Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE - Belly-Dancing’s Defender

  CHAPTER TWO - Not an Infidel, But a Freethinker and a Scholar

  CHAPTER THREE - Pastor of the Church of Yoga

  CHAPTER FOUR - An Expert in Sexology

  CHAPTER FIVE - Every Inch a Martyr

  CHAPTER SIX - One Religio-Sexual Maniac

  Epilogue

  ABBREVIATIONS

  NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  Advance Praise for Leigh Eric Schmidt’s HEAVEN’S BRIDE

  “The life and work of Ida C. Craddock show all the signs of a genuine erotic mysticism, as profound as any in the history of religions. Her attempts to express the full measure of this love—from secularism and religious liberalism, through psychical research, British occultism, and Indian Tantra, to marriage reform, sexology, and women’s rights—were as diverse and as passionate as the censorship campaigns, familial condemnations, criminal prosecutions, and mental pathologizing that finally silenced her. Leigh Eric Schmidt, with his trademark erudition, balance, and humor, has effectively resurrected Ida for us from all of this cruelty. She speaks again. This is historical scholarship at its most liberating and most redeeming.”

  —JEFFREY J. KRIPAL, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies,

  Rice University, and author of Authors of the Impossible:

  The Paranormal and the Sacred

  “Leigh Schmidt offers us a compulsively readable account of the tragic, fantastic, and utterly idiosyncratic life of Ira Craddock, self-taught scholar, mystic, sex reformer, and psychoanalytic subject. Sympathetic toward Craddock, yet even-handed in his treatment of both her admirers and her vehemently critical detractors, Schmidt opens a window on the fierce ideological cross-currents at the intersection of sexuality, psychology, and religion at the turn of the last century. This is serious scholarship in a form that everyone can enjoy.”

  —ANN TAVES, Professor of Religious Studies,

  University of California at Santa Barbara

  “With a novelist’s grace, Leigh Schmidt tells the absorbing, astonishing, and long-forgotten story of Ida C. Craddock, religious seeker and sex radical. Through Craddock’s life, Schmidt restores the spiritual pulse to the sexual revolution of the early twentieth-century. Heaven’s Bride is a masterful contribution to the entwined history of religion, sexuality, and American reform.”

  —KATHI KERN, author of Mrs. Stanton’s Bible

  more . . .

  “Schmidt’s lyrical, compelling, and captivating story of a truly unique American religious experimenter is a rare gift. In Heaven’s Bride, Craddock’s sometimes amusing, often tragic interactions with bellydancers, vice informants, the police, asylums, freethinkers, scholars, mystics (and even a disapproving mother and a range of spirit friends) come to life and provide a window into the unsettledness of American religious life one century ago. Yet Craddock’s story is much more than an entertaining and tragic narrative. In Schmidt’s story, Craddock’s refusal to live within the social boundaries taking shape around her and the consequences that she suffered expose the enormous and often violent efforts that have been required to solidify the distinctions that modern Americans take to be self evident. For all those readers think they know the difference between science and religion, mysticism and sexuality, amateurs and experts, psychosis and devotion, Craddock’s life—and Schmidt’s analysis—presents perspicuous challenges. This enormously fascinating book inspires and unsettles, prompting ‘curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure.’ Miss Ida C. Craddock would be pleased.”

  —COURTNEY BENDER,

  Associate Professor of Religion at Columbia University

  “In Heaven’s Bride Leigh Eric Schmidt has done an admirable job of rescuing the remarkable Ida C. Craddock from the ashes of history and places her before us in her full glory: a brilliant autodidact, a sexual researcher, writer of sex manuals, and wife of an angel named Soph. Craddock is a classic American iconoclast in the spirit of Walt Whitman and her fascinating story is far-reaching, touching on abuses of free speech, early feminism, and America’s still-ongoing obsession with sex and purity.”

  —MARTIN GARBUS, First Amendment lawyer and author of The Next Twenty Five Years

  For R. Marie Griffith,

  my own educator in right marital living

  PREFACE

  SETTING OUT FROM GREENWICH VILLAGE on a Saturday in late September 1997, a jovial group of sightseers embarked on an unconventional tour of New York City. Sponsored by Playboy magazine, the excursion offered aficionados a journey to the storied landmarks of the sexual revolution. A visit to Margaret Sanger’s ground-breaking clinic paid homage to the birth-control campaign she spurred in the 1910s and 1920s; a stop at the Stonewall Inn recalled the famed riots of 1969 that catalyzed the gay rights movement; a pause at the New Amsterdam Theatre celebrated the high-kicking dancers of Ziegfeld’s Follies, the risqué showgirls who opened on Broadway in 1913. It was an urban expedition, as Hugh Hefner imagined it, through “the first phase of the revolution,” a period of heroic struggle for freedom of expression against an army of censors and prudes. For all their lightheartedness, these day-trippers were on a countercultural pilgrimage to memorialize and sanctify the history of American sexual liberation, the long and ongoing battle against the forces of “puritan repression.”1

  If the tour-goers imagined that they would mostly be traipsing through the bohemian precincts of Greenwich Village, Playboy senior editor James R. Petersen had a surprise for them: The “Century of Sex” did not actually begin with any of the familiar New York milestones or hot spots. Instead, the revolution could be traced to a small apartment on West 23rd Street, where a relatively unknown reformer, Ida C. Craddock, had taken refuge in 1902. So, off the group went to pay their respects to a largely forgotten forebear, a daring innovator whom the anarchist Emma Goldman had once eulogized as “one of the bravest champions of women’s emancipation,” but who had since slipped into obscurity.

  The tribute that Playboy’s parade of libertarians, bohemians, and merrymakers offered Craddock was apt enough. A marriage reformer demonstrably concerned with free sexual expression, she no doubt deserved to be on the outing’s itinerary, and yet that notice captured only a small fraction of her colorful and oddly consequential life. A secular freethinker, a bookish folklorist, a spiritual eclectic, a civil-liberties advocate, and a psychoanalytic case history, Craddock was a distinct American visionary whose story sweeps across a vast cultural and religious terrain.2

  That Playboy’s tour director introduced the sightseers to Craddock’s contribution was an unexpected twist, but that gesture was not half so unlikely as the historian’s opportunity to craft Craddock’s story from her own writings: Craddock was supposed to have been silenced, and a book like this made impossible to write. Between 1893 and 1902, Craddock produced six pamphlets offering frank advice to married couples, but all of these tracts were suppressed as obscene literature and thus turned into exceedingly scarce commodities. Having consigned Craddock to the mixed company of pornographers, birth-control proponents, and literary renegades such as Walt Whitman and George Bernard Shaw, America’s moral guardsmen made it very difficult for her to print and circulate her views at all.

  As a result of her recurrent legal jeopardy, almost all of Craddock’s writings went unpublished. The bulk of her literary output existed only in manuscripts and typescripts, which were especially vulnerable to destruction. The danger came not only from the official censors—notably the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a government-backed or
ganization dedicated to upholding public morality—but also from those nearer (if not always dearer) to Craddock. “I recalled what Mother had said,” Craddock noted with despair in her diary in 1896, “that if I die before she does, she will burn every one of my manuscripts.”3 Craddock’s mother often threatened her, sometimes idly, usually not; so Craddock wisely took steps to safeguard her papers, including an intimate diary of her mystical experiences and several book drafts on subjects ranging from marriage reform to comparative mythology. She shipped off most of the manuscripts to a patron in England where they remained safely tucked away until after World War I out of reach of the censor’s fire.

  The retrieval of Craddock’s life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major social and political issues of her day—and, often enough, of our own as well. Foremost among these is the religious and moral character of the United States, the very durability of the country’s Christian identity. No less an authority than the Supreme Court declared in a decision in 1892 that everywhere in American life there was “a clear recognition of the same truth”: namely, “that this is a Christian nation.” The ideal of a Christian America still holds sway with a significant portion of the American public—but, as a cultural standard, it was first seriously tested by religious and secular challenges posed during Craddock’s lifetime.4

  Ida Craddock’s conflict-ridden story offers an opening to investigate some of the cracks in the declared consensus—that a fusion of evangelical Christianity and Anglo-Saxon civilization necessarily undergirded the nation’s laws, civic customs, moral codes, and global enterprises. Her unmooring from her own Protestant upbringing provides a parable of a larger cultural transformation: the disruption of evangelical Christianity’s power to define the nation’s sexual taboos, artistic limits, and sacred canon. “I don’t know about you,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut once remarked, “but I practice a disorganized religion.” Craddock was part of an advanced band of troublemaking inquirers who helped propel that creative experimentation in American religious life. By 1925, America’s God was less securely Christian, let alone firmly evangelical.5

  Drifting away from her natal Protestant faith, Craddock pursued both secular activism and spiritual variety. As a leader of the American Secular Union, Craddock pushed that group’s most uncompromising demands for church-state separation, including the purging of prayer and Bible reading from the public schools. She also pressed for a universal “sexual enlightenment” on medical, legal, and educational grounds that looked very much apiece with a secular agenda of advancing scientific knowledge against outworn superstition. Craddock, for instance, insisted that married couples deserved how-to guides—which often took the form of explicit sexual guidebooks—to help them navigate the bedroom. Those initiatives, though, were only half her program.

  Unlike the secular revolutions of sexuality that Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner subsequently advanced, Craddock was part of a larger circle of nineteenth-century marital innovators who imagined a sexual revolution in specifically sacred terms. Having no desire to blot out all religion as an infamy, Craddock and her associates yoked sexual enlightenment to spirituality, the marriage bed to the passions of mystical experience. That maneuver, however baffling it sounded to secular liberals, carried a silver lining for them in their opposition to Christian statecraft and moral crusading: Sex, like religion, was made an intimate affair of personal satisfaction and individual liberty, a private matter of the heart. Human sexuality, once redeemed by spiritual association, could shed the veil of censorship and don the halo of free expression.6

  The cultural skirmishes involving religion, politics, and sex provided combat enough, but Craddock also had to negotiate her way through a rapidly changing intellectual landscape. At once scholar and seeker, she occupied an ambiguous position amid a series of newly demarcated fields of inquiry, including comparative religions, psychology, folklore, and sexology. Unlike William James at Harvard, Morris Jastrow at the University of Pennsylvania, or G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, Craddock never inhabited an ivory tower that raised her to the level of reputable academic observer. Instead, as a love-steeped mystic, adrift and exposed, she herself became the object of scientific scrutiny.

  Craddock, a skilled shape-shifter, always remained hard to pin down, but that elusiveness seemed only to intensify the desire to categorize her. Was she merely one more case history who could be pigeonholed by the new psychological and neurological sciences—an erotomaniac, nymphomaniac, or hysteric, a victim of an insane delusion of one diagnostic type or another? Or, was she a latter-day visionary, a weirdly American Teresa of Avila, “the madwoman,” as Hélène Cixous put it, “who knew more than all the men”? In other words, had Craddock mastered the new disciplines for her own self-making, or did they ultimately master her? The scales were inevitably weighted against her—she would lobby hard, and unsuccessfully, to open the liberal arts at the University of Pennsylvania to women. Thanks, in part, to that early frustration of her collegiate ambitions, Craddock had to make her way as a thinly credentialed amateur in a world increasingly controlled by professionals and specialists.7

  Kept on the intellectual margins, Craddock often delighted in her own unconventionality, well aware that her very edginess allowed her to enter one cultural fray after another: How much muscle would evangelical Protestantism have to define and enforce the norms of American literary, sexual, and religious expression? Would women be able to claim academic standing, spiritual authority, and social equality in American public life? Was visionary experience an empowering capacity or a debilitating clinical symptom? Was the erotic redeemable, a grace rather than a curse, a spiritual yearning as much an animal appetite? Those questions are the durable refrains of Craddock’s story, but the answers come through the particularities of her unfamiliar life, not apart from them. “I am poet of the Body and I am poet of the Soul,” Walt Whitman had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass, “The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me.” Craddock, as much as anyone of her era, revealed the force of those doubled passions.8

  Ida C. Craddock—her very name had the homophonous ring of idiosyncratic, and that fluke of christening ended up pitch perfect for her. A talented eccentric, she was one of Whitman’s unbound wayfarers, those bold swimmers who, no longer willing to wade timidly “holding a plank by the shore,” jump off “in the midst of the sea.” To write a cultural biography of her—a woman “very clever but queer,” as one contemporary described Craddock—is to dignify the ramblings of a social, religious, and intellectual drifter. It is to write with, rather than against, the grain of American dissent—with “mind and heart wide open,” as George Santayana said of his mentor William James, to the “odd, personal, or visionary in religion,” to all those “spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full.” Greatness, after all, is not what distinguishes Craddock’s story; she is by no means an old-fashioned worthy. Instead hers is a tale of the obscure and the obscured; to tell it is to recover a dangerous and difficult woman from prearranged disappearance. Heaven’s Bride makes legible a heretofore unprintable life.9

  The story begins with Craddock’s out-of-the-blue defense of belly dancing—an exotic art that had caused a furor at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. That hullabaloo managed to condense, in a single episode, all the controversies that eventually raged around her. Organized around Craddock’s successive self-inventions, Heaven’s Bride next explores her efforts to claim the mantles of freethinker and scholar, her determination to be taken seriously as a student of the sexual history of religion. It then tracks her increasingly eclectic religious fascinations—curiosities that included everything from the Ouija board to new meditative techniques to the supposed Tantric secrets of Hindu yogis. Scholar and mystic—those incarnations were plenty controversial—but then there was Craddock’s professed expertise as a sexologist and marriage counselor, her insistence that couples could benefit from her intimate advice on
love and sex. Her labors on behalf of marriage reform—and the repeated arrests for obscenity that resulted thereby—created yet another identity for Craddock: a martyr for civil liberties. Even then, Craddock still had one last role to play. Latched onto by Theodore Schroeder, a free-speech lawyer turned Freudian theorist, she looked like the epitome of religious and sexual manias. Ida C became, in due time, Schroeder’s Anna O.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Belly-Dancing’s Defender

  FOR YEARS SHE HAD REFERRED TO THEM AS “the Holy Fathers of the American Inquisition.” When Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and three of his deputies arrived at her Manhattan apartment in February 1902, Ida Craddock was not surprised. She had long anticipated a last-ditch showdown with Comstock, America’s most formidable censor, and his smut-fighting organization. About a week earlier Comstock had warned her directly against any further violation of federal and state anti-obscenity laws, and, as a repeat offender, she was well aware of her vulnerability. So when Comstock and his fellow inspectors showed up at her cramped residence on West 23rd Street with a warrant for her arrest, Craddock steeled herself anew. “I wish to fight right through to a finish,” she wrote her lawyer shortly afterward. “All I ask is that you use me in the most effective way possible.” As an unabashed sex reformer and a mystic founder of her own Church of Yoga, Craddock was to Comstock a twice-damned purveyor of obscenity and blasphemy. He wanted to shut down her whole operation—the distribution of her pamphlets, the delivery of her lectures, even her face-to-face counseling sessions. “I am taking my stand on the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” Craddock countered, “guaranteeing me religious freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”1