
What made Ida unusual was the time period in which she lived and worked: any woman who displayed even a remote interest in sex could be tossed into an insane asylum, or in jail for running afoul of the evil Anthony Comstock’s obscenity laws. (And Ida was.) Both Ida and Margaret Sanger, among others, came up against Anthony Comstock, who as the Postal Inspector and self-proclaimed vice squad, was the perverted christian right’s spyglass into everyone’s bedrooms; women, of course, always being the ones punished for anything odd taking place in the bedroom.
What made Ida even more unusual – and what caught my attention immediately! – was that she had a spirit husband. She identified him as "Soph", and their sexual unions were so passionate and so loud, that even the neighbors noticed. Why should anyone find this unusual, she wondered, when Jesus himself was the offspring of such a union? Human mother, spirit father.
"Am I not right in saying that to impugn the possibility of marital relations between earthly women and heavenly bridegrooms is to strike at the very foundations of Christianity?"
Ida Craddock, Heavenly Bridegrooms: An Unintentional Contribution to the Erotogenetic Interpretation of Religion, by Ida C. (Ida Craddock), Bibliography, with an Introduction by Theodore Schroeder, 1918
I grinned from ear to ear when I read this! The conclusion of her life? Tragic. Anthony Comstock and his christian supporters had her arrested for sending "smut" though the mail, the said "smut" being marital advice for women, none of whom had been told what "sex" was, before they were tossed into the marital bed. Rather than die in prison, she committed suicide, already fully aware that she would NOT be punished for it, the way christians insisted she would. She’d be with her spirit husband, and death held no fear for her. Her suicide letters, one to her mother, the other to the public, are some of the most powerful letters you’ll ever read.
For those interested in a brief but very interesting biographical sketch of the amazing Ida Craddock:
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2012/may/17/sexy-ghost-story/
2 comments:
"Soph" might have been a ghost because she knew him in life, he died when she was still young.
Possibly, but Ida didn't think it was a ghost; she saw him as a "Spirit Husband". What's even more pitiful: he had to convince her that a specific part of her body (three guesses which part) was NOT created by the christian satan as a deterrent to salvation. From the spirit realm he could easily see how much damage the christian belief system caused, when it pertained to sex.
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