16 Facts About Ida Craddock

Ida C Craddock was a 19th-century American advocate of free speech and women's rights.

Ida Craddock was born in Philadelphia; her father died before she was five months old.

Ida Craddock went on to publish a stenography textbook, Primary Phonography, and to teach the subject to women at Girard College.

Ida Craddock began to develop an academic interest in the occult through her association with the Theosophical Society around 1887.

Never married in a traditional sense, Ida Craddock claimed to have a blissful ongoing marital relationship with an angel named Soph.

Ida Craddock stated that her intercourse with Soph was so noisy that it drew complaints from her neighbors.

Ida Craddock's mother responded by threatening to burn Craddock's papers and attempted to have her institutionalized.

Ida Craddock achieved national notoriety with her editorials to defend Little Egypt and her controversial belly dancing act at the World's Columbian Exposition, which was held in Chicago in 1893.

Ida Craddock expounds at the greatest length the philosophy connected with this thesis.

Ida Craddock was held for several months at a time on morality charges in five local jails, as well as the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.

Ida Craddock refused to plead insanity to avoid being incarcerated and was sentenced to three months in prison.

Ida Craddock served most of her time in Blackwell's Island workhouse.

At 45 years old, Ida Craddock saw her five-year prison sentence as a life term.

On October 16,1902, the day before she was due to be sent to a federal penitentiary, Ida Craddock died by suicide after she had slashed her wrists and inhaled coal gas from the oven in her apartment.

Ida Craddock had penned a final private letter to her mother and a lengthy public suicide note condemning Comstock, who had become her personal nemesis.

Ida Craddock had sponsored the Comstock Act, which was named after himself, under which she was repeatedly charged.