The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch.

Utopians don't say, 'The world's corrupt, women make less money, people of color are oppressed at every turn.' You don't list the problems of the world; you describe a world in which those things aren't the case. The critique is implicit and as a result it's kind of a positive critique. You're not listing what's bad, but rather what would be good - you're oriented toward this positive vision.

One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there.

There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.

The biggest names in the Transcendentalist literary circle visited the community regularly, and supported it, but they couldn't live there happily. Hawthorne [who was briefly a resident] left for reasons I'm sure make sense to you; he couldn't get enough writing done in a house full of people playing music, and arguing. It was too busy.

The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.

They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer would have been, 'In the new world women will have total equality, so lets spend our energy creating that whole new world.' And to their credit, the women at Oneida probably had far greater practical equality than what any of the women gathered at Seneca Falls experienced in their lifetimes.