Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman by Leigh Eric Schmidt (review)

Heaven’s Bride provides an insightful and meticulously researched exploration into the life and world of Ida C. Craddock, a woman largely forgotten today but considered notorious during her short and ultimately tragic life. Craddock became associated with some of the major social, intellectual, and religious movements of the 1890s, the last decade of her life, even though she was often relegated to the margins due to her gender, her lack of academic credentials, and her religious beliefs. Schmidt’s biography reveals a complex and compelling character who, through her endeavors as a feminist, sexologist, secularist, marriage counselor, and even pastor, challenged the conventions of her day to both acclaim and derision.

Schmidt selectively probes Craddock’s early life for insights into her future actions and beliefs. She had a vexed relationship with her mother, a devout and overbearing woman who stifled her daughter’s ambitions as a child and questioned her sanity as an adult, threatening repeatedly (and once, successfully) to lock her up in an insane asylum. Craddock, proving both resilient and precocious, sought admission to the elite, all-male University of Pennsylvania and passed its arduous entrance exams. Although she was denied admission, this battle revealed the confident and tenacious qualities that characterized her later efforts to gain knowledge, independence, and recognition as a mystic, scholar, and sexologist. These pursuits would place Craddock in the center of the era’s debates over sexual and religious freedom.

Schmidt ably leads the reader through Craddock’s various transformations during the 1890s, providing insights into her complicated character while also contextualizing the currents of intellectual and religious thought. Her work as a secretary for the American Secular Union provided a forum for her activities as a freethinker and women’s rights advocate while also inspiring her first scholarly work on the sexual history of religion. The subject of her research—phallic worship—made her a marginal figure both as a woman in a male-dominated field and as an amateur scholar among academics and exemplified the sort of idiosyncratic decisions she made in her life. While working with the Secular Union, she also began to explore an eclectic array of religious beliefs, including Unitarianism, spiritualism, and even “clairaudience,” vaguely defined by Schmidt as “listening quietly for an inward voice that was separable from her individual subjectivity” (106). These religious interests, in turn, prompted Craddock to start a “Church of Yoga,” for which she served as pastor. Her career as a sexologist emerged from these scholarly and religious interests, as they inspired her to reconsider the relationship between sexuality and spirituality. In this capacity she wrote numerous pamphlets and counseled couples on the spiritual and physical intimacies of the marriage bed.

It is perhaps not surprising that Craddock paid a price for these endeavors, becoming a victim of Anthony Comstock’s purity crusade and a madwoman in the records of the psychoanalyst Theodore Schroeder. Craddock first came to the attention of Anthony Comstock in 1893, when he attempted to charge her for distributing a pamphlet defending the Danse du Ventre, or the Belly Dance, as a means of sexual and spiritual expression. Comstock proved more successful in 1902, when he brought charges against her for distributing indecent materials. After serving three months in jail on state charges, Craddock, rather than face federal prison time, became a martyr among freethinkers by committing suicide at the age of forty-five. After her death, Theodore Schroeder appropriated her life, titling his postmortem assessment of Craddock “One Religio-Sexual Maniac.”

Schmidt’s analysis of Craddock’s endeavors reveals a woman who was brave, insatiably curious, and perhaps even brilliant. Curiously, it is not until the final chapter that he provides a comprehensive explanation of her role as “heaven’s bride.” Craddock claimed to have married a businessman she referred to as Soph...