Heaven's Bride : The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman
Published by Basic Books, 2010, illustrated, index, 355 pages, condition: as new.
Ida Craddock was by turns a secular freethinker, a religious visionary, a civil-liberties advocate, and a resolute defender of belly-dancing. Arrested and tried repeatedly on obscenity charges, she was deemed a danger to public morality for her candor about sexuality. By the end of her life Craddock, the nemesis of the notorious vice crusader Anthony Comstock, had become a favorite of free-speech defenders and women's rights activists. She soon became as well the case-history darling of one of America's earliest and most determined Freudians. Craddock's story reveals the beginning of the end of Christian America, a harbinger of spiritual variety and sexual revolution.
Ida Craddock was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison 110 years ago in 1902 for violation of the Comstock Act of 1873 that made it illegal to send any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mail. Craddock was a sexologist who wrote and distributed through the mails several pamphlets on how married couples could achieve mutual satisfaction in their sexual relations. Rather than serve her prison sentence, she committed suicide. Outrage over her death marked the beginning of a Free Speech Movement that eventually overturned the Comstock Act. She was a brilliant woman who passed the entrance exams for the University of Pennsylvania"very satisfactorily," but was denied admission by the board of trustees because of her sex. She then became the secretary of the American Secular Union, one of the most important liberal organizations of the 19th century. She stood alone as the only woman researcher in the 19th century investigation of the phallic roots of Christianity. Craddock formed her own Church of Yoga to preach her mix of American Spiritualism, Quaker mysticism, Unitarian free thought, and Tantric Yoga. As a practicing sexologist Craddock suggested that the gyrations of the belly dance, along with male orgasmic restraint, could result in female gratification in the marital bed.
Craddock was hounded during her life by a mother who wanted to commit her to an asylum and Anthony Comstock who wanted to send her to jail. After her death her papers, which she tried to save from destruction by her mother, fell into the hands of Theodore Schroeder, an amateur psychologist. When her personal files were opened, her "marriage" to Soph, the spirit of a dead suitor from her youth, is revealed. As an American Spiritualist, her relationship with Soph was a natural outcome of her research into the spirit world. Schroeder, a lawyer turned psychologist, obtained her personal papers after her death and used her writings on "Heavenly Bridegrooms" to prove Craddock was a "sexual and religious maniac." He tried to show that her repressed sexuality expressed itself by taking on a spirit lover. Her efforts at reform in Turn of the Century America as revealed in this biography shine a light on the pressures women faced in the last decades before they obtained the right to vote. The terrible price she paid and her quiet resolve to pay it make her what the famous anarchist Emma Goldman called "one of the bravest champions of women's emancipation."
