VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE’S very name, with its bow to the famed French philosopher, made clear that she had been christened for intellectual rebellion, but little in Craddock’s own family background suggested that she had been cradled in dissent. Hers was not a lineage of religious misfits or social rebels. Born in Philadelphia on August 1, 1857, she was reared in a family of comfortable means and conventional refinement. Only by a later, second-hand account was Ida’s father, Joseph T. Craddock, taken as an augur of her intellectual discontent. A religious doubter, he had supposedly announced his opposition to his wife’s plans for a firm Christian upbringing for their daughter. How much credit to give that story is impossible to determine. Her father, a purveyor of teas and patent medicines, died of consumption in his early forties when his only surviving child was still an infant. That Joseph Craddock sold cure-all tonics for the disease that killed him is apparent from his firm’s advertisements, but not much else about him survives in the historical record.10
Joseph’s death left Ida in the sole hands of his respectably devout wife, Lizzie Craddock. Widowed in her mid-twenties, Lizzie had enough of her own independent, entrepreneurial streak to run the family business after her husband’s death, but she never regarded self-reliance as a good quality in her daughter. An authoritarian parent, Lizzie expected dutiful obedience from Ida and bristled at any show of willfulness. Having had no relationship with her father except through the memory of others, Ida saw her mother as being a singularly omnipotent force in her life. Once, indeed, she spoke of sensing God in the same way that “we were wont, when very, very small children, to sense our mother”—that is, “a powerful, mysterious being . . . to whom we looked with awe and to whom we clung as our protector,” and yet who nevertheless remained “a vaguely understood and somewhat feared personality after all.”11
If Ida saw her mother as a god, she was a fearsome one—and resentment of Lizzie’s frightening power, more than appreciation of her mother’s protectiveness, came to dominate Ida’s estimate of their relationship. “While I remain with Mother,” Ida subsequently observed in a tone of harsh exasperation, “I shall never do anything; my life will be a nonentity in the future as it has always been in the past. For years and years, looking back, I remember how my friends who knew my abilities, kept hoping for great things from me—but I never did them; and why? Just because I was a poodle at the end of a chain, the other end of the chain being in my Mother’s hand.” From a young age, Ida defined herself against her mother’s authority, often with indignant defiance.12
Intellectual rebellion and dutiful submission were the two poles of this mother-daughter conflict. Ida saw her mother as “a woman of very little book education” who, though supportive of her daughter’s schooling, did not know what to make of her child’s precocity. “I was able to read at a very early age—two and a half years old,” Craddock recalled, however implausibly. “As I grew into girlhood, I read with avidity all books that came into my way.” Lizzie thought that the Bible was the book most worthy of her daughter’s absorption, but Ida soon wandered much farther afield. In particular, she remembered how, as a ten-year-old, she had shocked her “conservative mother” by informing her that she had been reading Comte de Volney’s Ruins, an infidel classic of the French Enlightenment, and that she had thus “found out all about the Christian religion, and that it was not what it claimed to be.” Her mother cultivated fairly traditional Protestant allegiances: she played a particularly active part, for example, in the Philadelphia chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (she would bequeath $1,000 to that society in her will). As Ida moved farther and farther away from her mother’s upstanding pathways, Lizzie grew ever more scornful of her daughter’s intellectual captivations. “It has always been a standing joke with Mother,” Ida recalled, “that I would get absorbed in reading and studying, and hear nothing outside.”13
The first fifteen or twenty years of Craddock’s life can now be seen primarily through the prism of her later ambitions and resentments, the refracted memories of a woman who had grown intensely alienated from her mother’s “petty tyrannizing.” One of Ida’s earliest surviving letters, written at age twenty-one when on vacation with her mother, caught the glimmering outlines of her subsequent representation of her childhood and youth. A little bored with their usual “summer flight,” Craddock wanted out of the trip with her mother. “I do not expect to stay here long,” she wrote a friend in June 1879. “I first declared it should be only a week; but Mother has talked me into a little longer sojourn. I think I shall most likely stay over next Sunday, and come back the middle of that week. At least, that is my idea now,—unless the powers that be forbid. I expect that Mother will make a great outcry at so early a return; but I want to get back to have a jolly time all to myself among my books; and besides, I have one or two brilliant plans that I am anxious to try.” The fragmentary remains of Craddock’s early correspondence disclosed other snippets—her “dipping into botany” through closely examining flowers, for example, or her girlish joy over horseback riding—but none offered a better glimpse of the turbulence that she subsequently imagined as having defined her early life. Here were the joined desires of being all alone with her books and out from under her mother’s thumb, the restless yearning for independence, intellectual and otherwise. “I want the universe all to myself to make my experiments in,” she pronounced to her friend. 14
The friend in this case was an old classmate, Katie Wood, who had first gotten to know Craddock at the well-regarded Quaker school, Friends’ Central, which they both attended in their teen years. Katie and Ida remained close throughout their lives, but that warmth of friendship did not keep Katie from forming the retrospective judgment that young Ida’s intellectual cravings had been a little too intense. Confirming the lore of Craddock having been “precocious in the extreme,” Wood remembered finding her schoolmate strangely gifted, but suggested as well that her “wonderful mental ability” had generated noticeable “peculiarities of character.” Katie remarked that Ida had “glorious brilliant blue eyes,” almost too bright—as if Ida could not quite contain the light within her.
Among Ida’s peculiarities, Katie put particular stress on her friend’s overly confident bearing. Craddock’s assertiveness as a student, Wood thought, had often exasperated their teachers. “Instead of confining herself to the simple answers,” Katie recalled, “she always said more than asked and showed a great amount of knowledge upon each subject which was entirely unappreciated by the teachers who wished simply to rush the lessons through.” The classmate marveled at her friend’s gifts—her working knowledge of five languages (Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian); her capacious memory for history and literature—but there nonetheless seemed to be “a great drawback” in Craddock’s intellectual comportment. As Wood came to see it in hindsight, even as a schoolgirl Ida had manifested a self-destructive impulse “to impart knowledge without discrimination.” Trying as an adult to figure out what had gone so tragically wrong for her youthful companion, how it was that Craddock had become one of Comstock’s most notorious targets, Wood reached for an explanation in her friend’s unregulated intelligence and the teachers who had failed to impart the lessons of self-censorship to their talented pupil.15
Craddock’s “brilliant plans” for bookish achievement, which she had announced to Katie in 1879, were left unspecified. Certainly, Ida had been reading a lot and writing some since the completion of her schooling in 1876. In 1878, she had penned, for example, a short review of a new translation of Goethe’s Faust, a peculiarly resonant choice for someone ever tempted by the pursuit of dangerous and forbidden knowledge. More likely than not, however, Craddock’s big plans already involved laying some of the academic groundwork for her first venture into public controversy—her struggle to gain admission to the University of Pennsylvania for the fall of 1882.16
Craddock craved an education beyond what she had received at Friends’ Central, but the path to higher learn
ing was steep. To have even a chance of overcoming Penn’s bar against admitting women, she would have to pass the entrance examinations administered to similarly aspiring young men: four days of written examinations on ancient and modern geography, mathematics, English grammar and composition, Latin grammar and hexameter verse, and Greek grammar and prose composition—all of which was followed by a fifth day for an oral examination on Cicero’s orations and Horace’s odes. Craddock’s ambition to integrate Penn would clearly demand considerable preparation and persistence. And even if she passed the entrance exams, the likelihood was slim that she would, as a woman, actually be admitted. 17
Through the Civil War the great majority of American colleges and universities were, without much debate, open to men only. While a handful of antebellum experiments, including Mount Holyoke and Oberlin, served as harbingers of academic opportunity for women, calls for coeducation made significant headway only in the postbellum period. Full-fledged women’s colleges—Vassar (1865), Wellesley (1875), Smith (1875), and Bryn Mawr (1884)—became ever more viable options, and coeducational opportunities at state universities from Michigan to California also expanded considerably in the quarter century after the Civil War.
Many of those early battles were themselves hard-won, but the struggles at the most privileged male institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Penn) were still more difficult and often less successful. Columbia skirted the issue by setting up Barnard as a separate woman’s college in 1889, a path that Harvard likewise followed with the founding of Radcliffe in 1894. Princeton pursued a similar course for a time by chartering Evelyn College, a short-lived experiment that only temporarily breached that male preserve. Penn, like Yale, opened some of its graduate programs to women, but held back altogether from admitting women into the undergraduate liberal arts. Even as gains for coeducation were being made elsewhere, several arch-advocates of women’s rights, including the suffragist Lucy Stone, saw it as absolutely crucial to carry the battle to the gates of America’s most elite institutions. Craddock joined the fight in the early 1880s, targeting Philadelphia’s highest ivory tower. For two years at least, Craddock made it her cause “to force open the University of Pennsylvania for the admission of women,” writing letters, studying hard, meeting with faculty and trustees, and simply refusing to be easily dismissed.18
The first indication of the campaign that Craddock was mounting came in a report prepared by Penn’s Faculty of the Arts for the Board of Trustees in September 1882. The faculty noted that “Miss Ida C. Craddock has passed her entrance examinations very satisfactorily” and had thus qualified for admission to the freshman class. On that much the professors agreed, but they were clearly torn on how to proceed from there. Finally, on a narrow six to five vote, they recommended that the board approve Craddock’s acceptance, effectively turning her application into the occasion for placing the whole question of women’s admission on the trustees’ agenda. When the board met the next month, Craddock’s case actually came very close to carrying the day. A trustee subcommittee presented a ten-point plan, right down to the details of tuition fees and room arrangements, for the incorporation of women into the college. The proposal included the express provision that “in the case of Miss Ida C. Craddock” the faculty be “requested to afford to her all the facilities that may be practicable” for her to begin her liberal arts education right away—in advance of “the regular opening of the women’s section” the next academic year. As Penn’s trustees measured their own situation against parallel debates going on simultaneously at Columbia and Harvard, it looked like the door was about to crack open for Craddock particularly and women more generally.19
That hope soon proved illusory. At the next meeting of the trustees later in the fall, the plans for “a separate Collegiate Department for the complete education of women” foundered on an insufficiency of immediate funds. One trustee, the Episcopal bishop William Bacon Stevens, seized upon the financial uncertainty to scuttle the entire plan with a resolution in November 1882 that deemed it “inexpedient at this time to admit any women to the Department of Arts.” With that declaration the door slammed shut on Craddock.
Ida would not give up so easily, but her further appeals to Penn were fruitless. Two months later she renewed her petition to join what she saw as her rightful class and to sit now for the sophomore examinations, again without success. Shortly thereafter, in February 1883, suffragist Susan B. Anthony went on record in support of Craddock’s efforts to “open to young women the doors of the University of Pennsylvania” in a speech at a nearby church. That public appeal, too, was of no avail; the provost and trustees resolutely insisted that their November decision on coeducation was final. The last word on Craddock’s rejection came in the minutes of a meeting of the Board of Trustees in June 1884 when the secretary duly noted receipt of another communication “from Miss Craddock requesting a reply to her application for examinations, and for the admission of women to the University.” Whether the trustees paid her the courtesy of another rejection letter was by now, two years after the faculty had voted to accept her, beside the point. It would be another half century before women entered the college. 20
Her setbacks—and ultimate failure—at Penn had to have been personally galling, if not infuriating, for Craddock. She was intellectually voracious and saw herself, quite reasonably, as a notch or two above most of her peers in her abilities. The frustration of her collegiate ambitions seems only to have deepened her self-perception as an individual brimming with underutilized brainpower. A couple of years later, for example, she reported to her friend Katie Wood that she had been reading Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855) as part of an adult class. The reigning philosopher of the age, Spencer was a grand synthesizer of psychology, sociology, ethics, and evolutionary biology, and Craddock was thrilled to have found a group of intellectual peers with whom to discuss such an acclaimed thinker. “You know I have belonged to a good many clubs, and have associated with a good many thoughtful people,” Ida told Katie, “but, while I have of course met individuals who were far above me, I can truly say, without the least egotism, that I have never yet been in any class or club that went quite fast enough for me; it was always easy to get to the front rank, with little or no effort.” In discovering this new reading group, Craddock found herself pushed to keep up and sometimes felt like she was merely following from “afar off, picking up the crumbs that fall from this feast of reason and flow of soul.” Even though she was “the youngest among those who do the talking,” she was hardly cowed. “Of course, I will always have my say”; she told Katie, “you know I must put in my oar, on every occasion that interests me.”21
Three of the group’s members especially stood out in Craddock’s mind as her intellectual match. The first was a doctor, “a Harvard graduate” who had “read all the leading English, German and Greek philosophers”; the second was “Miss Stevens, a quaint little old maid” who was “a thorough-going idealist and a monist”; and the third was a lawyer, “cautious, calm, cool, critical” with a strong “materialistic bias.” They seemed an ideal threesome for Craddock’s ongoing project of learned self-definition.
Though Craddock finally felt among intellectual equals, it was not as if this newfound salon was free of the usual presumptions about studious women. One man praised the inquisitive (and not incidentally unmarried) Miss Stevens to Craddock as having an intellect “superior to that of any woman he ever met,—being thoroughly masculine in its logical way of thinking, but manifesting itself in a sweet and gentle manner that is thoroughly feminine.” Perhaps the man’s praise of Miss Stevens’s mien was not intended to stand as an invidious comparison with Craddock’s own assertive show of female intellectualism, but it certainly suggested as much. Craddock often found herself “arrayed on opposite sides” from Miss Stevens and allied instead with the Harvard doctor, a man she admired for his “exceedingly subtle and penetrating mind.” Even in the group’s most spirited exchanges, th
e markers of collegiate achievement and female reserve remained pronounced. For all her scholarly initiative Craddock was already keenly aware of the difficulties involved in overcoming the limits placed on her education and working around the norms of proper womanly behavior. In another social setting sometime before this exchange about Miss Stevens, Craddock had overheard a gossipy remark about her demeanor. “With all her intellect, she lacks in femininity,” one young woman had sniped about her to another. Craddock learned early on that her cerebral intensity was at odds with social convention and threatened to desexualize her.22
Despite the “wound” of having been labeled unfeminine, Craddock continued to live in a spirit of deliberate independence and self-cultivation. Sometime after her graduation from Friends’ Central, she had taught herself a system of shorthand called phonography. She used that knowledge to get her first real job, a position at Girard College in Philadelphia as a teacher of stenography, a trade she pursued for several years in the 1880s and would return to again in the early 1890s. With typical initiative Craddock even produced her own textbooks on the subject, Primary Phonography: An Introduction to Isaac Pitman’s System of Phonetic Shorthand (1882) and its sequel Intermediate or Full Phonography (1892).
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