Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  16 Edward Carpenter, Days with Walt Whitman: With Some Notes on his Life and Work (London: Allen, 1906), 49-50; Edward Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (London: Sonnenschein, 1903), 179-181; Alice B. Stockham, Hindu Wedding Bells and Taj Mahal (Chicago: Stockham, n.d.); Alice B. Stockham, introduction in Edward Carpenter, A Visit to a Gñani (Chicago: Stockham, 1900). On Carpenter’s devotedness as a Whitman disciple, see Michael Robertson, Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 167-188. Another radical literary figure of the period who appealed to Craddock (and Carpenter) was the Canadian novelist Grant Allen, author of The Woman Who Did and The New Hedonism. Craddock especially drew on his Darwinian defense of the sex instinct. See IC, “Marriage Relation,” 6-10.

  17 IC, The Danse du Ventre (Philadelphia: n.p., 1893), 1, 5.

  18 IC, Advice to a Bridegroom (Philadelphia: n.p., 1897), 1. Copies of Craddock’s pamphlets of sexual counsel are very, very rare. Advice to a Bridegroom survives only in the form of a fragmentary typescript at the New York Public Library, the published version of the pamphlet having been lost entirely. That it was actually published seems evident from several ads that she placed for it in LLB in early 1898. The other pamphlets survive in the Ralph Ginzburg Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the Rare Book and Special Collections at the Library of Congress. Tellingly, even the main collection of Craddock Papers at Southern Illinois University has none of the outlawed pamphlets beyond two copies of the 1893 version of the Danse du Ventre. For the medical preview of the one tract, see IC, “Right Marital Living,” Chicago Clinic 12 (1899): 197-200. For notice of its September appearance, see “Books Received,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 23, 1899.

  19 IC, “Address Book of Customers for Books and of Pupils in Divine Science,” box 7, f. 4, ICP. Many of her customers were identified by initials only, but of the little more than 500 who can be identified by sex, the ratio was nearly 3 men to 2 women.

  20 IC, Letter to a Prospective Bride (Philadelphia: n.p., 1897), 3-4, 8, 10, 15-17; IC, “The Marriage Relation,” 1, 69.

  21 “The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living,” advertising circular, n.d., box 7, f. 5; IC, Right Marital Living (Chicago: n.p., 1899), 30-38, 43, 46, 48; IC, “Telepathy Between the Sexes,” 14, box 5, f. 1, ICP; IC, “Marriage Relation,” 22, 31, 34-35, 76, 78-80. For popular examples of the more euphemistic advice literature of the period, see Mary Wood-Allen, What a Young Girl Ought to Know (Philadelphia: Vir, 1905); Mary Wood-Allen, Almost a Man (Ann Arbor: Wood-Allen, 1895); Lyman Beecher Sperry, Confidential Talks with Young Men (Chicago: Revell, 1898); Lyman Beecher Sperry, Husband and Wife: A Book of Information and Advice for the Married and the Marriageable (New York: Revell, 1900). For wider surveys of American sex manuals, see Michael Gordon, “From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm: Sex in American Education Literature, 1830-1940,” in James M. Henslin, ed., Studies in the Sociology of Sex (New York: Appleton, 1971), 53-77; Peter Laipson, “‘Kiss without Shame, for She Desires It’: Sexual Foreplay in American Marital Advice Literature, 1900-1925,” Journal of Social History 29 (1996): 507-525; Jessamyn Neuhaus, “The Importance of Being Orgasmic: Sexuality, Gender, and Marital Sex Manuals in the United States, 1920-1963,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 447-473. On the evangelical Protestant sources of the ideology that Craddock was critiquing, see Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” Signs 4 (1978): 219-236.

  22 IC, “Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 39; IC, Letter, 8; IC, Right Marital Living, 46.

  23 IC, Right Marital Living, 37. For the ongoing debate with Edward Bond Foote about ejaculation, see IC to EBF, Nov. 3, 1896; EBF to IC, Sept. 8, 1899; EBF to IC, Dec. 28, 1900, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  24 IC, The Wedding Night, 3rd ed. (New York: n.p., 1902), 9; IC, “Marriage Relation,” 74-75; IC, Right Marital Living, 37-38.

  25 IC, Advice, 3-4; IC, “Marriage Relation,” 74-75, 80-81, 218-220; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Davis, 1924), 1: 280. For a brilliant history of the anxieties about masturbation and the social sources of those fears, including the terror of the individual imagination running amok in its solipsistic fantasies, see Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003).

  26 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 74-75, 215.

  27 Ibid., 80-82.

  28 IC, Right Marital Living, 22-25, 38. The vernacular examples celebrating “fucking” are taken from John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 83. Some sex radicals (notably Ezra and Angela Heywood) embraced this straight-talking vernacular, but Craddock and Stockham did not use the f-word. On how the Heywoods used the term, see Sears, Sex Radicals, 177-178.

  29 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 1, 4, 26; IC, Letter, 18.

  30 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 115.

  31 IC, “Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 1, 5.

  32 Ibid., 20, 22-23.

  33 Ibid., 9.

  34 Ibid., 34-35.

  35 Ibid., 6-8.

  36 IC, “Oral Instruction,” 31-33.

  37 IC, “Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 4-5.

  38 Ibid., 2, 24. Craddock did not identify the religious background of about half of her pupils. Of those that she did, it was a very diverse lot, but far from strictly representative of the American denominational map. No Methodists, the largest Protestant body at the time, were identified among her clients, and she had a high percentage of pupils from the typically more liberal side of the spectrum: Unitarianism, spiritualism, and New Thought.

  39 Ibid., 31-32.

  40 Ibid., 37-38; IC, “Oral Instruction,” 7, 14.

  41 IC, “Oral Instruction,” 25-26.

  42 Ibid., 27. On the vast expansion of the sex industries in entertainment, prostitution, and publishing, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: Norton, 1992); Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880- 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xviii-xx, 39-41, 142.

  43 IC, “Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 16-19.

  44 IC, “Oral Instruction,” 34; IC, “Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 9-10.

  45 IC, “Oral Instruction,” 10.

  46 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 207-208.

  47 Ibid., 241-243.

  48 Ibid., 159, 161, 171. The companionate ideal, to which Craddock gave expression, continued to provoke outrage well into the twentieth century. See Rebecca L. Davis, “‘Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry’: The Companionate Marriage Controversy,” Journal of American History 94 (2008): 1137-1163.

  49 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 179, 190; Waisbrooker, Bible Truth Bursting Its Shell, 8; Victoria C. Woodhull, “Tried as by Fire; Or, The True and the False, Socially,” in Madeleine B. Stern, The Victoria Woodhull Reader (Weston, MA: M and S Press, 1974), 16-17, 25, 28. Though Craddock shared their logic, other sex radicals, including Waisbrooker, Woodhull, and Ezra Heywood, offered more sustained reflection on this point—how the rights of religious privacy needed to be extended to the “sacred seclusion” of the bedchamber. See also E. H. Heywood, Cupid’s Yokes: Or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life (1877), reprinted in Martin Blatt, ed., The Collected Works of Ezra H. Heywood ( Weston, MA: M and S Press, 1985), 22-23.

  50 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 3, 121.

  51 IC, “Memoranda: Indictment in Chicago,” 4, box 2, f. 2, RGP; IC, “Cases of Marital Reform Work,” 6, 9, 19; IC, “Oral Instruction,” 30.

  52 IC, “Oral Instruction,” 10-11.

  53 IC, “Marriage Relation,” 122.

  Chapter 5: Every Inch a Martyr

  1 �
��Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1871-1953,” 3: 64, 126-127, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division. For a sustained analysis of these records and of obscenity cases in New York during Comstock’s ascendancy, see Elizabeth Bainum Hovey, “Stamping Out Smut: The Enforcement of Obscenity Laws, 1872-1915,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998. For a statistical breakdown on Comstock’s arrestees—by religion, ethnicity, occupation, age, and so forth—see Richard Christian Johnson, “Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice, and the American Way,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1973, 154-168, 183-197.

  2 In many ways, the most informative biography of Comstock remains the old standard of Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, especially since the authors had access to Comstock’s diaries, which were later lost or intentionally destroyed (by his successors at the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice). See Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Boni, 1927). For a more recent biographical treatment, see Anna Louise Bates, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995); for a good sociological treatment of Comstock’s crusade, especially in terms of class formation, see Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); for the spread of Comstock’s Protestant cause from New York to Boston, see P. C. Kemeny, “‘Banned in Boston’: Moral Reform Politics and the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice,” Church History 74 (2009): 814-846; for women reformers who joined in the anti-obscenity campaigns for maternalist and feminist reasons, see Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and for placing Comstock’s anti-obscenity campaign within the larger panoply of evangelical Protestant efforts to use the federal government to reconstruct morality, see Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), esp. 47-71. Richard Johnson discovered the fate of Comstock’s diaries and related papers, the loss of which makes the vice society’s arrest records the primary archival material surviving on Comstock’s crusade. See Johnson, “Comstock,” 5.

  3 On the legal and literary contexts for the obscenity rulings, see especially Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 404-436, and Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992). The impact of the Hicklin standard on American jurisprudence is well known; less noticed is the irony that the original British case involved a Protestant pamphlet attacking supposed Roman Catholic immoralities—namely, The Confessional Unmasked: Showing the Depravity of the Romish Priesthood, the Iniquity of the Confessional, and the Questions Put to Females in Confession. The irony of a Protestant fount for the prevailing legal measure of obscenity was not lost on Theodore Schroeder. See TS, ‘Obscene’ Literature and Constitutional Law (New York: n.p., 1911), 55-56.

  4 Charles C. Moore, Behind the Bars; 31498 (Lexington: Blue Grass Printing, 1899), 216-219, 290-294. For the pamphleteering possibilities of Ingersoll’s closing argument in the Reynolds case, see Robert G. Ingersoll, Trial for Blasphemy (New York: Farrell, 1888). For cursory summaries of the Kneeland, Reynolds, and Moore cases, see Leonard W. Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 414- 422, 506-512. For the counter-argument to Levy’s emphasis on the decline of blasphemy jurisprudence, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, “Blasphemy and the Law of Religious Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 52 (2000): 682-719. Gordon stresses the strength of American blasphemy laws, flowing from the precedent of People v. Ruggles in New York in 1811, and the judiciary’s protective stance toward a generalized Christianity throughout the nineteenth century. As Gordon also indicates, blasphemy had long been associated with libertinism; in other words, the basis for the slippage between obscenity and blasphemy ran deep. For the English parallels, including the conflation of blasphemy with indecency, see Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), esp. 207-215.

  5 . Moore, Behind the Bars, 221-243. The Blue-grass Blade carried at least five articles on Craddock’s case in 1902. See, for example, “Organize! Organize!” Blue-grass Blade, Nov. 9, 1902, 4; “Another Victim of Ignorance and Tyranny,” Blue-grass Blade, Nov. 16, 1902, 2.

  6 IC, “Brief Account of My Indictments,” 5, box 2, f. 2, RGP; IC to [WTS], undated fragment, [1899], box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  7 For the belated application in the 1940s of an individual civil liberties approach to church-state relations, see David Sikkink, “From Christian Civilization to Individual Civil Liberties: Framing Religion in the Legal Field, 1880-1949,” in Christian Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 ), 310-354. For especially perceptive analyses of the limits of free-exercise jurisprudence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

  8 Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Robert Bremner (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 158.

  9 Anthony Comstock, Frauds Exposed; Or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted (New York: Brown, 1880), 388-495; Comstock, Traps for the Young, 184-185, 199; Anthony Comstock, “Lawlessness of the Liberal Leagues,” Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform 1 (1888): 393-398; Anthony Comstock, “Indictable Art,” Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform 1 (1888): 48.

  10 DPE, 207-209.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Advertisement, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 1897, 15; DPE, 209.

  13 DPE, 209, 215.

  14 Ibid., 209. The dates and details of the postal complaints against Craddock are recorded in U.S. v. Ida C. Craddock, Case 31, Aug. 1898, Records of U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, National Archives and Records, Philadelphia.

  15 IC, “Memoranda: Indictment in Chicago,” 2-4, box 2, f. 2, RGP; IC, “To My Patrons and Well-Wishers,” Dec. 1897, box 2, f. 2, RGP; “Miss Craddock Resigns” and “Why She Resigned,” newspaper clippings, 1897, box 20, f. 15, RGP; “Daily Doings in City Hall,” North American (Philadelphia), Nov. 16, 1897. For notices that she was circulating her pamphlets, see LLB, Aug. 18, 1897, 259; Sept. 22, 1897, 299. Craddock preferred to blame office politics, particularly her refusal to pay assessments to the city’s corrupt political machine, as the source of her firing. That might have been the case, but her pamphleteering on behalf of sex reform caught most public notice.

  16 IC to EBF, June 6, 1898, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  17 Ibid.; TS, “Notes on Ida C,” box 20, f. 16, RGP; IC, “Memoranda,” 5; IC, “Brief Account ”; IC to Katie Wood, July 5, 1901, box 1, f. 1, ICP. Schroeder seems to have gotten at least a bare overview of Craddock’s medical evaluations of 1898; he certainly tried hard to gain access to her records through directly contacting the authorities involved in her case. These asylum records, though, were officially off limits to Schroeder, and, by Pennsylvania state law, any materials naming specific patients remain closed to researchers. For Schroeder’s efforts, see Owen Copp to TS, Feb. 10, 1913; Edward A. Strecker to TS, March 14, 1923, box 1, f. 4, ICP. On the legal process of official medical certification, see Information Respecting Friends Asylum for the Insane and Requirements for Admission (Philadelphia: Buchanan, 1897), 17, and The Annual Report of
the Department for the Insane of the Pennsylvania Hospital (Philadelphia: Ferris, 1889), 38-42. Finally, it should be noted that Craddock’s diary is scant for the period from September 1897 to October 1898, so the story here has to be pieced together mostly through correspondence.

  18 IC to Katie Wood, Oct. 8, 1898, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  19 Ibid. The date of Craddock’s release from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane was Sept. 7, 1898, roughly coincident with the agreement to drop the indictment. On the dates of her confinement, see Owen Copp to TS, Sept. 20, 1913, box 1, f. 4, ICP.

  20 IC to Wood, Oct. 8, 1898; DPE, 190.

  21 This London debacle is traceable in IC to Katie Wood, Dec. 2, 1898; Dec. 9, 1898; Dec. 13, 1898; and Dec. 20, 1898, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  22 IC, “Memoranda,” 1-2, 4. Specifics on the Chicago case are recorded in U.S. v. Ida C. Craddock, Case 3078, Oct. 1899, Criminal Records and Dockets, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, National Archives, Great Lakes Region, Chicago. See also 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.

  23 Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), 11, 398- 399. The designation “attorney for the damned” comes from Arthur Weinberg, ed., Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Craddock’s case, a plea bargain, has obviously not made the canon of Darrow’s celebrated courtroom feats.

  24 IC, “Brief Account,” 2, 4-5. Comstock was subpoenaed as the figurehead of the whole anti-obscenity campaign, but Craddock pointed to the Western Society for the Suppression of Vice as the behind-the-scenes force in this instance. It was housed in Chicago’s YMCA building and headed by Comstock’s equally vigilant comrade-in-arms R. W. McAfee. See “Right Marital Living,” LLB, Feb. 17, 1900, 43.

  25 “Right Marital Living,” LLB, 43; IC to [ WTS], undated fragment; IC, The Wedding Night, 3rd ed. (New York: n.p., 1902), 13. The three objectionable passages (pp. 6-7, 12-13, 17-18) were specified in the federal indictment in New York in March 1902, which is discussed below. A copy of the expurgated Denver edition of Right Marital Living has not survived, but an excerpt from the new preface was reprinted in the Lucifer article cited above. Craddock also discusses it in the undated fragment of a letter to Stead noted above.