Ida Craddock

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Portrait of Ida Craddock
Portrait of Ida Craddock

Ida C. Craddock (August 1, 1857 – October 16, 1902) was a 19th century American advocate of free speech and women's rights.

Born in Philadelphia, her minister father died when she was two years old. Her mother homeschooled her as an only child and provided her with an extensive fundamentalist and Christian education.

In her twenties, Craddock was recommended by the faculty for admission into the University of Pennsylvania as its first female undergraduate student after having passed the required entrance exams. However, her entrance was blocked by the University's Board of Trustees in 1882. She went on to publish a stenography textbook, Primary Phonography, and teach the subject to women at Giraud College.

In her thirties, Craddock left her Quaker upbringing behind. She developed an academic interest in the occult through her association with the Theosophical Society beginning around 1887. She tried in her writings to synthesize translated mystic literature and traditions from many cultures into a scholarly, distilled whole. As a freethinker, she was elected Secretary of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Secular Union in 1889. Although a member of the Unitarian faith, Craddock became a student of religious eroticism and declared herself a Priestess and Pastor of the Church of Yoga. Never married, Craddock eventually claimed to have a blissful ongoing marital relationship with an angel named Soph. Her mother responded by threatening to burn Craddock's papers and unsuccessfully tried to have her institutionalized.

Craddock moved to Chicago and opened a Dearborn Street office offering "mystical" sexual counseling to married couples via both walk-in counseling and mail order. She dedicated herself to “preventing sexual evils and sufferings” by educating adults, achieving national notoriety with her editorials in defense of Little Egypt. This was a controversial belly dancing act at the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago during 1893.

A gifted and compelling writer, Craddock wrote many serious instructional tracts on human sexuality and appropriate, respectful sexual relations between married couples. Among her works were Heavenly Bridegrooms, Psychic Wedlock, Spiritual Joys, The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living. These sex manuals were all considered obscene by the standards of her day. Their distribution led to numerous confrontations with various authorities, often initiated by Craddock herself. She was held for up to several months at a time on morality charges in five local jails as well as the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.

Mass distribution of Right Marital Living through the U.S. Mail after its publication as a featured article in the medical journal The Chicago Clinic led to an 1899 Chicago Federal indictment of Craddock. She pled guilty and received a suspended sentence. A subsequent 1902 New York Federal trial on charges of sending The Wedding Night through the mail during a sting operation ended with her conviction. She refused to plead insanity as a condition to avoid prison time. At age forty-five, she saw her five year sentence as a life term and so committed suicide, by slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas, on October 16, 1902 the day before reporting to Federal prison. She penned a private final letter to her mother as well as a lengthy public suicide note condemning Anthony Comstock, her personal nemesis. Comstock first opposed Craddock almost a decade before over the Little Egypt act and effectively acted as her prosecutor during both Federal legal actions against her. He had sponsored the Comstock Act under which she was repeatedly charged.

Today Ida Craddock's manuscripts and notes are preserved in the Special Collections of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her battle with Anthony Comstock is the subject of the 2006 stage play Smut by Alice Jay and Joseph Adler, which received its world premiere at Miami's GableStage in June 2007.

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