Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Craddock nonetheless kept grappling with her own demons (and angels). Trying once again to ward off the terror of disintegration, she reported in her final surviving diary entry, penned on August 26, two months before her suicide, that “a strangely serene and calm feeling” had come over her. It was an experience again mediated through her conjugal relationship with Soph, but it also sounded like a final assertion of renewed “elasticity and courage”—her own grasping of independence and creative voice: “I was in full control of myself, as queen of myself; and I WAS A WOMAN!” How long she held onto that assurance of self-possession, and whether she had it the night of October 16 as she methodically sealed up her room and turned on the gas, it is impossible to say. This much, though, is clear: Ida Craddock had made every effort to die a free woman and to be remembered as such.57

  Epilogue

  IN A POEM FROM HER COLLECTION Lizzie Borden in Love (2006), Julianna Baggott imagines the birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger, tired and bereft, finding solace in addressing the ghost of Ida Craddock:Ida, is it you? Gauzy as a bride, at long last,

  Do you instruct the virgins of heaven

  with pamphlets?

  Why, Sanger asks Craddock, did she “breathe poison” for Comstock, “the angry man full of piss, . . . his brain a pink lard ham”? “Our enemy” is now dead, Sanger relates, and yet she still feels Comstock’s weight: “Ida, tell me again how much we cannot speak of.” In seeking to revive her own spirits through invoking Craddock’s spirit, Sanger divulges a fantasy of “lewd flowers” rising “season after season” on Comstock’s grave, “a riotous orgy of fornication.” Craddock’s ghost, filmy and wordless, becomes a conduit for the poet to channel Sanger’s voice.1

  The haziness of Sanger’s encounter with Craddock, in Baggott’s portrayal, is about right: Most of the reformers of the next generation barely knew how to engage spirit-minded comrades like Craddock or Alice Stockham as flesh-and-blood allies. In her autobiography Sanger expressed only surprise at the religious backers who seemed to come out of the woodwork to defend her Woman Rebel, a monthly that quickly fell under Comstock’s ban as obscene literature in 1914. These supporters represented groups, she said, “I had hardly known existed— Theosophist, New Thought, Rosicrucian, Spiritualist, Mental Scientist.” Another leading birth-control advocate of the 1910s, the physician William J. Robinson, to whom Sanger turned for support in publishing her book Married Love, was brusque and more specific. “Our radicals must be hard up indeed for pioneers,” Robinson blasted in 1915, “when they have to drag in the name of Mrs. Ida Craddock, a poor weak-minded creature,” worthy only of “a psychopathic asylum.” He located her squarely among the “disreputables,” a generation of Free-Love radicals and spiritualist outliers who had mostly—and thankfully, in Robinson’s view—given way to forward-looking medical professionals and secular progressives.2

  Sanger’s surprise and Robinson’s dismissal, like Theodore Schroeder’s psychoanalysis, pointed to a broader secularizing of sexology that became only more pronounced as the twentieth century wore on. The creation of a secular sex revolution would gradually render the spiritual sex revolution of nineteenth-century reformers—John Humphrey Noyes, Victoria Woodhull, Lois Waisbrooker, Alice Stockham, Edward Carpenter, and Ida Craddock, among them—a bygone inheritance. “No Gods, No Masters” had been Sanger’s slogan for the Woman Rebel, and a substantial portion of the twentieth-century movement for sexual emancipation would march forward under such secular banners. In 1979, when one of Craddock’s long suppressed pamphlets was finally republished, the reviewer for the New York Times tellingly remarked: “If one excised from Ida C. Craddock’s widely banned Right Marital Living its pious obeisance to religion, the plain and mostly accurate talk about orgasm and the ‘marital embrace’ would fit easily into a contemporary sex manual.” In other words, if Craddock were to tally with the post-Kinsey, Masters and Johnson era of scientific sexology, her religion would need to be pared away.3

  That excision of Craddock’s religion was necessary not because sex had been successfully secularized by 1979. This was the very year, after all, that Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a conservative Protestant counterblast to the malign forces of secular humanism. Instead, Craddock’s religion had to go because her cultural world—one in which metaphysical speculators and spiritual drifters were in the front ranks on sex-reform and civil-liberty causes—now sounded unimaginably foreign. It looked to the political left like Falwell was poised to become the new Comstock (and if not Falwell, then Donald Wildmon, who had two years earlier founded the National Federation for Decency, with its strong anti-obscenity agenda). Secular liberals were, amid the inklings of a new culture war, hard-pressed to envisage any form of religious piety as the handmaiden of sexual emancipation. With the rise of the Moral Majority and allied organizations, strict constructions of church-state separation and personal privacy—“Get Your Bible Off My Body” and “Focus on Your Own Damn Family”—seemed, once again, imperative for the protection of a liberal civil society. Even though Craddock and other disreputables had much to say about the joined privacy of religion and sex, they had become ghostly anomalies—social reformers who had championed the companionate equality of marriage partners, the importance of female passion and sexual pleasure, the liberalization of divorce laws, and the rights of reproductive control through an appeal to both secular principle and religious vision.

  For all of the outrageous impossibilities that Craddock pursued, many of them now seem, a little more than a century later, like rather ordinary possibilities. Her vanguard ambition for the inclusion of women in the liberal arts, for example, has become utterly unremarkable as has her hope that women would be welcomed into the academy of scholars. Indeed, in 2004 the elite institution she had sought to integrate, the University of Pennsylvania, named as its eighth president the political philosopher Amy Gutmann. The issue at Penn, as elsewhere, has moved well past coeducation to the question of how to achieve greater gender equity in all faculty ranks, schools, and departments. Craddock’s progressive enthusiasms for American higher education would hardly seem wild-eyed or brash now.

  Even Craddock’s enforced amateur status might appear at this point a credit rather than a debit. Having become disenchanted anew with William James’s PhD octopus and Max Weber’s spiritless specialists, contemporary intellectuals often romanticize the daring amateur, the independent voice who has somehow escaped the tireless self-monitoring of “proper, professional behavior.” If anyone possessed “an unrewarded, amateurish conscience”—to borrow a laudatory phrase from Edward Said—it was Craddock. If anyone displayed an incorrigible dedication to her scholarly ideas apart from their respectability and marketability, it was Craddock. That creative amateurism made her exclusion from Penn and her marginality to professional societies no less painful; it made the renovated lavatory she had for an office in Philadelphia no more roomy or well-appointed. Perhaps Craddock would find it disconcerting to hear those who enjoy the perquisites of professionalization pining for the amateur’s emancipation. The small consolation: What once made her a lightweight novice might now make her a bohemian hipster.4

  Likewise, Craddock’s teachings on the pleasures of heterosexual intimacy and the blessings of female passion look rather safe and restrained now. In many instances, indeed, she appears a taboo-preserving throwback as much as a full-orbed anticipation of the subsequent liberalization of sexuality in American culture. Perhaps, given her desire to promote sustained sexual encounters, she would be happy to hear the promises and four-hour perils of Viagra and Cialis advertisements so freely broadcast. Perhaps as well she would be pleased to see that evangelicals themselves have gotten into the act of celebrating the sexual delights of married couples with their own how-to manuals.5 But, there would be much more to discourage her: the passing hook-ups of American youth culture, the mainstreaming of adult entertainment, and the globalization of the sex trade are all trends that would have made her cringe. Craddock,
keenly aware of how much the commercialization of sex colored the perception of her own teachings, was not one to rejoice in the consumer’s titillation. She preached a pro-sex, anti-censorship feminism only within the consecrated limits of heterosexual monogamy and only on the basis of the religious, medical, and social value of her work.6 That Playboy’s senior editor James Petersen presented her as the inaugurator of a freewheeling “Century of Sex,” she would have found, to say the least, an irony-laden compliment.

  As for the religious eccentricities of Craddock’s Church of Yoga, these too seem rather mundane in hindsight. Articles on “Sex and Yoga: They’re Good for the Soul” now land their authors in mainstream magazines rather than jail, and most health clubs and even many churches appear eager to help Americans realize their yogic potential.7 The old ideal of a resolutely Christian America remains, to be sure, a live option on the right, but the cultural opening for both religious disaffiliation and post-Christian experimentation has markedly grown in the last generation. Roaming seekers, freethinking secularists, and outspoken atheists suffer few encumbrances in the religious marketplace—certainly, nothing with the bite of the blasphemy charge. So also the reversal of fates for obscenity and civil liberties: While many of the debates surrounding obscenity—including the definition of community standards and artistic value—remain intensely divisive, free literary expression largely trumped Comstockery at the Supreme Court level in the 1960s and 1970s. The obscenity charge could not silence Craddock, Sanger, or Havelock Ellis now nor could it keep Walt Whitman, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, or Henry Miller under wraps. Contemporary American writers—thanks to the court battles fought against censorship by pioneering mid-century publishers like Barney Rosset and Hugh Hefner—have little to worry about in the way of obscenity charges.

  Not that Craddock herself would be blandly uncontroversial a century later. Religion, sex, gender, and politics—she pursued too many hot-button issues to avoid contention. Still, there are some advantages to having become a ghost in public memory. Unlike Sanger, whose legacy through Planned Parenthood continues to have polarizing political effects, Craddock floats only occasionally into view as a feminist forebear, a tragic free-speech martyr, a steamy occultist, or a sexologist ahead of her time. The diaphanous quality of those memories should not dissolve the grainy roughness of her life, the audacity and disrepute of it. Hers was a life lived on the borders—of solvency and sanity, of ostracism and vagrancy—and yet, even as she drifted from Philadelphia to London to Chicago to Denver to New York, Craddock was far from purposeless, always possessed as she was of a visionary’s eye for uncanny perception and intense focus. An escape artist of the imagination, she tried to lift herself free on the paired wings of Eros and divine love. In soaring heavenward she became a spectacle of sin, sex, madness, and criminality, and immediately began a downward spiral. In the descent, as much as in the ascent, her struggles blazed with a sometimes searing light. Those flames have finally burned through the censor’s filter.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  BI Boston Investigator

  DPE Ida C. Craddock, “Diary of Psychical Experiences,” box 2, f. 2-3, Ida C. Craddock Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois.

  EBF Edward Bond Foote

  IC Ida C. Craddock

  ICP Ida C. Craddock Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois.

  LLB Lucifer the Light-Bearer

  RGP Ralph Ginzburg Papers, 1848-1964, Mss 862, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.

  SML Ida C. Craddock, “Story of My Life in Regard to Sex and Occult Teaching,” box 2, f. 2, Ralph Ginzburg Papers, 1848-1964, Mss 862, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.

  SWC Ida C. Craddock, “Sex Worship (Continued),” box 2, f. 5, Ida C. Craddock Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois.

  TS Theodore Schroeder

  TSP Theodore Schroeder Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois.

  WTS William T. Stead

  NOTES

  Preface

  1 Nadine Brozan, “Chronicle,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1997, B7; Hugh M. Hefner, foreword to James R. Petersen, The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, 1900-1999 (New York: Grove, 1999), x.

  2 Brozan, “Chronicle,” B7; Petersen, Century of Sex, 15-18; Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931; Salt Lake City: Smith, 1982), 553. The scholarly literature on Craddock is limited and piecemeal. Four of the most notable works are Shirley J. Burton, “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious: Ida Craddock and the Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago, 1873-1913,” Michigan Historical Review 19 (1993): 1- 16, which particularly attends to the criminal case against Craddock in 1899; Evelyn A. Kirkley, Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen: Gender and American Atheism, 1865-1915 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 92-98, which considers Craddock’s role as a freethinker; Taylor Stoehr, ed., Free Love in America: A Documentary History (New York: AMS, 1979), 63-70, 302-315, 619-635, which helpfully contextualizes Craddock’s teachings on sexuality; and Janice Wood, “Ida Craddock, Free Speech Martyr,” in David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris Jr., eds., Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the Nineteenth Century Press (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009), 317- 325, which highlights Craddock’s 1902 battle with Comstock. See as well Shirley J. Burton, “Ida C. Craddock,” in Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 192-193; Robert P. Helms, “Ida C. Craddock,” in Tom Flynn, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 220-221; and Inez L. Schaechterle, “Speaking of Sex: The Rhetorical Strategies of Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, and Ida Craddock,” PhD diss., Bowling Green State University, 2005. The larger historiography on the sexual politics and religious debates of the era is immeasurably rich; those works that have provided me with especially important background and perspective include: Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: Norton, 1992); R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002); Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Hal D. Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977).

  3 DPE, 202. In her diary entry Craddock often used the abbreviation MSS for the word manuscripts. I have spelled it out for clarity’s sake here and elsewhere.

  4 Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).

  5 Kurt Vonnegut, “Worship,” New York Times, April 13, 2007, A19. For a classic treatment of Protestant visions for a Christian nation, see Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  6 IC to Hugh Pentecost, Feb. 9, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

&nb
sp; 7 Hélène Cixous quoted in Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.

  8 Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 207.

  9 Ibid., 242; TS, “Some Metaphysics of Sex,” box 5, f. 21, ICP; George Santayana quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 160.

  Chapter 1: Belly-Dancing’s Defender

  1 IC, letter fragment to unidentified correspondent, n.d.; IC to Hugh Pentecost, Feb. 9, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  2 Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1927), 49.

  3 “Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1871-1953,” 3: 126-127, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division; The Thirtieth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York: n.p., 1904), 14-15.

  4 George E. Macdonald, Fifty Years of Freethought: Being the Story of the Truth Seeker, with the Natural History of Its Third Editor, 2 vols. (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1931), 2: 218. For the sinewy, hagiographic version of Comstock’s life, see Charles Gallaudet Trumbull, Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime of Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil (New York: Revell, 1913).

  5 Anthony Comstock to Henrietta P. Westbrook, Feb. 28, 1902, box 2. f. 2, RGP; The Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York: n.p., 1903), 7, 9-25; “Comstock Tells His Part in the Ida Craddock Case,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 14, 1902, newspaper clippings, box 20, f. 15, RGP.