had to ask for permission from an elder to engage in two-hour sexual “interviews.”² Male continence—the repression of ejaculation—was expected, and repeated pairings were discouraged.

In this distinctive Community, mutual criticism was a critical regulatory mechanism. Noyes  cited Romans 15:14, “I am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye are full of goodness, filled  with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another,” in his justification of this “organized  system of judgement and truth-telling.” In small circles, members like Miss E. were called out by the Community while reminded that “Evil spirits are always in a hurry and will not wait to be tested; good spirits, on the contrary, love the judgment.”³

The results of a session of mutual criticism had real bearing on Community members’ lives. As  psychologists Murray Levine and Barbara Benedict Bunker explained, “To be sexually desirable as a partner, members had to participate in the life of the community, share its values, and strive to meet its ideals.” Those who cultivated “a manly spirit” in “the manure of patience” for accepting criticism may have even been selected for stirpiculture, Noyes’ eugenics experiment —a rare scenario in the Community where male orgasm was permitted.⁴

As we continued the road trip, our van had a grand time reading more of the transcripts from  Mutual Criticism. While there was humor in the cutting language of centuries past, there was also something deeply touching about getting to know, for just a few paragraphs each, the contours of members’ personalities. Their recorded strengths and flaws shed light onto why  they might have chosen to enter Oneida—for contemporary passersby, a beautiful Italianate and Gothic Revival home, but for members of the Community, a gateway to Heaven.

1. John Humphrey Noyes, with an introduction by Murray Levine and Barbara Benedict Bunker, Mutual Criticism (Syracuse University Press, 1975), 53. ↩︎
2. John Humphrey Noyes, Slavery and Marriage: A Dialogue (1850), 12-13; William T. La Moy and George Edward Cragin, “Two Documents Detailing the Oneida Community’s Practice of Complex Marriage,” The New England Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2012): 125. ↩︎
3. Noyes Mutual Criticism, 26, 60. ↩︎
4. Noyes, Mutual Criticism, xv, 37-38. ↩︎