Heaven's Bride by Leigh Eric Schmidt

Author:Leigh Eric Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

A CARD-CARRYING LIBERAL, Craddock saw religion and sex as intensely “private affairs,” things that priests and magistrates should not presumptuously legislate for free and equal individuals. “Are we free, can we be free as long as our sex life is under the control of church and state?” queried one of Craddock’s fellow radicals. “I advocate complete freedom for sexuality the same as for religion,” insisted another fellow traveler. If these reformers had their way, sex would join religion in the sheltered domain of individual liberty, private judgment, and personal choice. Sexual emancipation would then be able to move forward, arm-in-arm, with religious freedom. As Craddock would have it, the bedroom was a “little temple,” a private sanctuary for the joined expression of religious aspirations and sexual ecstasies. Comstock and company had no business invading that safe haven.49

In the view of Craddock and her allies, making religion and sex private matters was important for the effectiveness of liberal statecraft. Marriage reformers offered the government a cuddly domesticated version of religion—one that would focus on blissful personal experiences rather than zealous church-state entanglements. The “foaming rapids” of these religious passions swept through the bedroom, not the public square. Extending liberal ideals of freedom and individuality from religion to sexuality would cut the taproot of Comstock’s evangelical politics. “The Holy Fathers of the American Inquisition” would have no right to impose their notions of public decency on such private, intimate affairs.50

Apologists for liberal secularism were unable to advance their vision of privacy, free expression, and strict church-state separation very far during Craddock’s lifetime. Instead, Comstock’s vice society, very much maintaining its legal force and political power, kept an ever-vigilant eye on sex reformers, Craddock included. As she bitterly noted, “the sanctities of my private life”—by which she meant the “peculiarities” of both her religion and her sexuality—went unprotected from the “prying questions” of inspectors, lawyers, and judges. Comstock and his allies sometimes even managed to intrude upon the personal confidences of her face-to-face sessions, disrupting that zone of privacy too. As she typed up her notes on one of her clients, an “earnest Christian” who had benefited from reading Right Marital Living, she confessed that she could not remember the details of his case. The postal inspectors had arrived unannounced right after she finished her lesson with him, and that confrontation had caused her so much “worriment” that it “drove his affairs out of my mind.”51

If Craddock felt anxious or even paranoid, she had every right to be; Comstock and his agents seemed to be everywhere. During another counseling session, this one in New York in August 1902, Craddock had become extremely apprehensive—even “sort of dazed”—when she started thinking that the client looked disquietingly familiar. He reminded her so much of a detective who had once accused her of distributing obscene literature. Had he shaved his moustache, she wondered? No, it was a false alarm. The man turned out not to be a postal inspector or a police officer—just one more “insolent sensualist” who could not help hitting on her.

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