Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman

The nineteenth-century eccentric Ida C. Craddock was by turns a secular, freethinker, a religious visionary, a civil-liberties advocate—and deemed a grave danger to the public morality for her candor about sexuality. Craddock's legal problems began when she offered a spirited defense of belly dancing, first introduced to American audiences at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893. Thereafter she became persona non grata to the great vice-crusader Anthony Comstock who saw such performances as abominations.

Arrested and tried repeatedly on obscenity charges, she had become by the end of her life a favorite of free-speech defenders and women's rights activists. She soon became as well the case-history darling of one of America's earliest and most determined Freudians.

In Heaven's Bride, prize-winning historian Leigh Eric Schmidt offers a biography of this forgotten mystic, who occupied the seemingly incongruous roles of yoga priestess, suppressed sexologist, and suspected madwoman. In Schmidt's evocative telling, Craddock's story reveals the beginning of the end of Christian America, a harbinger of spiritual variety and sexual revolution.

Leigh Eric Schmidt is Charles Warren Professor of Religious American History at Harvard University, and the author of numerous books including Restless Souls, Hearing Things, and Consumer Rites.