Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Not surprisingly, Craddock ambled with particular ease into discussions of spiritualism, especially moving into those byways as a counselor to the bereaved. That strategy was exemplified in the case of a widower, who, still in grief, spoke to her about his loneliness. Craddock took that as an occasion to edge the conversation toward the subject of possible “communion with the blessed dead,” but at the mere suggestion of spirit communication the man had laughed at her. When he returned for another visit, she grudgingly broached the subject again, and this time he “seemed exceedingly interested.” Craddock did not switch roles from counselor to medium, but she did assure her patient of her own spiritualist convictions: “I told him I was not at all sure as to the way in which she would communicate with him; it might be by touch, by sight, by hearing, by the interior voice, by writing, by planchette or the Ouija board, by raps, by table-tipping, by a dream,” Craddock enumerated, “but I felt sure that in some way he could become at least dimly conscious of her presence.”39

  The widower’s initial laughter at Craddock’s spiritualism was revealing of the kind of resistance she often met. In this case, the man had first decided to visit Craddock mostly as a diversion; he considered her “one of the interesting sights of Chicago,” not much more than that. Time and again, Craddock found a gap in the way that men and women responded to her: Women usually looked favorably on the religious side of her instruction—they “take to it, for the most part, as a duck takes to water,” she said—while men had a much harder time getting a fix on her and her ideas. As Craddock observed of one of her middle-aged male clients, “He did not appear to have paid sufficient attention to the metaphysical side of the teaching, and I told him so. (So few men do!).” That parenthetic aside applied as a general rule, and not just to the men who came out of “idle, lascivious curiosity” to see what Craddock had to offer.40

  Craddock often found that her male patients were far more interested in her carnal teachings than her spiritual instruction. Another widower, an Episcopalian of aristocratic bearing—“age, 59; slender, fastidious and selfish”—came to her for help, feeling ashamed of “leading an irregular life” and certain “the Lord didn’t approve of him.” He wished to regularize his life by finding a new mate, but most definitely did not want “some clever college girl” or a career woman. Instead, he specified that he desired “a blonde, with a beautiful, voluptuous form, which he could take pleasure in gazing at.” He wanted, in other words, a trophy wife. He told Craddock that he was ruling out one prospect, despite her bright and lively disposition, simply because she did not have large enough breasts. “As usual,” Craddock moaned, “the metaphysical part of my teaching fell on dull ears. I supposed, as he was Episcopalian, that he could take his medicine as religious pills; but he gagged at it. Said he was materialistically inclined. . . . And it is these sensual swine before whom I am doomed to cast my pearls.”41

  Swine, that was a strong word, but it did not necessarily overstate the piggish behavior that Craddock encountered in several of her male clients. Her face-to-face sessions often turned out to be every bit as risky as her publishing efforts as she came to occupy, at least in the eyes of men about town, a niche in the economy of commercialized sex. In that flourishing marketplace of bawdy houses, concert halls, stripteases, masked balls, and sex districts that characterized urban nightlife by the 1880s and 1890s, Craddock’s offerings could look like one more peep show. “I observe that most of these men who come to me for lessons,” she remarked after meeting with a deceptively charming gentleman, “evidently cherish hopes of being eventually admitted to intimacy with me. . . . Oh, what lying, sensual beasts men are!”42

  In her role as counselor, Craddock had to fend off one advance after another. An unhappily married man, who had previously attended the Church of Yoga, came in for a one-on-one lesson. Since he had never heard of the clitoris, Craddock started with basic physiology, pulling out two anatomical charts, and the man was instantly entranced by “the chart of the woman’s genitals.” He soon returned for another visit, wanting to hear the very same lecture again, mostly in order to see “that chart.” Reluctantly Craddock opened it up again and tried to be as “cool and scientific” as possible, when the man suddenly blurted out that the diagram had given him an erection. “To say I felt outraged, but feebly expresses it. I closed the chart, and froze to a white heat,” she seethed. Her client quickly apologized for offending her, but the situation only got worse. “A little later, he said he would give five dollars—he would give ten dollars—just for the sight of a woman’s genitals,” Craddock noted as her loathing for him deepened. The implication, of course, was that the man wanted her to be the specimen. Craddock scornfully pointed him to harlots, but he kept his attentions awhile longer on her. Finally, after a last plea to see the chart yet again, he gave up, wished her well as “a brave little woman,” and went away.43

  Craddock’s self-image as a virtuous woman was repeatedly called into question by those who saw her as a sex worker of one kind or another. A stout German man, sent to her by a local physician, quickly made it evident that he was uninterested in her usual counseling. Smiling and laughing, he told her that he found her spiritual lessons to be “a fake” and that she “ought to give objective teaching.” Craddock quickly assured him that “I wasn’t here for that sort of thing.” Well then, he suggested, she “ought to have some beautiful young girls here for purposes of objective teaching.” In other words, she should stop the silliness of marital advising and instead pursue a real sex trade. “There are times when I think maleness in men is something diabolical and loathsome,” she swore. One elderly man especially occasioned her bitterness and anger. Taking a little too much pleasure in hearing her talk about the history of sex worship, he had put his hand on her waist as she was opening the door for him to leave. Utterly exasperated, she wondered why he could not keep his hands to himself, why he looked at her with such lust in his eyes. “Oh God, I just loathe the memory of him!” she railed. “I think I could at times grind that man to powder; I could tear his eyes out.”44

  If Craddock were a physician of the emotions, that expertise proved of little help to her in dealing with her own feelings of disgust over these wayward male clients. Her anger simply flamed from the pages of her case notes. Was it the exposure of spiritualized sex as an impossibility, as a phony mystification of unredeemable sexual drives, that made her rage so violently against such men? Was it the massive commercialization of sex as urban entertainment, a net vast enough to catch her up in it as one more commodity, that made her want to pluck out that one man’s eyes? “I didn’t care to be looked at as though I were a monkey in a show, or an actress in a vaudeville,” she fumed. Was it all the privileges and prerogatives that the culture accorded male over female, or, was it finally a primal disorder—the brutish nature of men—that was laid bare when her male clients hassled her? Burdened by all those things, Craddock sometimes despaired of ever communicating her gospel to men, her spiritual idealism utterly deflated.45

  One thing Craddock’s rage did not stem from was naiveté; hers was not the shock of prudish innocence. The heaviness of sexual aggression repeatedly weighed down the lightness of her banter about ecstatically good sex. Craddock discerned a blood lust in “the male human animal,” a “passion of destructiveness,” that instinctively rejoices in everything from cockfights to boxing to sexual conquest. Slipping into “medical parlance,” she detailed the prevalence of sadism in men, those who found satisfaction in inflicting pain or humiliation on their sexual partners. “Sadism, too, is back of the habit in which men of a certain stripe indulge—that of beating and kicking their wives or mistresses,” she observed. The male presumption of having “purchased the privilege of coition” through marriage reinforced both sexual aggression and domestic abuse, Craddock averred in urgent tones familiar among marriage reformers of the day.46

  Beyond the coercion women faced within marriage, Craddock confronted the broader incidence of violence agains
t women in American society. The prevalence of “sexual crimes”—assault, rape, and even murder—made Craddock despair of ever adequately educating “our male population along the lines of right sexual living.” At best, reform would be “a slow matter,” and hence she found it necessary to offer explicit guidance to girls and women on the necessity of self-defense. However indelicate it seemed to discuss such matters, mothers needed to instruct their daughters about how to protect themselves if they ever encountered a “would-be raper.” If assaulted, Craddock detailed, a woman “should watch her opportunity, and seize both his testicles in her hands with a firm grip, squeezing them tightly,” which will make him “drop like a stone.” A hard kick in the groin might also prove sufficient to disable the assailant.47

  For all her mystical flights, Craddock kept her advice to women gritty and down-to-earth—and not only on sexual matters. She called out child-custody laws that left mothers empty-handed just as she criticized unequal property rights that kept women economically dependent. Craddock saw a role model for women in Carrie Burnham Kilgore, a pioneering Philadelphia lawyer: Before getting married, Kilgore had been “wise enough” to get her fiancé to sign an “ante-nuptial agreement” by which the couple agreed to equal property and child-custody rights. In her educational program, too, Craddock invariably insisted that she was a marriage reformer and not simply a sex enhancer. “Just as long as wives remain, by reason of their wifehood, economically dependent upon their husbands;” she exhorted, “just as long as they are willing to fill, at one and the same time, the various positions of cook, chambermaid, seamstress, laundress, housekeeper, child’s nurse, governess and concubine, with no salary for their exhausting labors and no remuneration beyond their board and clothing—and often not that: Just so long will marriage mean for the average wife sexual slavery and thankless household drudgery.” Couples were not going to have the good sex both partners desired until they reconstructed their domestic world in cooperative terms. Inhabiting “neither matriarchate nor patriarchate,” they needed to be “comrades” and “equals” before they could become contented lovers.48

  A CARD-CARRYING LIBERAL, Craddock saw religion and sex as intensely “private affairs,” things that priests and magistrates should not presumptuously legislate for free and equal individuals. “Are we free, can we be free as long as our sex life is under the control of church and state?” queried one of Craddock’s fellow radicals. “I advocate complete freedom for sexuality the same as for religion,” insisted another fellow traveler. If these reformers had their way, sex would join religion in the sheltered domain of individual liberty, private judgment, and personal choice. Sexual emancipation would then be able to move forward, arm-in-arm, with religious freedom. As Craddock would have it, the bedroom was a “little temple,” a private sanctuary for the joined expression of religious aspirations and sexual ecstasies. Comstock and company had no business invading that safe haven.49

  In the view of Craddock and her allies, making religion and sex private matters was important for the effectiveness of liberal statecraft. Marriage reformers offered the government a cuddly domesticated version of religion—one that would focus on blissful personal experiences rather than zealous church-state entanglements. The “foaming rapids” of these religious passions swept through the bedroom, not the public square. Extending liberal ideals of freedom and individuality from religion to sexuality would cut the taproot of Comstock’s evangelical politics. “The Holy Fathers of the American Inquisition” would have no right to impose their notions of public decency on such private, intimate affairs.50

  Apologists for liberal secularism were unable to advance their vision of privacy, free expression, and strict church-state separation very far during Craddock’s lifetime. Instead, Comstock’s vice society, very much maintaining its legal force and political power, kept an ever-vigilant eye on sex reformers, Craddock included. As she bitterly noted, “the sanctities of my private life”—by which she meant the “peculiarities” of both her religion and her sexuality—went unprotected from the “prying questions” of inspectors, lawyers, and judges. Comstock and his allies sometimes even managed to intrude upon the personal confidences of her face-to-face sessions, disrupting that zone of privacy too. As she typed up her notes on one of her clients, an “earnest Christian” who had benefited from reading Right Marital Living, she confessed that she could not remember the details of his case. The postal inspectors had arrived unannounced right after she finished her lesson with him, and that confrontation had caused her so much “worriment” that it “drove his affairs out of my mind.”51

  If Craddock felt anxious or even paranoid, she had every right to be; Comstock and his agents seemed to be everywhere. During another counseling session, this one in New York in August 1902, Craddock had become extremely apprehensive—even “sort of dazed”—when she started thinking that the client looked disquietingly familiar. He reminded her so much of a detective who had once accused her of distributing obscene literature. Had he shaved his moustache, she wondered? No, it was a false alarm. The man turned out not to be a postal inspector or a police officer—just one more “insolent sensualist” who could not help hitting on her. “I am not here to be touched; I am here to teach; that is all, sir,” she admonished him, as she had so many others before him.52

  “America and Americans are ripe for [my] teaching,” Craddock continued to hope, despite all the signs to the contrary. To teach Americans in candid and heartfelt ways about sex, to be an expert in sexology, to be a physician of the emotions—these were not easy tasks at the turn of the twentieth century, especially for a single woman with queer religious and political views. Harassment was a constant in Craddock’s work—and not only because of Anthony Comstock, but also because sex was now so unavoidably commercialized in American society. Obscenity laws and strip-shows, vice suppression and merchandized sex—these were Craddock’s Scylla and Charybdis. She often wondered if any sanctuary of liberty, privacy, and legal protection remained for her as she navigated the tough straits of the country’s sexual politics. American freedoms of speech, press, and religion—surely these would buoy her up as she continued her perilous struggle.53

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Every Inch a Martyr

  IDA CRADDOCK MADE HER FIRST APPEARANCE in Anthony Comstock’s massive logbook, “Names and Record of Persons Arrested under the Auspices of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice” on May 27, 1898. Comstock squeezed her name in among booksellers, peddlers, and saloonkeepers, but at this point he had no occupation to list for Craddock, only an offense: sending obscene literature by mail. By the time he registered her arrest in New York City in February 1902, Comstock had become more precise; he pegged Craddock’s profession as “Pastor of Church of Yoga” and “Lecturer of filth.” Right before this latest notation on Craddock, Comstock recorded the case of a German Jewish youth, the son of a rabbi, who had been arrested for mailing a lewd postcard; right after his entry on her, Comstock made note of a “Dealer in ob[scene] books & pictures,” who had fled to Canada after Comstock confiscated his inventory.1

  In Comstock’s long-running war on vice, Craddock was only one offender among thousands. A lot of the crimes were miniscule infractions like that of the unfortunate Jewish teenager who, otherwise a well-behaved student in school, had been picked up for indulging in a little erotic juvenilia. Some of those arrested were big-time gambling operators and sex traffickers, but many more were minor leaguers—a bartender, an actress, a housekeeper, a newspaper reporter, a nostrum-selling quack—caught in Comstock’s vast imagining of obscenity. If the eventual public visibility of Craddock’s case was unusual, it was at the outset quite typical in its ordinariness: The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice pursued a woman of modest means—a secretary and teacher of stenography—as a threat to public safety and moral decency, a purveyor of obscene literature. For every Walt Whitman or George Bernard Shaw he went after, Comstock snared innumerable obscure offenders.
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  In the Protestant hagiography, Comstock was pictured as a savior of innocent children. The caption on this photograph read: “These are the citizens for whom ‘Uncle Tony’ has lived and ‘died daily’ for more than forty years, and to whom his heart goes out.” Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime of Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil (New York: Fleming, 1913), facing p. 153.

  Comstock’s vice squad would not have been half so controversial—or significant—if it had simply been one more Protestant voluntary society trying to effect moral reform through pious persuasion and hellfire denunciation. Not content with being an evangelist or a scold, Comstock wanted the power of the state behind his anti-obscenity campaign; in a word, he wanted a badge. To that end, he successfully lobbied the New York state legislature to strengthen its anti-obscenity laws and then scored his big coup in 1873 when the U.S. Congress passed “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” Parlaying his legislative successes into a federal appointment as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, Comstock thereafter had the means to take his fight against obscenity all across the country. He proudly made these new powers of enforcement the basis for the vice society’s logo: On one side, a police officer pushes a cuffed prisoner into a jail cell; in the other half of the seal, a gentlemanly reformer throws confiscated books into the flames. For more than four decades, Comstock relished his combined role of evangelical crusader and federal agent.2