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About 100 reform communities were established in the decades before the Civil War. Historians call them “utopian” after Thomas More’s sixteenth-century novel Utopia, an outline of a perfect society. (the word has also come to imply that such plans are impractical and impossible to realize.) These communities differed greatly in structure and motivation. Some were subject to the iron discipline of a single leader, while others operated in a democratic fashion. Most arose from religious conviction, but others were inspired by the desire to counteract the social and economic changes set in motion by the market revolution. Nearly all the communities set out to reorganize society on a cooperative basis, hoping to restore social harmony to a world of excessive individualism and to narrow the widening gap between rich and poor. Through their efforts, the words “socialism” and “communism,” meaning a social organization in which productive property is owned by the community rather than private individuals, entered the language of politics. Most utopian communities also tried to find substitutes for conventional gender relations and marriage patterns. Some prohibited sexual relations between men and women altogether; others allowed them to change partners at will. But nearly all insisted that the abolition of private property must be accompanied by an end to men’s “property” in women. The most successful utopian religious community, the Shakers, also had a significant impact on the outside world. At their peak during the 1840s, cooperative Shaker settlements, which stretched from Maine to Kentucky, included more than 5,000 members. The Shakers were founded in the late eighteenth century by Mother Ann Lee, the daughter of an English blacksmith, who became a religious preacher and claimed that Christ had directed her to emigrate with her followers to America. The first Shaker community was established in upstate New York in 1787. God, the Shakers believed, had a “dual” personality, both male and female, and thus the two sexes were spiritually equal. Their work was deemed equally important (although each man was assigned a “sister” to take care of his washing and sewing). “Virgin purity” formed a pillar of the Shakers’ faith. They completely abandoned traditional family life. Men and women lived in separately large dormitories and ate in communal dining rooms. Their numbers grew by attracting converts and adopting children from orphanages, rather than through natural increase. Numerous outsiders visited Shaker communities to observe the religious services that gave the group its name, in which men and women, separated by sex, engaged in frenzied dancing. Although they rejected the individual accumulation of private property, the Shakers proved remarkably successful economically. They were among the first to market vegetable and flower seeds and herbal medicines commercially and to breed cattle for profit. Their beautifully crafted furniture is still widely admired today. Another influential and controversial community was Oneida, founded in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes, the Vermont-born son of a U.S. congressman. Noyes took the revivalists’ message that man could achieve moral perfection to an atypical extreme. He preached that he and his followers had become so perfect that they had achieved a state of complete “purity of heart,” or sinlessness. In 1836, Noyes and his disciples formed a small community in Putney, Vermont. Like the Shakers, Noyes did away with private property and abandoned traditional marriage. But in contrast to Shaker celibacy, he taught that all members of the community formed a single “holy family” of equals. The community became notorious for what Noyes called “complex marriage,” whereby any man could propose sexual relations to any woman, who had the right to reject or accept his invitation, which would then be registered in a public record book. The great danger was “exclusive affections” which Noyes felt destroyed social harmony. After being indicted for adultery by local officials, Noyes in 1848 moved his community to Oneida, where it survived until 1881. Oneida was an extremely dictatorial environment. To become a member of the community, one had to demonstrate command of Noyes’s religious teachings and live according to his rules. Members carefully observed each other’s conduct and publicly criticized those who violated Noyes’s regulations. By the 1860s, a committee was even determining which couples would be permitted to have children—an early example of “eugenics,” as the effort to improve the human race by regulating reproduction came to be known. To outside observers, utopian communities like Oneida seemed a case of “voluntary slavery.” But because of their members’ selfless devotion to the teachings and rules laid down by their leader, spiritually oriented communities often achieved remarkable longevity. The Shakers survived well into the twentieth century. Communities with a more worldly orientation tended to be beset by internal divisions and therefore lasted much shorter periods. In 1841, New England transcendentalists established Brook Farm not far from Boston, where they hoped to demonstrate that manual and intellectual labor could coexist harmoniously. They modeled the community in part on the ideas of the French social reformer Charles Fourier, who envisioned communal living and working arrangements, while retaining private property. Fourier’s blueprint for “phalanxes,” as he called his settlements, planned everything to the last detail, from the number of residents (2,000) to how much income would be generated by charging admission to sightseers. With leisure time devoted to music, dancing, dramatic readings, and intellectual discussion, Brook Farm was like an exciting miniature university. But it attracted mostly writers, teachers, and ministers, some of whom disliked farm labor. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a resident for a time, complained about having to shovel manure. Brook Farm disbanded after a few years. The most important secular communitarian (meaning a person who plans or lives in a cooperative community) was Robert Owen, a British factory owner. Appalled by the degradation of workers in the early industrial revolution, Owen created a model factory village at New Lanark, Scotland, which combined strict rules of work discipline with comfortable housing and free public education. Around 1815, its 1,500 employees made New Lanark the largest center of cotton manufacturing in the world. Convinced that the “rich and the poor, the governors and the governed, have really but one interest,” Owen promoted communitarianism as a peaceful means of ensuring that workers received the full value of their labor. In 1824, he purchased the Harmony community in Indiana—originally founded by the German Protestant religious leader George Rapp, who had emigrated with his followers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here, Owen established New Harmony, where he hoped to create a “new moral world.” In Owen’s scheme, children would be removed at an early age from the care of their parents to be educated in schools where they would subordinate individual ambition to the common good. Owen also defended women’s rights, especially access to education and the right to divorce. However, a harmonious society eluded the people of New Harmony. They squabbled about everything from the community’s constitution to the distribution of property. Owen’s settlement survived for only a few years, but it strongly influenced the labor movement, educational reformers, and women’s rights advocates.