In honor of Banned Books Week, I am sharing more about Ida Craddock , the heroine of my novel Censored Angel. Bright and studious, Ida was an unlikely woman to become the enemy of Anthony Comstock.
Upon rejection from the University of Pennsylvania, she decided to carry out her own research. She chose as her topic Female Sex Worship, motivated by the question of why there were no women ministers. This research and the pain and abuse women at the time experienced in their marriages, led her to write, lecture, and distribute a series of sex education pamphlets, intended to help men and women experience pleasure and orgasm in their marital relationships.
Comstockery
Doing so in the late 1800s was risky. At the time, Anthony Comstock, the Anti-Obscenity Postal Inspector and father of the Comstock Act, was on a rampage to destroy any mention of sex in public society.
Comstock believed himself more moral and more pure than other men. He campaigned to wipe all reference to sex, birth-control, and the human body from any and all publications. Under the guise of saving children, he burned medical and anatomy books, along with pornography; attacked doctors, as well as booksellers; railed against nudity in works of fine art; and took it upon himself to define what was an obscenity so that juries, such as the ones Ida eventually faced, never saw the material they were to judge as obscene.
Ida’s Battle
Small, petite, and pretty, Ida Craddock, who dared advocate that women learn to belly dance as preparation for marriage, soon became the focus of Comstock’s vendetta.
Ida found herself pursued across the country, even taking refuge in England at one point. But despite the constant threat of arrest and imprisonment, she refused to stop helping people through her writings.
Worn out from pursuit by his agents, she moved to New York City, where Comstock held sway. It did not take long for him to arrest her and burn her writings. Although Ida fought her conviction based on the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, she was tried and convicted of sending obscenity through the mails. Facing a long prison sentence at hard labor designed to silence her, Ida took the radical step of writing a letter about her treatment at his hands to be made public after her death by suicide. In her mind, she was joining her angel husband in heaven.
Here is part of her suicide letter.
Room 5, No. 134 West 23D St., New York, Oct. 16, 1902.
To the Public:
I am taking my life, because a judge, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, has decreed me guilty of a crime which I did not commit–the circulation of obscene literature–and has announced his intention of consigning me to prison for a long term.
The book has been favorably reviewed by medical magazines of standing, and has been approved by physicians of reputation. The Rev. Dr. Rainsford of this city, in two letters to me, partially approved this book so far as to say that if all young people were to read it, a great deal of misery, suffering, and disappointment could be avoided, and that to have arrested me on account of it, as Mr. Comstock has done, was ridiculous. This little book, “The Wedding Night,” and its companion pamphlet, “Right Marital Living,” have been circulated with approval among Social Purity women, members of the W.C.T.U., clergymen and reputable physicians; various physicians have ordered these books from me for their patients, or have sent their patients to me to procure them or to receive even fuller instruction orally; respectable married women have purchased them from me for their daughters, husbands for their wives, wives for husbands, young women for their betrothed lovers. On all sides, these little pamphlets have evoked from their readers commendation for their purity, their spiritual uplifting, their sound common sense in treating of healthful and happy relations between husbands and wives.
In contrast with this mass of testimony to their purity and usefulness, a paid informer, who is making his living out of entering complaints against immoral books and pictures, has lodged complaint against one of my books as “obscene, lewd, lascivious,” and proposes to indict the other book later on, so as to inflict legal penalties on me a second time. This man, Anthony Comstock, who is unctuous with hypocrisy, pretends that I am placing these books in the hands of minors, even little girls and boys, with a view to the debauchment of their morals. He has not, however, produced any young person thus far who has been injured through their perusal; nor has any parent or guardian come forward who claims even the likelihood of any young persons being injured by either of these books; nor has he even vouchsafed the addresses of any of the people from whom he states he has received complaints. In addition, he has deliberately lied about the matter. He stated to Judge Thomas of the United States Circuit Court (secretly, not while in court), that I had even handed one of these books to the little daughter of the janitress of the building in which I have my office. It so happens that there is no janitress in this building, nor is there any little girl connected with same. I took a paper around among the tenants to this effect, which they signed, and which I sent to the judge by my lawyer; also a paper to the same effect, which my landlord stood prepared to attest before a notary, if need be. But even this made no impression upon Judge Thomas; he still is firmly convinced (so he says) that Anthony Comstock is a strictly truthful man.
After Ida’s suicide, the men and women who had come to her defense vilified Comstock for hounding a “bright, brainy” woman to death. Excerpts of her suicide letters were published in the newspapers. Fair-minded religious leaders spoke from the pulpit. Comstock was heckled when he spoke in his own defense, especially when he called Craddock a “mad dog” and stated it was “imperative that mad dogs of all sizes should be killed, before children are bitten.” He never regained the sway that he held over the public, although his restrictive Comstock Act still remains federal law and might be resurrected at any time.
Ida Craddock’s Writings
Most of her writings can be found at https://www.idacraddock.com
Learn More about Ida Craddock
A Wanton Woman NPR Review
Ida Craddock on the Belly Dance
Read Ida Craddock’s story. Buy Censored Angel. All proceeds go to the Freedom to Read Foundation which supports librarians fighting book bans.