Carpenter’s work was among the final pieces to fall into place for Craddock’s marital reform message. Whether she obtained a copy of Stockham’s edition or a prior English version (the Labour Press in Manchester had originally published the book in 1896), Craddock heartily embraced Love’s Coming of Age. She lifted out a long passage on the importance of educating young people in sexual matters, typing it up as confirmation of her own teaching mission: “That we should leave our children to pick up their information about the most sacred, the most profound and vital, of all human functions, from the mere gutter, and learn to know it from the lips of ignorance and vice, seems almost incredible.” Carpenter, poet and progressive, joined his call for honest talk about sexuality to feminist exhortation, and that only made him more appealing: “Let every woman . . . hasten to declare herself and constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman. Let her . . . insist on her right to speak, dress, think, act, and above all to use her sex, as she deems best.” Carpenter’s avant-garde perspective was hardly a perfect fit for Stockham and Craddock—neither followed his lead on same-sex or “homogenic” love, for example—but their affinities with England’s Whitman remained pronounced.15
Carpenter’s attractiveness to Stockham and Craddock also derived from his offbeat religious sensibilities. Stockham, like Craddock, had become increasingly interested in appropriating spiritual strands from India for her own purposes, especially after she traveled there as a wide-eyed tourist in 1891. Making her sympathies explicit in a glowing introduction, Stockham published Carpenter’s memoir of pilgrimage through India and Ceylon, A Visit to a Gñani (1900), a four-chapter excerpt on religion from his more diffuse travelogue, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta (1892). That extract described Carpenter’s extensive encounter with a white-robed guru, the portrait of whom he came to value right alongside a cherished photograph of the gray-bearded Whitman. However impressed Carpenter was with his aged Hindu teacher, he made a move that very much jibed with how Stockham and Craddock viewed yogic disciplines: Namely, he concluded that new levels of consciousness would not be entered through the willed suppression of desire or such ascetic disciplines as fasting and sensory denial, but instead through the path of outpoured love. Carpenter, like Whitman, represented a literary, religious, and sexual avant-garde—bold, iconoclastic, and subversive. Stockham and Craddock were hardly artsy bohemians themselves, but they certainly knew what it was like to be part of a literary underground of feared writers. They were both primed to recognize in Carpenter a fellow prophet of a free society.16
Craddock’s sexology, however quirky, emerged out of a dense forest of intellectual precedents and influences. Free-Love radicals, women’s rights activists, amorous communitarians, eclectic physicians, Social-Purity reformers, Divine Science speculators, and avant-garde literati—Craddock riffed on ideas borrowed from all of them. No matter how much her spiritualist eccentricity made it look to skeptics as if she floated about in airy castles of mystic isolation and mad delusion, Craddock stood very much within the religious, medical, and erotic landscape of her day. Perhaps she was an American original, but, if so, her improvisation nonetheless bespoke everyday preoccupations—with damaged relationships and bedroom anxieties, with patched-up miscommunications and confusing desires. She was out there on a limb—and yet she had plenty of company.
IN HER EFFORTS TO CREATE a niche for herself as a sexologist, Craddock started with a literary program: the production of small-scale advice manuals for married couples. That publishing program had gotten off to a shaky start in 1893 when she publicly defended the Danse du Ventre as “a most valuable object lesson” for the better performance of “marital duties.” That plea contained a modicum of explicit sexual advice, particularly on her concomitant goals of strict male self-control over ejaculation and released female passion through protracted foreplay. Preoccupied with her grand scholarly projects as well as her spiritualist training, Craddock largely held back on her sex-radical agenda for the next three years. She also already had the inglorious distinction of being on the postal inspector’s watch-list, which necessarily made it dangerous for her to pursue her publishing efforts at all.17
Craddock laid low, first in one of William Stead’s editorial offices in London in 1894 and 1895, and then in the Bureau of Highways in Philadelphia—but she was unable to keep quiet much longer. In 1896 she again entered the fray with a sixteen-page tract entitled Helps to Happy Wedlock: No. 1 for Husbands, mainly a recommendation of male continence compiled from the work of John Humphrey Noyes and Albert Chavannes. She followed the next year with a pair of her own little guides called Letter to a Prospective Bride and Advice to a Bridegroom, both of which were designed to prepare the betrothed for the “psychophysiology of marriage.” Two years later in September 1899 she produced a slightly more substantial work on Right Marital Living, a piece that she had previewed a few months earlier in the safer confines of a medical journal, the Chicago Clinic. Lastly, in 1900, she issued The Wedding Night, another truncated version of her teachings, the bulk of which remained tucked away in typescripts and lecture notes, including her 437-page book manuscript on “The Marriage Relation,” a ten-chapter summation of her whole enterprise.18
If most of her teachings remained unpublished, Craddock still managed to get her ideas into at least limited circulation through her sundry booklets and circulars. A ledger she kept, titled “Address Book of Customers for Books and of Pupils in Divine Science,” contained 867 names (just for 1899 and 1900), many of whom ordered more than one of her pamphlets. A hypnotist in Riverside, California, for example, purchased a copy of the Danse du Ventre, Letter to a Prospective Bride, and Right Marital Living, while a Congregational minister in Chicago bought a copy of four of her pamphlets, plus an edition of Stockham’s Karezza, which Craddock continued to promote as an important companion volume. Most customers were less voracious, and, like the professor at Trinity College (later Duke University) in Durham, simply ordered one pamphlet; his choice, Right Marital Living, was the favored one on this client list. Getting the word out through advertising in newspapers, medical journals, and freethinking periodicals, Craddock managed to develop a decent customer base for her writings. Her patrons especially came from the big cities in which she had already labored in person, but dozens were scattered in small towns across the country: East Prairie, Missouri; Waterville, Maine; Abbeville, South Carolina; Aztec, New Mexico; Gardener, North Dakota, and the like.19
Craddock’s program began with the notion that those on the verge of marriage needed to be better prepared for sexual relations on the wedding night and thereafter. “The usual custom,” Craddock remarked in her Letter to a Prospective Bride, “is to keep a woman as ignorant as possible in regard to this matter previous to her wedding night.” This lack of awareness resulted in “all sorts of awkward embarrassments” as well as more momentous disharmonies, Craddock explained. It often made the groom’s sexual passion shocking to the bride; jarring, rushed, and perhaps even brutal, the consummation of the marriage could deteriorate into “a night of rape and torture to the woman, violating all instincts of her purity.” The marriage rite shifted the man from suitor to possessor; he all too frequently presumed an ownership of the woman’s body, a conjugal right to her sexual favors; she felt reduced to a convenience or even “a slop-pail.”
The wedding night should be a mutually joyous experience, swore Craddock—not a traumatizing experience for the bride. It should be, she said, “a night of poetry and tender passion, of serene self-control, and exaltation of mystic rapture for both parties.” Craddock joined these romantic abstractions to very concrete advice to the husband. He should be patient and gentle at first entry, should consider “anointing” the vagina with “some harmless unguent, such as vaseline,” and attend to the very deliberate process of bringing his bride to “final ecstasy.” Endurance and focus were crucial: If either party was exhausted from the wedding day, then it was best to wait until the next morning for “the firs
t marital endearments.” Sexual union demanded physical vigor and mental alertness, not to mention “artistic skill and spiritual insight.” The wedding night, given both its erotic and mystical possibilities, was not a time for thoughtless impetuosity or heedless gratification.20
To ensure a successful marriage, Craddock instructed, couples needed to carry forward what they had learned in preparation for the wedding night. She held out the hope that, with proper coaching, married couples could enjoy “a perpetual honeymoon,” but she knew that the demand for her advice came from the fact that husbands and wives regularly experienced “growing disappointment or estrangement” in their sex lives. To make marital relations healthier and happier, to reduce frustration and division, Craddock offered several ground-rules for couples to follow:1. Practice good grooming. Pay close attention to “la toilette intime,” to bodily hygiene and physical appearance. “Cleanliness is next to godliness at the genitals, as elsewhere,” Craddock advised, as she exuberantly combined the hygienic recommendations of medical works like Edward Bliss Foote’s Plain Home Talk and Medical Common Sense with detailed fashion tips for happy domesticity. Husbands, sadly lacking in “color expression” in their standard wardrobe, needed to cultivate their “aesthetic sensibilities,” and wives should give careful attention to, among other things, the luxuriance of their hair and the frilliness of their lingerie, which could be “made beautiful with laces and ribbons.”
2. Slow down. Small gestures of physical affection were important to display throughout the day and, once in bed together, the couple should lavish kisses and caresses upon one another. They should savor lying naked in each other’s arms—or, in marriage-reform parlance, take delight in “the nude embrace” as “a pure and beautiful approach to that sacred moment” of actual intercourse. “Do not be in a hurry,” Craddock counseled. “‘Patience and a little oil will do wonders,’ is a saying which applies here.”
3. Be naked and not ashamed. Women especially had been enjoined to sexual passivity, indifference, and modesty, all of which stifled the appropriate passions of lovemaking. “They clinch their hands,” Craddock wrote of severe cases, “as they force themselves to lie still, resolutely trying to resist any answering throb of passion during sexual union.” That miseducation of women had to be undone—right down to the acceptability and desirability of vigorous “pelvic movements” during sex. In wrongly taking passionlessness as a sign of “womanly purity,” all too many wives, Craddock feared, were choking back the very “sexual responsiveness” for which their partners longed. Indeed, Craddock suggested that faking orgasm (“to pretend rapture”) was actually preferable to lying there “like a log, without response.”
4. Try different positions. While she acknowledged that the “natural position” was for the man to be on top, she noted that “it is sometimes better for the woman to mount the man.” Not to be forgotten were “various side positions, which different couples can find out for themselves, by experimentation.” Ideally, the resourceful couple would find just the right position for maximizing their mutual satisfaction—one that lifted them to new heights as “sexual comrades.”
5. Keep the mind focused, engaged, and free of distracting worries. Ever-cerebral, Craddock saw physical intimacy as a vehicle of “intellectual blending”: “Think and talk during the nude embrace, and also at intervals during the sexual embrace, of good books, pictures, statuary, music, sermons, plans for benefiting other people, noble deeds, spiritual aspirations.” A couple achieved “perfect oneness” only when their minds as well as their bodies merged during their leisurely-paced sexual encounters.
Even as Craddock wanted to keep couples on the high road of spiritual and cultural uplift, she was offering manuals of sexual advice that were unmatched at the time for their candor and directness. Indeed, if she had been able to get her big book on “The Marriage Relation” into print, it would have left Stockham’s Karezza looking spare and prim in comparison. As it was, Craddock presented an original voice in a body of advice literature filled with euphemisms, unintelligible whispers, and full-throated rants against self-abuse. Her very prose seemed designed to destroy the canard of the passionless woman.21
However emancipating, Craddock’s guidelines for sexual expression came with severe regulations, as many “don’ts” as “dos.” This was especially the case for men. The release of female ardor would happen only through the restraint of male excitement. From the couple’s very first night together, the husband’s “selfish passion” was the particular object of Craddock’s scorn and disciplinary guidelines. The man, to be an accomplished and considerate lover, had to develop control over his own orgasm. To be sure, many of the men Craddock dealt with needed her admonition. Asked how long he lasted, one of her clients, whose wife was not enjoying sex that much, “answered carelessly, ‘the average time for a man.’” To which Craddock rejoined, “And what may that be in your case?’” “Oh, about forty seconds,” the man replied. “He was much astonished,” she deadpanned, “when I told him that he ought not to terminate the act short of a half hour or hour after entrance, so as to give time for his wife to come to climax.” Ejaculation, Craddock insisted, was always to be delayed and almost always suppressed. (The only obvious exception to the latter was in those cases in which the woman considered it a “fitting time” for her to become pregnant.) In that light, premature ejaculation was seen as a triple violation of the rules: It failed on the grounds of leisurely satisfaction, mind-over-body discipline, and birth control. Lasting only forty seconds made a man a derisory failure.22
Craddock knew that many physicians, including Edward Bond Foote, as well as many of her male clients thought her prescriptions for manly self-control unrealistic, if not harmful. Ejaculation was a necessary relief, not a dangerous expenditure; the very purpose of coitus, not a sign of failed discipline. But Craddock kept invoking her own male authorities, including Noyes and Chavannes, in defense of both the rigor and the practicality of such continence. As Craddock saw it, a husband who subjected himself to this training, stopping repeatedly on the verge of emission, would eventually gain the ability to have a “controlled orgasm”: that is, he would be able to experience the full thrill of sexual climax, while strictly retaining his semen.
Not all of Craddock’s ostensible supporters shared her enthusiasm for these theories about restricted ejaculation. Foote, open-minded about male continence, had nonetheless lost regard for it through “personal experiments” as well as the frustrations of his own patients. Putting his trust in improved birth-control devices, he tried valiantly to convince Craddock that she should not be emphasizing a controlled orgasm but a complete one. She remained unconvinced, holding fast to the protracted discipline of semen retention. While she did not present this directive—at least not overtly—as a female avenging of male haste, she certainly wanted to turn the husband into a tireless self-monitor of his own performance: “In all things, let him seek, not to get the most pleasure possible out of the relation for himself, but to give his wife the most pleasure,” she instructed. “Let him study his own movements, in their possibilities of conferring pleasure.” Long an act that prioritized the male experience, as Craddock saw it, sex was to be shifted to recognize female needs and desires.23
Some of Craddock’s other proscriptions made the strenuous demand for female satisfaction even more challenging for the husband. While she encouraged ample foreplay, including the husband’s gentle stroking of his wife’s breasts and face, she still drew strict lines on the body. “Upon no account use the hand to arouse excitement at the woman’s genitals,” she specified. “There is but one lawful finger of love with which to approach her sexual organs for purposes of excitation—the erectile organ of the male. Many men, in order to arouse passion quickly in the woman, are accustomed to titillate the clitoris with the finger—a proceeding distinctly masturbative.” To be counted a successful lover, the husband had to bring his wife to orgasm—but this was to occur only during vaginal intercourse, no
t through any substitutive techniques. The clitoris, Craddock claimed, should be “saluted, at most, in passing, and afterwards ignored as far as possible.”24
Clitoral orgasm appeared to Craddock a dangerous sensual indulgence—one that rightly enlightened couples would avoid. Clitoral stimulation, she warned, created “a fury for satisfaction,” and it encouraged masturbatory habits, which were likely to leave the wife haggard and coarsened. Though Craddock thought that the morbid effects of masturbation—insanity, epilepsy, acne, asthma, eye troubles, and sundry other calamities—had been “greatly exaggerated,” she still condemned it as an asocial behavior and moral ill. She had digested the more dispassionate treatment of autoeroticism in the au courant sexology of Havelock Ellis, whose writings debunked the more sensational claims about masturbation’s ill effects—but Craddock was not prepared to follow him down the path toward normalizing it. Masturbation, that “colossal bogy,” retained much of its horror in her outlook.25
Craddock’s antipathy towards clitoral stimulation was representative of a deeper strain of anxiety within her sexual mores. Even worse than its masturbatory quality, clitoral stimulation partook of “sexual perversion”—a category that Craddock invoked most often when the “unnatural relations” of same-sex love lurched into view. And it quickly became apparent that this was her underlying problem with the clitoris as well. By Craddock’s anatomical account (which she shared with Freud, among others), the clitoris was “not a female organ at all, but a rudimentary male organ.” Hence the man who stimulated it was actually entering a danger zone of same-sex genital contact and the woman who wanted it was showing herself to be “semi-masculine.” Husband and wife were both straying from expected norms, but the man especially seemed to be edging into the perilously unacceptable. “What a man needs, in order to establish a perfectly wholesome channel for the outlet of his sex magnetism at the genitals,” Craddock claimed, “is to have genital contact, not with a grown man, nor with an immature boy, nor with the rudiment of a male procreative organ in a woman; what he needs is genital contact with the female organs of a thoroughly well sexed woman.” She readily admitted that many women liked “the excitement produced there” and were wont to insist on it from their husbands, but, given the specter of same-sex love, clitoral stimulation was indelibly marked as abnormal, “an out and out act of sexual perversion.” Clearly, Craddock’s regimen was anything but a free-for-all.26
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