How did this week’s research help me come to my final research question?

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A lot of my research has helped me explore my interests and meander between topics. After reading the first Foster source I really enjoyed the style of writing and so I sought out another source from Foster entitled Free Love and Feminism. This delved deeper into how Foster viewed women in society and as part of Oneida.

I thought this would have made me focus my research question onto the issue of women and their role at Oneida but it made me fascinated with Noyes as a person and how he formulated the ideas of Oneida by analysing modern day late 19th century society.

What I got though from the second Foster article was a clear understanding of how Noyes realistically approached the issue of feminism and establishing right relations between he sexes as grounded within his times. I concluded by saying that for Noyes restoring right relations between the sexes always came after achieving religious and social revitalisation.

I also explored other sources on issues Noyes was toiling with. I looked at mutual criticism in the source entitled System of Criticism and how this almost served as a way for Noyes to react against the prevailing culture of limited disclosure. I then looked at a source from Noyes entitled Slavery and Marriage: A Dialogue and began to understand how Noyes was in stark opposition to the modern enactment of marriage thereby replacing it with a system of complex marriage and male continence.

I lastly explored religious revitalisation.I found information on this in the source Bible Communism. What I gleaned from this was that a strict adherence to the Bible was what was stopping Oneida from completely equalising the relations between the sexes.

This lead me to this research question:

Was Noyes not able to fully recommend equalising relations between the sexes because of the subtle undertones that came with Oneida adhering to the Bible?