Sex and Sects PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Sex and Sects PDF full book. Access full book title Sex and Sects by Stewart Davenport. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Stewart Davenport
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813947073
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 486
Get Book Here
Book Description
With a revolution behind them, a continent before them, and the First Amendment protecting them, religio-sexual pioneers in antebellum America were free to strike out on their own, breaking with the orthodoxies of the past. Shakers followed the ascetic path; Oneida Perfectionists accepted sex as a gift from God; and Mormons redefined marriage in light of new religious revelations that also redefined God, humankind, spirit, and matter. Sex became a powerful way for each group to reinforce their sectarian identity as strangers in a strange land. Sex and Sects tells the story of these three religiously inspired sexual innovations in America: the celibate lifestyle of the Shakers, the Oneida Community’s system of controlled polyamory, and plural marriage as practiced by the Mormons. Stewart Davenport analyzes why these bold experiments rose and largely fell over the course of the nineteenth century within the confines of the new American republic. Moving beyond a social-scientific lens, Davenport traces for the first time their fascinating shared trajectory as they emerged, struggled, institutionalized, and declined in tandem—and sheds historical light on the way in which Americans have discussed, contested, and redefined the institutions of marriage and family both in our private lives and in the public realm.
Author: Ellen Wayland-Smith
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250043107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319
Get Book Here
Book Description
A fascinating and unusual chapter in American history about a religious community that held radical notions of equality, sex, and religion---only to transform itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a successful silverware company and a model of buttoned-down corporate propriety. In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were looking for an alternative to the Puritanism that had been the foundation of the new country. Amid the fervor of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, John Humphrey Noyes, a spirited but socially awkward young man, attracted a group of devoted followers with his fiery sermons about creating Jesus’ millennial kingdom here on Earth. Noyes established a revolutionary community in rural New York centered around achieving a life free of sin through God’s grace, while also espousing equality of the sexes and “complex marriage,” a system of free love where sexual relations with multiple partners was encouraged. Noyes’s belief in the perfectibility of human nature eventually inspired him to institute a program of eugenics, known as stirpiculture, that resulted in a new generation of Oneidans who, when the Community disbanded in 1880, sought to exorcise the ghost of their fathers’ disreputable sexual theories. Converted into a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, would go on to become one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of silverware, and their brand a coveted mark of middle-class respectability in pre- and post-WWII America. Told by a descendant of one of the Community’s original families, Ellen Wayland-Smith's Oneida is a captivating story that straddles two centuries to reveal how a radical, free-love sect, turning its back on its own ideals, transformed into a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream.
Author: George Wallingford Noyes
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026706
Category : Alternative lifestyles
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Get Book Here
Book Description
The "free love" Oneida Community, founded in New York state during the turbulent decades before the Civil War, practiced an extraordinary system of "complex marriage" as part of its sustained experiment in creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. For more than thirty years, two hundred adult members considered themselves heterosexually married to the entire community rather than to a single monogamous partner. Free Love in Utopia provides the first in-depth account of how complex marriage was introduced among previously monogamous or single Oneida Community members. Bringing together vivid, firsthand writings by members of the community--including personal correspondence, memoranda on spiritual and material concerns, and official pronouncements--this volume portrays daily life in Oneida and the deep religious commitment that permeated every aspect of it. It also presents a complex portrait of the community's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, who demanded not only complete religious loyalty from his followers but also minute control over their sexual lives. It recounts the formidable legal suits faced by the community--one of which almost forced it to disband in 1852--and the critical behind-the-scenes work of Noyes's second-in-command, John L. Miller. Most important, Free Love in Utopia describes in detail how Oneida's "enlarged family" was created and how its unorthodox practices affected its members. Key selections from a large collection of primary documents detailing Oneida's early years were compiled by George Wallingford Noyes, nephew of the founder. The present volume, astutely edited and introduced by noted communitarian scholar Lawrence Foster, marks the first publication of G. W. Noyes's remarkable manuscript, excerpted from the irreplaceable original documents that were deliberately burned after his death. The volume also reproduces Oneida's First Annual Report, which contains the sexual manifesto that underlay the community.
Author: Eva Illouz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917995
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Get Book Here
Book Description
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance—from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses—is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
Author: Briallen Hopper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1632868792
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
A sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice. Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine. I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others' love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers. Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honors the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary--friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back. She draws from personal experience, sharing stories about her loving but combative family, the fiercely independent Emerson scholar who pushed her away, and the friends who have become her invented or found family; pop culture touchstones like the Women's March, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and the timeless series Cheers; and the work of writers like Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick like you've never seen it!). Hard to Love pays homage and attention to unlikely friends and lovers both real and fictional. It is a series of love letters to the meaningful, if underappreciated, forms of intimacy and community that are tricky, tangled, and tough, but ultimately sustaining.
Author: Erik Reece
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374710759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book Here
Book Description
For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly
Author: Stewart Davenport
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813947073
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 486
Get Book Here
Book Description
With a revolution behind them, a continent before them, and the First Amendment protecting them, religio-sexual pioneers in antebellum America were free to strike out on their own, breaking with the orthodoxies of the past. Shakers followed the ascetic path; Oneida Perfectionists accepted sex as a gift from God; and Mormons redefined marriage in light of new religious revelations that also redefined God, humankind, spirit, and matter. Sex became a powerful way for each group to reinforce their sectarian identity as strangers in a strange land. Sex and Sects tells the story of these three religiously inspired sexual innovations in America: the celibate lifestyle of the Shakers, the Oneida Community’s system of controlled polyamory, and plural marriage as practiced by the Mormons. Stewart Davenport analyzes why these bold experiments rose and largely fell over the course of the nineteenth century within the confines of the new American republic. Moving beyond a social-scientific lens, Davenport traces for the first time their fascinating shared trajectory as they emerged, struggled, institutionalized, and declined in tandem—and sheds historical light on the way in which Americans have discussed, contested, and redefined the institutions of marriage and family both in our private lives and in the public realm.
Author: Anthony Wonderley
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712446
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Get Book Here
Book Description
Oneida Utopia is a fresh and holistic treatment of a long-standing social experiment born of revival fervor and communitarian enthusiasm. The Oneida Community of upstate New York was dedicated to living as one family and to the sharing of all property, work, and love. Anthony Wonderley is a sensitive guide to the things and settings of Oneida life from its basis in John H. Noyes’s complicated theology, through experiments in free love and gender equality, to the moment when the commune transformed itself into an industrial enterprise based on the production of silverware. Rather than drawing a sharp boundary between spiritual concerns and worldly matters, Wonderley argues that commune and company together comprise a century-long narrative of economic success, innovative thinking, and abiding concern for the welfare of others. Oneida Utopia seamlessly combines the evidence of social life and intellectual endeavor with the testimony of built environment and material culture. Wonderley shares with readers his intimate knowledge of evidence from the Oneida Community: maps and photographs, quilts and furniture, domestic objects and industrial products, and the biggest artifact of all, their communal home. Wonderley also takes a novel approach to the thought of the commune’s founder, examining individually and in context Noyes’s reactions to interests and passions of the day, including revivalism, millennialism, utopianism, and spiritualism.
Author: Nyle DiMarco
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063062380
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Get Book Here
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A heartfelt and inspiring memoir and celebration of Deaf culture by Nyle DiMarco, actor, producer, two-time reality show winner, and cultural icon of the international Deaf community Before becoming the actor, producer, advocate, and model that people know today, Nyle DiMarco was half of a pair of Deaf twins born to a multi-generational Deaf family in Queens, New York. At the hospital one day after he was born, Nyle “failed” his first test—a hearing test—to the joy and excitement of his parents. In this engrossing memoir, Nyle shares stories, both heartbreaking and humorous, of what it means to navigate a world built for hearing people. From growing up in a rough-and-tumble childhood in Queens with his big and loving Italian-American family to where he is now, Nyle has always been driven to explore beyond the boundaries given him. A college math major and athlete at Gallaudet—the famed university for the Deaf in Washington, DC—Nyle was drawn as a young man to acting, and dove headfirst into the reality show competitions America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars—ultimately winning both competitions. Deaf Utopia is more than a memoir, it is a cultural anthem—a proud and defiant song of Deaf culture and a love letter to American Sign Language, Nyle’s primary language. Through his stories and those of his Deaf brothers, parents, and grandparents, Nyle opens many windows into the Deaf experience. Deaf Utopia is intimate, suspenseful, hilarious, eye-opening, and smart—both a memoir and a celebration of what makes Deaf culture unique and beautiful.
Author: Martin Schoenhals
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138549494
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 269
Get Book Here
Book Description
Work, Love, and Learning in Utopiabreathes new life into the age-old human preoccupation with how to create a happier society. With a fascinating mix of research from cross-cultural psychology, macro history, and evolutionary biology, the book gives new credibility to the advocacy of radical equality. The author, a psychological anthropologist, argues that the negative emotions of sadness, anger, and fear evolved in tandem with hierarchy, while happiness evolved separately and in connection to prosociality and compassion. The book covers a wide range of human concerns, from economics and education, to media and communication, to gender and sexuality. It breaks new boundaries with its scope, arguing that equality of love is as important and possible as is economic equality. Its argument is provocative yet practical, and each chapter ends with concrete proposals that invite dialogue with any student of policy. Written in an easily accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever puzzled over how our social world could be remade. In particular, it will be very useful to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. /P> Written in an easily accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever puzzled over how our social world could be remade. In particular, it will be very useful to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
Author: Russel Fox
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450227406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
John Humphrey Noyes founded the most revolutionary of all communal experiments in the nineteenth century and in American history the Oneida Community. As the selfordained Father of his utopian followers for thirty years, Noyes collectivized labor in the Communitys industries and abolished private property on the grounds of its Mansion House at Oneida, New York. But the defrocked preacher of Christian Perfectionism went still further: not only property, but spouses, were to be held in common in the Noyesian vision of heaven on earth. In the Communitys newspapers, including THE AMERICAN SOCIALIST and THE CIRCULAR, Noyes proclaimed that the Oneida system of Complex Marriage had eradicated the subjugation of women, the tyranny of monogamous marriage, and the burden of unwanted children. Finally, Noyes came to believe that his system made possible the betterment of human stock through a program of selective mating. Race Culture or, as Noyes eventually termed it, Stirpiculture, would become the utopian Communitys ultimate experiment: the application of scientific breeding to human beings.
