stirpiculture

Also disruptive was the "stirpiculture" or eugenics experiment, under which only certain couples were approved to have children.

In his book, The Physiology of Love: A Study in Stirpiculture, he describes how human temperament is shaped by bone structure and complexion, with grave physiological consequences.

Heavily influenced if not written entirely by Andrews, the speech explained "Stirpiculture," his term for the concept of scientific breeding applied to humans.

He allowed the community to reproduce naturally, but along strictly eugenic lines, what he called 'stirpiculture'.

Noyes, a nephew of the founder, was himself an off-spring of the community's stirpiculture experiment and his observations on his identity and childhood would have been invaluable.

In the mid-nineteenth-century utopian community of Oneida in upstate New York, it was women more than men who eagerly volunteered for leader John Humphrey Noyes's proto-eugenic experiments in breeding better children -- an undertaking he likened to plant breeding and called "human stirpiculture." During the heyday of the American eugenics movement, as historian Wendy Kline has found, women's reform organizations were some of the most enthusiastic lobbyists for compulsory state sterilization laws meant to combat the menace of the so-called feebleminded.

"I think we can all take hold in unity for the pursuit of truth in the great circle which embraces Spiritualism, Christianity, Communism, stirpiculture and science of every kind" said the new leader.