Continence_ (the name given to _coitus
reservatus_ in the community), written in 1872 by the founder,
John Humphrey Noyes. The practice is based, he says, on the fact
that sexual intercourse consists of two acts, a social and a
propagative, and that if propagation is to be scientific there
must be no confusion of these two acts, and procreation must
never be involuntary. It was in 1844, he states, that this idea
occurred to him as a result of a resolve to abstain from sexual
intercourse in consequence of his wife's delicate health and
inability to bear healthy children, and in his own case he found
the practice "a great deliverance. It made a happy household." He
points out that the chief members of the Oneida community
"belonged to the most respectable families in Vermont, had been
educated in the best schools of New England morality and
refinement, and were, by the ordinary standards, irreproachable
in their conduct so far as sexual matters are concerned, till
they deliberately commenced, in 1846, the experiment of a new
state of society, on principles which they had been long maturing
and were prepared to defend before the World." In relation to
male continence, therefore, Noyes thought the community might
fairly be considered "the Committee of Providence to test its
value in actual life." He states that a careful medical
comparison of the statistics of the community had shown that the
rate of nervous disease in the community was considerably below
the average outside, and that only two cases of nervous disorder
had occurred which could be traced with any probability to a
misuse of male continence. This has been confirmed by Van de
Warker, who studied forty-two women of the community without
finding any undue prevalence of reproductive diseases, nor could
he find any diseased condition attributable to the sexual habits
of the community (cf. C. Reed, _Text-Book of Gynecology_, 1901,
p. 9).

Noyes believed that "male continence" had never previously been a
definitely recognized practice based on theory, though there
might have been occasional approximation to it. This is probably
true if the coitus is _reservatus_ in the full sense, with
complete absence of emission. Prolonged coitus, however,
permitting the woman to have orgasm more than once, while the man
has none