Stirpiculture: Science‐guided Human Propagation and the Oneida Community

Abstract

Between 1869 and 1879, the communal Christian group the Oneida Community undertook a pioneering eugenics experiment called "stirpiculture" in upstate New York. Stirpiculture resulted in the planned conception, birth, and communal rearing of fifty-eight children, bred from selected members of the Oneida Community. This article concerns how the Oneida Community's unique approach to religion and science provided the framework for the creation, process, and eventual dissolution of the stirpiculture experiment. The work seeks to expand current understanding of the early history of eugenics in the United States by placing its practice more than two decades earlier than is generally considered. Additionally, this article situates the Community's leader John Humphrey Noyes as an early eugenics and social scientific thinker. Finally, the treatment provides a case study for the transitional period in mid to late nineteenth century America whereby scientific modes of epistemology were accommodated within or supplanted by theological worldviews.

FOCUS AND FLEXIBILITY: ZYGON'S PROFILE AND PRACTICE

“…What is the social role of the claim that something is “science”? In a previous issue, we had articles on eugenetics (Prince ), on claims that modern science can be found in the Qur'an (Bigliardi ), on images of science in film (Jones, ), and on the “science” in “Eastern religions” (Barua ). The last topic, science in the context of “Eastern” religions, returns in three contributions in this issue: by Jeff Wilson on research on meditation, by Oliver Zambon and Thomas Aechtner on ambiguities about evolution and creationism in the ISKCON (Hare Krishna) movement, and by Renny Thomas and Robert M. Geraci on religious rituals in the Indian Institute of Science.…”

Mazdaznan, Eugenics and the Future of the “White Race”

“…One example of a movement founded before Mazdaznan was the Oneida Community, established near Oneida, New York, in 1848 under the leadership of John Humphrey Noyes. In the case of Oneida, the doctrine of "stirpiculture", the reproduction of certain types deemed superior, and the role assigned to women in this process were concerns that originated in the 1860s and transitioned into eugenics in the first decades of the twentieth century (Prince, 2017). Noyes, through his theory of "companionate marriage", combined the ideas of Darwin, Charles Lyell, Plato, and Galton within a Christian worldview, arguing that the community must actively strive for perfection.…”