Sunday Pages: "The Wedding Night"

A manual by Ida C. Craddock

Dear Reader,

On October 10, 1902, Ida C. Craddock was convicted, for the second time, of obscenity under the Comstock Act. The pearl-clutching judge presiding over her trial, one Edward B. Thomas of the U.S. Circuit Court, ruled that her slender volume, The Wedding Night, was so “obscene, lewd, lascivious, and dirty” that the members of the jury would not be allowed to read it, and thus to determine for themselves if the alleged obscenity, lewdness, lasciviousness, and/or dirt in its 4,813 words was sufficient to meet federal standards for conviction. Per his instructions, the jury was not to weigh in on the content of the book, but simply decide whether or not it was sent in the mail.

Craddock was treated by Judge Thomas as a writer of erotica, a Gilded Age Pauline Réage or Anaïs Nin, if not an outright smut dealer or common pornographer. But that’s not what she was. Ida C. Craddock was a sexologist; a teacher; an instructor—a sort of Dr. Ruth Westheimer of the nineteenth century. The Wedding Night was not some racy tale of love and lust, but rather a manual for what brides-to-be might expect on the night in question. She had an idealized, rather traditional view of marriage, and was, relative to other sex radicals of the day, conservative. She wasn’t trying to rock the boat. She was trying to help women.

The manual begins in soaring, almost prayerful language:

Oh, crowning time of lovers’ raptures veiled in mystic splendor, sanctified by priestly blessing and by the benediction of all who love the lovers! How shall we chant thy praise?

Of thy joys even the poets dare not sing, save in words that suggest but do not reveal. At thy threshold, the most daring of the realistic novelists is fain to pause, and, with farewells to the lovers who are entering thy portals, let fall the curtain of silence betwixt them and the outside world forevermore.

What art thou, oh, night of mystery and passion? Why shouldst thou be thus enshrouded in an impenetrable veil of secrecy? Are thy joys so pure, so dazzling, so ecstatic, that no outside mortal can look upon thy face and live?

Or art thou a Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, and, under thy covering of silver light, a fiend, a loathsome monster, a distorted and perverted semblance of what thou dost profess thyself to the world?

Whatsoever thou art, it were well, methinks, that the veil, for a moment, were lifted from thee, that the young and ignorant may see thee as thou art, and, seeing, be not misled by thy glamour to their own undoing, but keep the higher law when they shall have entered thy radiant doors.

In other words, “Poets and novelists and everyone else crows about how great the wedding night is, but none of them tell you what actually happens.” After that flowery preamble, she lays out her purpose:

When the last stanzas of the wedding march have died away, and the bride, in shimmering white, places her hand in that of the bridegroom and pledges herself to be his wife “until death do part,” a shiver of awe stirs the audience, as a field of wheat is stirred by a strong wind. An uncomfortable feeling pervades us all during these few moments, for it is felt to be a solemn occasion; and when the final words of the marriage service have been pronounced, every one feels relieved.

Yet there is a more solemn moment to follow. It comes when the last kisses of mother and girl-friends have been given, and the last grain of rice has been thrown upon the newly wedded pair, and the last hack driver and hotel or railway porter have been gotten rid of, and the key is turned in the bedroom door and the blinds drawn, and the young girl, who has never been alone in a locked room with a man in all her life, suddenly finds herself, as though in a dream, delivered over by her own innocent and pure affection into the power of a man, to be used at his will and pleasure. She, who has never bared more than her throat and shoulders and arms to the world, now finds that her whole body, especially those parts which she has all her life been taught it was immodest to fail to keep covered, are no longer to be her own private property; she must share their privacy with this man.

Fortunate indeed is the bride whose lover at such a moment is a gentleman in every fibre of his being.

For there is a wrong way and there is a right way to pass the wedding night.

The book presupposes that the bride is a virgin, and has had exactly zero experience in the sexual realm. That specific demographic is also its intended audience. And she goes into clinical detail about what to expect.

The manual ends by invoking the Lord and Savior. You know, as juicy smut does:

Remember that Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God with all our soul and mind and heart, and with all out strength.

No bridal couple who have once shared the joy of a controlled orgasm and sustained thrill with God will ever care to leave God out of the partnership in future.

Craddock—a key figure in Amy Sohn’s brilliant The Man Who Hated Women, discussed on Friday’s podcast—was not being obscene, full stop. And yet the jury had no choice but to find her guilty. Anthony Comstock, who had been tormenting her with a stalker’s relentlessness for years, saw to it personally. As she wrote after the verdict:

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.

Craddock had already spent a few months incarcerated on Blackwell’s Island, for a previous but no less unjust conviction. After losing again, she knew she would spend the rest of her life in prison, and she did not want to suffer that fate.

And so, in her apartment at 134 W 23rd Street in Manhattan, the night before she was to turn herself in, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She wrote a suicide note for public consumption, explaining all of this—a longer document, ironically, than the little book that had brought the conviction upon her:

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…

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.

Judge Thomas, incidentally, is not Clarence Thomas.

She then explains, with the clarity, authority, and righteousness of purpose that informs all of her writing, the egregious unfairness of the trial:

On Friday last, October 10, I underwent what was supposed to be a fair and impartial trial by jury; but which was really a most unfair trial, before a thoroughly partisan judge, at the close of which he abolished my right of trial by jury on the main question at issue, namely the alleged obscenity of The Wedding Night book. My counsel was not permitted to present in evidence circulars which showed that as far back as 1898 and 1899, I was accustomed to state in print that any applicants for oral instruction upon marriage who were under 21 would have to produce written consent from a parent or a guardian. My evidence was almost wholly choked off; neither my counsel nor myself was permitted to endeavor to justify the book by argument. The most the judge would do was to permit me to read from various paragraphs in the book, without comment, if these could explain the indicted paragraphs. Even with this tiny bit of a chance, I made such good use of my opportunity before the jury, that Judge Thomas, who was evidently prejudiced in advance against both myself and my book, saw that he dared not now risk the case to the jury, or he might not manage to convict me after all. And so he announced that he himself intended to pass upon the character of the book. He stated that there is in existence a decision of the United States Supreme Court which gives him this right.

He said he would not let the question go to the jury; he considered the book “obscene, lewd, lascivious, dirty.” He added that he would submit to the jury only the question of fact. Did the defendant mail the book? (The charge was “mailing an obscene book.”) He said, “Gentlemen of the Jury, the question for you to pass upon is, Did the defendant mail the book? You know that she admits having mailed the book. Please render your verdict. I do not suppose you will care to leave your seats.” And the poor little cowed jury could do nothing but to meekly obey the behest of this unrighteous judge, and to pass in their ballots, “Guilty of mailing the book.” Which, of course, was no crime at all.

There was no one to come to her rescue. Comstock, unpopular thought he was, was nevertheless too powerful to stop. Certainly the local press had zero interest in making a big deal of this travesty of justice. (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.) She continues:

It is evident that the political pull of the party which fathers Anthony Comstock is too powerful for any newspaper in New York to dare to raise a protest when, at the instigation of this ex officio informer, an innocent woman, engaged in a laudable work of sex reform, indorsed by reputable citizens, is arrested on false information and denied her right of trial by jury.

Since Friday last, people of influence and respectability have written to the judge on my behalf and have been to see him; but he announces his inflexible intention of sending me to prison, and, he is careful to malignantly add, “for a long, long term.” I am a “very dangerous woman,” he adds: Mr. Comstock has told him most shocking things about me—not in court, however, this paid informer being far too cute to dare to face his victim openly with any such lies.

At my age (I was forty-five this last August) confinement under the rigors of prison life would be equivalent to my death-warrant. The judge must surely know this; and since he is evidently determined to not only totally suppress my work, but to place me where only death can release me, I consider myself justified in choosing for myself, as did Socrates, the manner of my death. I prefer to die comfortably and peacefully, on my own little bed in my own room, instead of on a prison cot.

And so she did. On October 16, 1902, after finishing her letter to the public, Craddock, not wanting to take any chances, slashed her wrists and inhaled coal gas from her oven.

I’m writing about this today because it is fresh in my mind, but also because what happened to Ida C. Craddock is happening to women in this country right now: the legal system is going after women trying to help other women. This week, we learned that in Georgia, where the state’s draconian antiabortion laws went into effect after the Dobbs ruling, a healthy 28-year-old woman died because doctors feared that giving her necessary medical care would subject them to legal penalty. As Pro Publica reported:

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

That’s the actual, horrible reality of what happens when abortion is criminalized. (Someone should send a copy of that article to Pope Francis, who continues to operate under the delusional fairy tale that abortion is a euphemism for baby-killing.)

Dobbs puts women’s lives in danger. The evidence is incontrovertible. But that is clearly the intended result of these neo-Comstock laws. Men are killing women, and using the risk of death to control them. And while the press reports on these horror stories when they crop up, the political writers are too consumed with the horse race and the poll numbers to tell the American people that one candidate—the adjudicated rapist—unabashedly wants women to die and the other one does not.

Craddock’s astute characterization of Anthony Comstock, written just before she ended her life, might apply to any one of a number of prominent, powerful men in the 2024 Republican ecosphere: Donald Trump, the “Black Nazi” North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, Leonard Leo, Mike Johnson, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and so on:

[I]f the reading of impure books and the gazing upon impure pictures does debauch and corrupt and pervert the mind (and we know that it does), when we reflect that Anthony Comstock has himself read perhaps more obscene books, and has gazed upon perhaps more lewd pictures than has any other one man in the United States, what are we to think of the probable state of Mr. Comstock’s imagination today upon sexual matters?

The man is a sex pervert; he is what physicians term a Sadist—namely a person in whom the impulses of cruelty arise concurrently with the stirring of sex emotion. The Sadist finds keen delight in inflicting either physical cruelty or mental humiliation upon the source of that emotion. Also he may find pleasure in gloating over the possibilities to others. I believe that Mr. Comstock takes pleasure in lugging in on all occasions a word picture (especially to a large audience) of the shocking possibilities of the corruption of the morals of innocent youth…

This passage eerily presages what might happen to pregnant women in those Red States who cross state lines to receive necessary medical care:

For months they tracked me night and day wherever I went, vainly hoping to learn something detrimental to my character, and at last they arranged to have me indicted for mailing immoral literature, as they could find no other means of successfully damaging my reputation.

Craddock’s reasons for taking her own life were twofold. First, she wanted to not spend the rest of her life in prison. And second, she hoped that her suicide would alert people to the insidious dangers of Comstockery:

Perhaps it may be that in my death more than in my life, the American people may be shocked into investigating the dreadful state of affairs which permits that unctuous sexual hypocrite, Anthony Comstock, to wax fat and arrogant, and to trample upon the liberties of the people, invading, in my own case, both my right to freedom of religion and to freedom of the press…

I earnestly hope that the American public will awaken to a sense of the danger which threatens it from Comstockism, and that it will demand that Mr. Comstock shall no longer be permitted to suppress works on sexology. The American people have a right to seek and to obtain knowledge upon right living in the marriage relation, either orally or in print, without molestation by this paid informer, Anthony Comstock, or by anybody else.

(“Unctuous sexual hypocrite” is [chef’s kiss]. I wish she were still alive and on Twitter.)

Craddock ends her note with an appeal to the American public to keep her other sexological marital guide, Right Marital Living, in print and out of the grubby mitts of her odious oppressor, Anthony Comstock. In 2024, she might say, “Don’t let this horrible, cowardly paid informer cancel me!”

I’m not so sure the advice proffered in The Wedding Night or its sequel is applicable to the 21st century. Some of it is, in a word, strange. But there is no question that Ida C. Craddock sought to understand all she could about sex, and sought to share that knowledge, without shame or prejudice, to everyone—women as well as men, young people as well as old—at great personal risk and even greater personal cost.

Comstock was an ugly man then, and an uglier one now. His legacy is one of sadism, misogyny, mendacity, and loud-and-proud ignorance. He exists in our memory as an example of what happens when free speech is curtailed, when women’s bodies are controlled by hateful men, and when ignoramuses in positions of great power are given the authority to enact laws.

During her life, Craddock communed regularly with ghosts; much of her personal sexual knowledge, she claimed, derived from her experiences with her “heavenly bridegroom.” (It all came to her in a dream, in a manner of speaking.) And so it is apt that we can read her writings today via the modern-day astral plane, the internet. Her work—all of it; even the books Comstock’s judicial puppets found obscene—is readily available online.

Ida C. Craddock, you see, got her last wish.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Lisa Graves:

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Photo credit: Ida C. Craddock ca. 1900.