Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  In deriving such theologically promiscuous claims from the Egyptian Theatre exhibition, Craddock knew that she was very likely to damage her own womanly reputation. To be above moral reproach, as a single woman, she was expected to have remained chaste through the years and to be without firsthand sexual knowledge. Certainly all her clever talk about phallic symbols and ancient sex worship was bad enough, but how had she gained so much familiarity with the “supreme moments” of sexual ecstasy, “this final quivering of passion”? Why was she able to comment so knowingly on the erotic mastery of the Cairo Street performers? “The Danse du Ventre,” she insisted in a manner that served only to confirm such suspicions, “trains the muscles of the woman in the endurance desirable in the wife . . . and therefore increases her capacity, not only for receiving, but also for conferring pleasure.” Even her friends and admirers had to admit that Craddock often did herself no favors in getting carried away with her own candor.31

  There were certainly modest ways of defending the Danse du Ventre, but Craddock’s approach was not one of them. The journalist Kate Field claimed such abdominal gyrations would make an excellent cure for American invalidism and would be a good gymnastic training for giving birth. The performer Loie Fuller, already famous for her serpentine skirt dances, made instead a purely aesthetic appeal, arguing that belly dancing appeared indecent only to those who lost sight of its artistic grace and beauty. “People of that sort,” she said, would be scandalized by the Venus de Milo or would find “something suggestive” in a dainty minuet. Craddock’s argument, by contrast, lacked even the veneer of well-tempered discretion and good taste. She seemed to know far too much about sex, especially for an unwed woman associated with boisterous liberals and freethinkers.32

  Craddock had a rationale for this sexual knowledge that sounded tame and respectable enough, and yet this was precisely where her account became even more fantastic, if not hallucinatory: “I would say that I speak from the standpoint of a wife,” she wrote in a “little paragraph” that she added to her Danse du Ventre essay when she began circulating it in typescript to friends and colleagues in late 1893, only to drop the point when she printed the revised edition in 1897. There was, though, a small problem with that conjugal explanation: Craddock had never been married in any conventional civic, religious, or, for that matter, terrestrial sense. “My husband,” she reported, “is in the world beyond the grave, and had been for many years previous to our union, which took place in October, 1892.” Being curious about spiritualism and psychical research was perfectly common among liberals and agnostics, but there was no way for Craddock to make this claim about a heavenly marriage anything but a bombshell. “Let the dead marry the dead,” freethinker George Macdonald scoffed at Craddock in an editorial in December 1893. He suggested that she find herself a real husband in order to put an end to a fantasy worthy only of a medieval convent, not modern America.33

  Before late 1893, when she revealed that she had an angelic husband, Craddock had never had her sanity questioned; after that, it would never go unquestioned. She had been well aware that this fantastic conjugal assertion would raise serious doubts about her mental state. But, as she explained in that “little paragraph” attached to her limited-circulation typescript, the relevant question was not so much the source but the content of her experience. Hallucination or not, she now saw marriage and sexuality differently:How far the reader may value my testimony as being the result of my personal experience, he will of course decide according to his bias for or against the possibility of communication with our deceased friends beyond the grave. However, whether my psychical experience be a fact or an hallucination, I can truthfully say that I have gained from it a knowledge of sex relations which many years of reading and discussions with other people never brought me.

  In a heavily Christian culture, it would have been one thing, of course, for Craddock to describe herself as a bride of Christ, to have taken Jesus as her husband, and to have surrendered herself—body and soul—to him. Here was another kind of spiritual betrothal, a very different sort of conjugal tie to an angelic specter, an experience that allowed her to speak openly and authoritatively about the relationship between religion and sex.34

  That her angelic intimacies marked her, in legal and medical terms, as an insane person was not an accusation that Craddock ever took lying down on a couch. Her mother viewed the whole Danse du Ventre episode as a sure sign that her daughter had “gone crazy” and quickly enlisted two physicians in an effort to commit her to a hospital for the insane. That plot initially failed, and Craddock simply scoffed when one of the doctors reported: “Had that essay been written by a man, by a physician or by any other scientist (and the paragraph about the spirit husband omitted) it would have been alright; but coming from an unmarried woman, neither a physician or a scientist, and with that claim of a spirit husband, there is no explanation possible but (1) illicit experience, which is denied by all who know her, or (2) insanity.” As Craddock understood the physician’s logic, her “worst offense” seemed to be “that, as a woman, I was out of my province in openly preaching marital reform” and thus needed to be confined in an asylum “until I should recant my heresy.”35

  Whether or not Craddock’s religious experiences proved her a madwoman, they certainly changed the course of her life work and transformed her reputation. Her religious dreams allowed clinicians to stamp her as a delusional nymphomaniac and would eventually make her a case history in psychoanalytic theorizing about the sexual origins of religion. But, her fantasies also emboldened her to make marriage reform the substance of her labors and offered her the clarity of vision to challenge skeptical physicians, prosecuting attorneys, postal inspectors, and vice crusaders as they sought to suppress her teachings. Ida Craddock’s legacy, for better or for worse, would be irrevocably joined to a private, ghostly romance.

  CRADDOCK HAD BEEN taken aback when Comstock started whistling the music of “the Koochy-Koochy Dance” as he prepared to arrest her in February 1902, but was it any wonder that he seemed, just then, to be meditating on belly dancing? For the better part of a decade Craddock had been performing her own dangerous and increasingly scandalous dance, riling moral watchdogs across the country. In the process she had moved back and forth between courtroom and asylum, visionary excess and restrained secularism, madness and rationality, spirituality and sexuality. Working along the intensely policed borders of obscenity and free speech as well as blasphemy and religious liberty, Craddock had become in the eyes of her opponents the very embodiment of the lewd and the sacrilegious. To Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Craddock’s literary exhibition had proven more abominable than the World Fair’s Danse du Ventre had ever been. “ Vile books and papers are branding-irons heated in the fires of hell,” Comstock fumed, “and used by Satan to sear the highest life of the soul.” Few influences were as diabolical as “EVIL READING,” and Craddock had proven a particularly recalcitrant purveyor of such polluting materials. She was, in Comstock’s view, one of “the devil’s sharpshooters”; she had to be stopped once and for all. The fragile and threatened innocence of America’s youth demanded it.36

  The more that Comstock reviled Craddock, the more useful her case became for defenders of civil and religious liberties. How, she wanted to know, could Comstock deprive her of the constitutional guarantees to freedom of religion, speech, and expression? Had not his censorship campaign overreached its mark and endangered fundamental American liberties? Craddock and her backers remained incredulous that Comstock possessed the legal authority to close down her educational enterprise and prevent people from receiving frank instruction about the sexual functions of their own bodies. Hell, he had not just seized “the printing-press of the man who printed my pamphlets,” Craddock vented; he had even confiscated “my type-writer . . . as contraband.” Would this crackdown ever let up? “In this fight, I stand for the right of the common people to sexual enlightenment, in print, sent through
the mails to whomsoever wishes it, without molestation by Anthony Comstock or anybody else,” Craddock vowed.37

  A few years earlier when facing federal trial in Philadelphia, Craddock had written physician Edward Bond Foote, a leading birth-control and free-speech advocate, to underline her all-out commitment to their shared work: “I would lay down my life for the cause of sex reform,” she had pledged, “but I don’t want to be swept away, a useless sacrifice. I want to make a breach in the enemy’s lines before I pass in my checks.” She had experienced few moments of peace in the four years since that indictment in Philadelphia, and so by the time Comstock and his agents came knocking at her New York apartment in early 1902, enough was enough. “Use me as a battering-ram against Comstock,” she now exhorted her latest lawyer, Hugh Pentecost. “Pour out my life like water, relentlessly, in this fight.” The slamming of Comstock had already begun, but the spilling out of her life, in blood, still seemed unnecessary and far from inevitable.38

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not an Infidel, But a Freethinker and a Scholar

  CRADDOCK HAD ADVANCED MANY PECULIAR claims in her slim treatise on belly dancing, but perhaps the most outrageous was her self-presentation as “a student of Phallic antiquities.” Not that the knowledge she gained from that research sounded wildly surprising: “The serpent is a well-known Phallic symbol of the male organ,” she casually remarked; or, the dancer’s castanets, “a symbol recognizable by any Phallic student,” typified female passion. The astonishing part was that she dared to represent herself as an expert on this subject at all. Since the end of the eighteenth century, a good number of freethinkers had seen such fertility symbolism as a rich lode to mine for anticlerical nuggets, but no woman had ever joined this particular fraternity of gentlemanly dilettantes and antiquarians. That exclusion seemed only to energize Craddock. As she informed the leader of the Manhattan Liberal Club in late 1893 in hopes of lining up a public lecture before that society, “I have given the subject of folklore in its reference to Christian theology considerable study for a number of years past; and I can say, without egotism, that this study has qualified me to speak with some authority as a specialist on Phallic Worship.”1

  In offering her services as a public lecturer to the Manhattan Liberal Club, Craddock had picked her potential audience wisely—and a little audaciously. That organization, inaugurated in 1869, provided a weekly forum dedicated to the discussion of new ideas, whether in science, religion, or politics. It was, one enthusiast remarked, New York’s preeminent gathering place for “intellectual athletes”: “On its platform were the most brilliant thinkers, scholars, writers, orators, poets, in the city.” Not at all afraid of controversy, the club embraced “the choice revolutionary spirits of the day”; the anarchist Emma Goldman, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and the civil-liberties lawyer Thaddeus B. Wakeman all congregated there.2

  The president of the Manhattan Liberal Club did not immediately leap at Craddock’s offer. Hesitating, he pointed her to the Brooklyn Philosophical Association and the Newark Liberal League instead. Perhaps the recent Danse du Ventre episode, along with her proposed lecture topic, made her sound too eccentric and high risk even for this “congregation of ‘cranks’ of the first order.” Craddock strongly emphasized, though, that she very much shared the club’s liberal outlook and was right now in the thick of the intellectual fray. “I have been writing up a book on the Origin of the Devil, from a folklore standpoint,” she explained, “which I trust will strike some telling blows in behalf of Freethought.” In other words, she had trained her attention on scholarly pursuits and was now ready to share the results of her research on the public lecture circuit. For a fee of ten dollars, she would hold forth on the history of phallic worship and its relevance for marriage reform.3

  Craddock’s explanation worked. She maneuvered her way onto the lecture platform of the Manhattan Liberal Club for a Friday evening the next February. She titled her address “Survivals of Sex Worship in Christianity and in Paganism,” and the announced lecture certainly caught people’s notice. Held in the German Masonic Temple on East Fifteenth Street, the meeting was crowded, a mixed audience with “at least thirty women” on hand. At the close of Craddock’s lecture, the presiding moderator emphasized that the subject was delicate and urged respectful caution in the customary discussion period.

  The moderator’s plea went completely unheeded. One woman, an officer of the club, quickly “marched to the front, flushed and excited,” and moved that the meeting immediately adjourn “for the sake of the good name of the Liberal Club.” Craddock’s paper, she claimed, was indecent and improper; it should never have been presented to the group and was certainly unfit to be discussed. “We are all ladies and gentlemen here, and it is not for us to listen to any talk of this sort,” she argued, invoking the demands of class-based decorum. In its report on the evening—“A Very Shocking Time: Miss Craddock’s Talk Caused Blushes”—the New York World concurred. The paper reminded its readers of Craddock’s outlandish defense of the Danse du Ventre the previous summer and declared this latest lecture “unprintable.”4

  The motion to adjourn provoked much confusion within the ranks of the Manhattan Liberal Club, a ruckus of name-calling and finger-pointing, but the consensus was nonetheless to go forward with the discussion. “It is fair to say that no such debate ever before followed a lecture delivered before a mixed audience in this town,” the World concluded. Despite the proposed bow to propriety, the club had again fulfilled its promise to serve as an unusually free platform—one that was open even to a lecturer as heterodox as Craddock. The group proudly claimed that in its twenty-five-year history only one speaker had ever been blackballed, a Protestant minister who had violated “the hearty cooperative respect” that formed a cornerstone of the group’s intellectual give-and-take. Craddock did not become a second outcast, but she certainly pushed at the club’s limits. Even in this liberal hotbed, the very notion of a woman lecturing on the history of sex worship tested the underlying bounds of decency and order. She had eluded the muzzle of premature adjournment, but she had hardly won everyone over. Freethinker George Macdonald, a prominent editor in these intellectual circles, offered her only a sardonic compliment: “An opportunity as Miss Craddock’s lecture affords cannot be lost, I fear, without deplorably lessening the sum total of human cussedness.”5

  Despite the storm at the Manhattan Liberal Club, a squall was not inevitable when Craddock took the platform. The next Sunday she lectured on the same subject at the Brooklyn Philosophical Association, and things reportedly went fine. Her “plea for more enlightenment on sexual matters,” heard by a “most attentive” audience, caused no hubbub there. Things had gone even better a couple of months earlier when she appeared at the Ladies’ Liberal League of Philadelphia. Her discourse on “Survivals of Sex Worship” filled the house, even on a very rainy night, and met with warm applause and lively discussion. “Some of the members expressed themselves as considering it one of the best lectures ever given before them,” Craddock proudly reported.6

  The Ladies’ Liberal League, anything but matronly, was the perfect venue for Craddock to present her unorthodox social and religious views. Under the inspiration of the freethinker Voltairine de Cleyre, this rebellious group of Philadelphia women had set up shop for themselves in 1892 apart from their gentlemanly compatriots in the Friendship Liberal League. Disdaining the limited role of a female auxiliary, the Ladies’ Liberal League served as a platform for radical lecturers, especially on women’s rights and the “sex question.” “We know,” de Cleyre enticed, “that there is forbidden fruit waiting to be gathered, the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and we propose to put up a step-ladder before every get-at-able apple and help ourselves and others to it.” Craddock’s knowledge of the sexual history of religion was among the most forbidden—evocative, indeed, of the original illicit apple. De Cleyre and company were not going to miss the opportunity to take a bite.7

  De Cleyre c
onsidered the lecture programs at the Ladies’ Liberal League splendid successes. Among the more compelling series was one that involved pioneering women in the fields of law, journalism, and medicine, all of whom had broken educational and professional barriers to get to where they were. Craddock’s inclusion on the league’s platform served a parallel purpose. “The scholarly Miss Craddock,” de Cleyre explained, “has made deep researches into ancient symbolism” as part of her turn to spiritualism and sex reform. Other “thin-shelled” liberal societies in the city might have no use for her; indeed, at least one male colleague had tried to get Craddock’s name scrubbed from the list of lecturers at the Ladies’ Liberal League itself. Always self-possessed, de Cleyre had flicked away that intervention and stood by Craddock.8

  The woman as lawyer, journalist, and physician—each presented a distinct professional challenge, but then there was “the scholarly Miss Craddock,” a woman who, having turned her sights on the fields of folklore and comparative religions, presented herself as a “specialist” in the history of phallic worship. Craddock’s claim to learned expertise was outrageous—and not only because of the immodesty of her subject. The pile of unpublished manuscripts that she produced (on everything from lunar mythology to heavenly bridegrooms to animal traits) left little doubt about the extent of her egghead dedication. But that intellectual ardor still left plenty of room to suspect Craddock was overstating her qualifications: What made her anything more than a scribbling amateur, a dabbler among real experts and professionals? Within the emergent “science” of studying religion, as in other newly imagined sciences of the era, the power of expertise was almost entirely male and distinctly credentialed. Access to the world of university chairs and specialized research remained negligible for women of Craddock’s generation. Though she claimed at this point in her life that there was nothing she wanted “half so much” as “the perfection of my intellectual work,” those labors always remained tenuous and inevitably amateurish. Craddock would achieve no scholarly standing to speak of, but her failure—that proved virtuosic.9