The hardest problem that Craddock faced was negotiating among rival versions of liberalism. She saw her task as one of widening the membership of the American Secular Union by holding secular and religious liberals together. Freethinkers relished the unmasking of pious frauds, but Craddock did not see much wisdom in making aggressive unbelief the basis of the organization. In her view the point was safeguarding religious and civil liberties, not the atheistic scolding of churchgoers. She saw liberals as defenders of a thoroughgoing religious freedom, not as hecklers whose aim was “to cripple the Church, if not to kill it off entirely.” She urged freethinkers to treat church people with gentle consideration rather than dishing out all “our rude jeers at their silly superstitions.” Concentrate on the positive ideal of state secularization and build alliances among religious liberals, including “Free Religionists, Quakers, Progressive Jews and Liberal Christians”—that was Craddock’s program.36
Craddock was particularly convinced that secular liberals needed to make common cause with progressive spiritualists, those religious inquirers who embraced both spirit communication and liberal reform causes. That proposed alliance did not sit well with hard-line secularists. Liberal purists, like the lawyer Thaddeus B. Wakeman, wanted to see secularism extended over all “the domains of human hope, now occupied by supernatural religion.” Spiritualists, in Wakeman’s view, were beyond the pale of respect and cooperation; the American Secular Union had to keep a safe distance from such deluded spook-lovers. But Craddock well knew that spiritualists were a crucial source of support for liberal causes. She celebrated the connection she had forged with the Progressive Thinker, a paper of “immense circulation” that had “become our organ among the Spiritualists” and had been critical in enlisting that “large and influential body of Liberals.” Tweaking the critics of such initiatives at the group’s annual convention in 1891, she suggested that the financial survival of the American Secular Union had actually come to depend on “our Spiritualistic constituency.” Craddock once boasted that she kept up with all the agnostic and atheistic publications of the day during her tenure as corresponding secretary, but her working relationship with spiritualists came closer to being her trademark contribution to the organization.37
Taking a cooperative line with spiritualists was certainly one of the reasons why Craddock’s stint with the American Secular Union ended after only two years of service. Surprisingly, another issue that proved problematic for her was the relationship between secularism and sex reform. Confronted with the more radical elements of the liberal movement, Craddock seems to have decided that she was not (yet) as zealous for free sexual expression as some of her compatriots were. As she recalled the issue later,At the close of two years (having once been re-elected) Richard B. Westbrook, the President, and I, concluded to resign, as the Free-Lovers and other ultra members wished to force us to take up the defence of radicals who were prosecuted for sending so-called ‘obscene literature’ through the mails, and we would not; neither would [we] encourage Free-Love. In those days, I drew my dress very carefully aside from all such questions, and was exceedingly prim and proper in all my public expression, and careful not to give the slightest encouragement to the left wing of Radicalism.
The issue of how far to press the attack on Comstock and how much to defend his targets divided members of the American Secular Union in 1890, just as it had the National Liberal League a decade earlier. Seeing it as her job to hold a very fragile union together, Craddock tried to play, along with Westbrook, a moderating role in a conflict that would not go away.38
Truth be told, though, Craddock was already giving plenty of encouragement to the “ultra-radicals” on matters of women’s rights and marriage reform. In February 1890 she lent the backing of the American Secular Union to the formation of the Woman’s National Liberal Union, the brainchild of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s co-conspirator, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Craddock published an endorsement of the convention in all the leading freethought outlets, including the Truth Seeker and the Boston Investigator, and pushed Gage’s characteristic emphasis on the church’s deep complicity in women’s disenfranchisement, “the doctrine of woman’s inferiority by reason of her original sin.” Though the National Liberal League and the American Secular Union were certainly sympathetic to the cause, neither had made women’s rights one of the fundamental demands of liberalism. Craddock, for her part, suggested a joining of arms with Gage’s emergent organization and thus signaled her support for a thoroughgoing political and theological critique of women’s inequality within Christian institutions. Certainly in October 1891 when she stepped down, careworn and embattled, from her post as corresponding secretary, Craddock was more cautious than she would be just a couple of years later when she made headlines for her defense of belly dancing. Still, there were clear signs of the direction she was headed. Perhaps the best indicator of all was that she had already begun her learned inquiry into the history of sex worship, the peculiar vehicle for her radical emergence.39
WHEN CRADDOCK BEGAN promoting “Freethought Sunday-schools” as the kindergarten of the American Secular Union, the project never got off the ground, but her proposed curriculum showed how much of the skeptical study of religion she had already internalized. Her prospectus was dedicated, first of all, to combating “religious superstition”—an always-commodious notion among freethinkers that covered “pious frauds” from the ancient world to the present day. Her syllabus was also designed to inveigh against religious violence and intolerance, whether past persecutions (such as the hounding of witches or the hanging of Quakers) or contemporary dangers (such as “the would-be ecclesiastical tyranny of the God-in-the-Constitution party”). Like any freethinker worthy of the name, Craddock knew what she did not like about religion.40
In addition to the usual Enlightenment critiques, her approach offered a survey of “the leading mythologies of the world—Egyptian, Hindoo, Greek, Roman, Norse, Saxon.” Such familiarity with a range of gods and goddesses would be of value, Craddock claimed, “in the child’s literary and art education” and would also prepare him or her for appreciating how the Christian tradition itself had inspired “thousands of works in literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music.” Fairness mattered: Teachers and pupils in Craddock’s hypothetical freethought schools were not only to explore the bleak history of religion’s abusive power, as evidenced in the coerced recantation of Galileo or in Christian defenses “of chattel slavery in this country,” but also to assess religion as “a stimulus to noble work.” Let the students sort out their own sense of the balance between religion’s evil and its good, Craddock advised, through shared inquiry and discussion.
Even with that romantic nod to religion’s potential for artistic expressiveness, Craddock made clear that science was the ultimate arbiter. Instruct the students, she insisted, “that evolution, and not special creation, is the law under which the universe always works. The teaching of this modern gospel of evolution should be supplemented by brief talks on geology, astronomy, plant and animal life, etc.” The faith in physical science was to be joined to a larger faith in the physical world—not the celestial—as the focus of human striving and hope. The all-important theme, Craddock claimed, was “the good to be gotten out of this life, right here and now, without waiting until we die.” Christianity had for too long cast a gloom over “the beauty, the joy of this earth-life,” and humanistic freethinkers were to lift that pall through energetic optimism. Show the children, Craddock exhorted, that “Liberalism is, before all, a religion of sunshine.”
The emphasis on this world’s joys meshed nicely with Craddock’s budding reevaluation of the human body. Already in 1891 she indicated that freethought Sunday schools needed to be in the business of educating children about human sexuality “from a purely impersonal and scientific standpoint.” This initiative, too, was connected in Craddock’s mind to her freethinking critique of religious superstition. “It has been the disgrace of Christianity, tha
t it has taught mankind to despise the body, and especially the sexual nature, as something too impure to be talked of. . . . Shall Liberals follow in the footsteps of the monkish promulgators of Christian superstition?” As Craddock saw it, the church’s policy of shame and silence—that “certain organs of the body” must not be discussed “before they are put into use” within marriage—fell with particular weight upon young women. The Christian “law of modesty,” in Craddock’s estimation, was applied unequally, burdening women with terribly constraining forms of dress and even more cramped forms of virtue. Through the advancement of a freethinking history of religion, the church’s underpinning of patriarchal tyranny—or, “sex slavery” in the radical parlance of the day—would finally be exposed and the emancipation of women would become newly realizable.
The last piece of Craddock’s curriculum turned to “the proper study of the Christian Bible” itself—an inquiry more akin to an archaeological dig than to meditation on a holy text. Unlike some avowed secularists who hoped to oust the scriptures entirely from American education, Craddock saw that as a misguided impulse, inimical to literature, art, and serious learning. “The Christian Bible is a curious old book,” she wryly observed, “and worthy of the most scholarly study that Liberals can put upon it.” To pursue such learning required not only the historical and textual tools of the new biblical scholarship, but also the implements of comparative mythologists and folklorists. With such research methods in hand, the “persistently literal interpretation” of the Bible could then be “exploded” and the scripture’s “true value” made plain to children and youth.
Craddock saw the Bible’s main worth as that of “a storehouse of precious myths.” Once biblical stories were placed “upon the same footing with that beautiful sun and dawn myth of Cinderella, with the solar and phallic myth of William Tell, and others,” they would become valuable materials for freethinking inquiry and instruction. A blue-chip text for fathoming the evolution of religion, the Bible provided a historical record of “a primitive people” attempting “to fix the floating legends of ancient sun, moon, and star worships, of tree, phallic, serpent and fire worships, into some definite form.” By analyzing the Bible as a work of the mythological imagination, scholars could form a clearer sense of humanity’s archaic past and at the same time deprive the Christian scriptures of their claim to uniqueness, their aura of finality and all-sufficiency. Like other freethinking intellectuals, Craddock enveloped the biblical history of redemption under the vast canopy of comparative religion and mythology.
After her tenure with the American Secular Union ended in October 1891, Craddock’s intellectual energies shifted to the program that lay behind her model curriculum for young freethinkers. For a steady income she returned to her old trade of teaching shorthand at Girard College, but she had long desired a more fulfilling life of the mind. She now started presenting herself as a student of folklore and comparative mythology, spoke of her intellectual work as her primary labor, and made her services available for the liberal lecture circuit as an inquirer into religion’s evolutionary history. Having managed a side trip to Alaska during her California sojourn, she tapped into her encounter with indigenous religious carvings—totem poles and ceremonial staffs—to produce an initial article on Alaskan mythology that appeared in the Truth Seeker Annual and Freethinkers’ Almanac in 1891. That piece made clear Craddock’s resolve to pursue ethnological inquiries, even if it meant handling objects that “any comparative mythologist” would recognize as being of “phallic design.” She was already more than willing to stretch the limits of decency in order to further her own theories and expertise.41
Craddock’s scholarly efforts bubbled up within a broader confluence of women’s rights activism and freethinking reflections on religion—a convergence that reached a high-water mark in the 1880s and 1890s. The outspoken lecturer Helen H. Gardener, a fearless critic of the new studies in neurology that marked women’s brains as innately inferior to men’s in size and complexity, led the way in 1885 with her book Men, Women, and Gods, a blunt attack on religion’s role in female subjection. (Gardener was so committed to establishing—in physiological terms—the intellectual equality of men and women that she later willed her brain to Cornell University for anatomical comparison to male specimens.) The daughter of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher, Gardener had moved by her mid-twenties to the far left of the religious and political spectrum, a protégé of agnostic Robert Ingersoll and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Exposing sexist “fictions” wherever she found them, Gardener was an especially forthright critic of biblical revelation and Christian doctrine. “There are a great many women today who think that orthodoxy is as great nonsense as I do, but who are afraid to say so,” she urged. “I want to help make it so that they will dare to speak.”42
During a trip to Alaska in 1889 Craddock collected photographs of totem poles that she planned to incorporate into an essay on Alaskan folklore, one of her few scholarly efforts that she actually got into print. Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
More voices were certainly heard soon. In 1892 Elizabeth E. Evans, an American inquirer who spent much of her life as an expatriate in German intellectual circles, issued A History of Religions, Being a Condensed Statement of the Results of Scientific Research and Philosophical Criticism. It offered a less incisive analysis of gender relations than Gardener’s series of lectures, but it contained a similarly critical attitude toward Christianity. The next year suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage followed with Woman, Church and State, a banner work that built its vision of women’s political, legal, and economic emancipation upon a critique of Christian teachings on family, gender, and sexuality. Gage effectively turned the anticlerical posture of the Woman’s National Liberal Union into a historical rumination on the power of ancient priestesses and goddesses, the ascendancy of patriarchal rule through Judaism and Christianity, the Church’s enshrinement of female inferiority in canon law, and the misogyny of witchcraft accusations. That history, in turn, provided the groundwork for Gage’s indictment of the contemporary clergy’s resistance to women’s equality and their continued insistence on women’s subjugation by divine command.
Woman, Church and State provided a strong backdrop for Craddock’s own inquiries, but the capstone work in this decade of intellectual ferment came in 1895 with the first of two volumes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. In its disregard for scriptural verities, that project managed to raise hackles everywhere and became a serious public-relations problem for the suffrage movement. Through a series of commentaries, Stanton and allied activists sought to undercut the scriptural passages used to oppose female emancipation and confine women to domestic dependency. Verse by verse, Stanton and company offered revisionist interpretations of all the familiar passages that were used to keep women silent, disenfranchised, secondary, or cursed. Stanton intended the work as a head-on challenge to a scripture-soaked culture, and The Woman’s Bible certainly hit the mark. “Come, come, my conservative friend,” she prodded, “wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving. . . . We have made a fetich of the Bible long enough.”43
In freethinking critiques of religion, women would gain their freedom only through breaking the chains of the male clerical establishment, an emancipation neatly embodied in this illustration by Watson Heston, the era’s banner cartoonist for irreligion. Watson Heston, The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1890), facing p. 90. WHi-65505, Wisconsin Historical Society.
Just as this group of freethinking women was forging its own identifiable tradition of religious learning and critique, the professional terrain was shifting underneath them. Amateur scholars were becoming increasingly marginalized in American and European intellectual life toward the end of the nineteenth century, after long enjoying authority in a broad range of fields. Through the 1860s and 1870s amateurs were as likely to be eminent auth
orities in the learned study of religion as a holder of a university chair. The sway of the amateur was evident, for example, in the towering status of John McLennan as an ethnologist, a Scottish lawyer who never held a university post, or the high standing of Lewis Henry Morgan as an ethnographer, an American lawyer who devotedly studied the Iroquois, again from outside the academy. It was all the more evident in dozens of other inquirers whose intellectual achievements were far more modest than Morgan’s and McLennan’s but who were of perfectly solid reputation. One more American example suffices to underline the amateur’s considerable role: Alexander Wilder, a medical doctor, who dabbled in comparative religions and who spearheaded the introduction of F. Max Müller’s scholarship to American audiences. The deference that Wilder accorded Müller in the early 1880s was in itself, though, a sign of shifting authority; the New Jersey physician, a dilettante, paid homage to the Oxford professor, a master of the new science of religion.44
In offering his pioneering Introduction to the Science of Religion in 1873, Müller had heralded the historical, philological, and comparative study of religions as an important venture of the emergent research university. The spread of that academic enterprise showed the familiar signs of professional consolidation. Following the lead of the Dutch universities, which established four university professorships for the scientific study of religion in 1876, American institutions gradually climbed on board: New York University in 1887, Cornell in 1891, and the University of Chicago in 1892. Lectureships were inaugurated; learned congresses convened; academic journals launched; and new professional societies organized, including the founding of an American Society of Comparative Religion in New York City in 1890. Scholarly expeditions and field sites also multiplied, giving new energy to the archaeological study of religion, and these excavations also fed museum displays of religious artifacts as well as the specialized studies of exhibition curators. By 1905 this “advancing Science” appeared so well established that the University of Chicago hosted a lecture series celebrating the discipline’s international rise and flourishing over the previous quarter century. The modern study of religion had been built, the self-congratulating lecturer claimed, by experts, and for experts. The field owed its success to “the researches of Scientists of distinction and imperial outlook,” well-trained masters of a new empire of knowledge that left no place for “novices.”45
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