From the Archives: Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis. A Novel by Joan Koster

This was originally posted on October 10, 2024.

Moderator’s Note: With the Trump administration getting closer and closer to re-establishing the Comstock Laws in their efforts to stop all abortions in the United States, we felt it important to repost this story. It is about Ida Craddock, her life and her efforts to stand against Anthony Comstock. Joan Koster wrote a powerful book about her. This post today is also a prelude to tomorrow’s post which will discuss a new movie Sex Radical that will be premiering this month about Ida Craddock’s life.

“I would lay down my life for the cause of sex reform, but I don’t want to be swept away. A useless sacrifice.” Ida C. Craddock, Letter to Edward Bond Foote, June 6, 1898

In 1882, Ida C. Craddock applied to the all-male undergraduate school of University of Pennsylvania. With the highest results on the entrance tests, the faculty voted to admit her. But her admission was rejected by the Board of Trustees, who said the university was not suitably prepared for a female. (U of P only became co-ed in 1974)

With her aspirations blocked, Ida left home determined to leave her mark on women’s lives by studying and writing about Female Sex Worship in early cultures. At the time, little information was available to women about sexual relations. To do her research, Ida resorted to having male friends take books forbidden to females, such as the Karma Sutra, out of the library for her.

An unmarried woman, she turned to spirituality and the practice of yoga, a newly introduced practice to the American public at the time, as a way to learn about sex. In her journals, she describes her interaction with angels from the borderlands, and in particular, her sexual experiences with Soph, her angel husband through what was likely tantric sex.

Her studies, her sexual experiences, 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 to experience pleasure and orgasm in their marital relationships.

Comstockery

Doing so was risky. At the time, Anthony Comstock, the Anti-Obscenity Postal Inspector and father of the Comstock laws, was on a rampage to destroy any mention of sex in public society.

Comstock believed himself more moral and more pure than other men. In his campaign to wipe any reference to sex, birth-control, and the human body from any and all publications, he went far beyond the bounds of commonsense. 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 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.

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’s Legacy

Emma Goldman, in her autobiography, Living My Life, called Ida one of the “bravest champions of women’s emancipation.”

One important result of Ida Craddock’s persecution by Comstock was the formation of groups specifically focused on First Amendment rights, such as the Free Speech League, the antecedent of the American Civil Liberties Union. These groups challenged the arbitrariness of the Comstock obscenity laws. Why were some works, such as the poetry of Walt Whitman banned, they asked, but not Shakespeare? Their defense of our First Amendment rights continues to this day.

Another effect of Ida Craddock’s battle against censorship was to awaken Americans, especially women, to new ways of talking about marriage, sexuality, and reproduction.

Researching Censored Angel

Because Ida Craddock was an ardent correspondent, diarist, and author, many details of her life are available for anyone wishing to learn more about her. In Censored Angel, I have relied heavily on her diaries and letters in creating my imagined version of her character.

The fact that so much of her work has been saved is due to the interest that Theodore Schroeder took in her. Schroeder, although a founding member of the Free Speech League, never met Ida Craddock.

Starting a decade after her death, Schroeder, an amateur psychoanalyst, began collecting her writings and interviewing those who knew her. Ida C, as he called her, became the star example of his theory of the primitive confusion of sexual desire with religious passion. He proceeded to tear apart her writings and accuse her of being obsessed with sex—a nymphomaniac.

William Stead believed Schroeder’s views would have been abhorrent to Ida and refused to turn over her papers and materials to Schroeder. Only after Stead drowned in the sinking of the Titanic, did Schroeder obtain her papers from Stead’s daughter.

Schroeder went on to publish her work and numerous articles in which he expounded on her obsession with sex, titling one article “One Religio-Sexual Maniac.”

Despite Schroeder’s particular take on Ida’s writings, the work he did collecting everything about her has benefited modern researchers. All her papers are currently in the Ida Craddock collection at Southern Illinois University.

Works by Ida Craddock

Lunar and Sex Worship by Ida Craddock with an Introduction by Vere Chappell (2010).
Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock edited by Vere Chappell (2010).

Ida Craddock’s letters and diaries can be obtained from the Southern Illinois University Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Digital copies of her articles and her suicide letters to her mother and to Comstock are available at Vere Chappell’s https://www.idacraddock.com

To learn more about Ida C. Craddock’s life:

Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman by Leigh Eric Schmidt (2010).
Ida Craddock: A Religious Interpretation of Sexuality (1877-1902) by Elizabeth A. Green, master’s thesis, Southern Illinois University (1995).

To learn more about Anthony Comstock’s war on Ida Craddock and her compatriots:

Frauds Exposed by Anthony Comstock (1880).
Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock by Amy Werbel (2018).
The Man Who Hated Women by Amy Sohn (2021).
The Mind of the Censor and The Eye of the Beholder by Robert Corn-Revere (2023)
Traps for the Young by Anthony Comstock 3^rd edition (1883).
Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career by Anna Louise Bates (1995).

The text of the Comstock Act can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873

To learn more about nineteenth century women’s views on marriage and about tantric sex:

Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America by Carroll Smith-Rosenburg (1985).
Tantric Orgasm for Women by Diana Richardson (2004).

About the Book

Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis
By Joan Koster
Book 2 in the Forgotten Women Series

She refused to be silenced! Brilliant, corseted, and haunted by spirits from the Borderlands, Ida Craddock turns her back on the constrictions of Victorian society and strikes out on her own, becoming a mystic marriage counselor. Sharing what she views as essential sexual knowledge puts her in the crosshairs of Anthony Comstock, the nation’s Anti-Obscenity Postal Inspector. She vows to bring him down. He promises to silence her forever. With prison looming, Ida and her guardian angels must prepare for a battle they may not be able to win.

Censored Angel received the 2023 Best Historical Fiction Award from Book Fest and short listed for the Chanticleer Goethe Award

Available from these online sellers
https://books2read.com/the-censored-angel

All proceeds from the sale of this novel are donated to the Freedom-to-Read Foundation of the American Library Association. Learn more here. https://www.ftrf.org

BIO: Dr. Joan Koster writes eye-opening historical fiction about forgotten women. Book 1 in the series That Dickinson Girl is about the life of Civil War orator, Anna E. Dickinson. Releasing in November is Prairie Cinderella, the story of American sculptress, Vinnie Ream, the first woman to receive a sculpture commission from Congress.

Interested in meeting more forgotten women? Joan Koster publishes an article about a forgotten woman every month on her blog at https://joankoster.com