Special love/special sex

by Victor Hawley

The recently discovered diary of an Oneida Community member written between 1876 and 1877 deals with love, aggression, jealousy, and the conflict between private desire and public good. Victor Hawley was a thirty-year-old dental assistant with a passion for collecting butterflies, who fell in love with Mary Jones, another colony member. Because of the community's unique social and sexual practices, however, the two were kept apart and denied their request to have a child. In the eyes of the community, their love was unsanctified. Instead, on the order of colony founder John Humphrey Noyes, Jones was subsequently impregnated by Noyes's son. Fogarty effectively uses the diary to illuminate with particular clarity the largely ignored darker side of the community. Thus this rare chronicle opens for radical reinterpretation the Oneida Community's plan on procreation and the central role that sexual domination played in its history. . Hawley's intense struggle to reconcile individual and com