Communes are communities formed by groups of people who share certain values. Often those values include cooperation in working, growing food, cooking, cleaning, and child rearing. Sometimes the groups develop new and often more liberating roles for women. Some communes even experimented with new sexual arrangements between men and women. American culture has often valued individualism over communal effort, and many people started communes as an alternative to the dominant values of their day. Communes have existed in many societies. Among the first communes in the United States were those started by the Shakers and the Oneidas in the mid-nineteenth century. Both groups had strong religious convictions, although very different ones.

Communes enjoyed a resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s during the youth counterculture movement. Then, groups of young people established utopian communes (their idea of the ideal community) as alternatives to the dominant values of the United...