Ida Craddock

Ida C. Craddock (August 1, 1857 – October 16, 1902) was a 19th-century American advocate of free speech and women's rights.

Early life

Ida Craddock was born in Philadelphia; her father died when she was four months old. Her mother homeschooled her as an only child and provided her with an extensive Quaker education.

In her twenties, Craddock was recommended by the faculty for admission into the University of Pennsylvania as its first female undergraduate student after having passed the required entrance exams. However, her entrance was blocked by the University's Board of Trustees in 1882. She went on to publish a stenography textbook, Primary Phonography, and to teach the subject to women at Girard College.

In her thirties, Craddock left her Quaker upbringing behind. She developed an academic interest in the occult through her association with the Theosophical Society beginning around 1887. She tried in her writings to synthesize translated mystic literature and traditions from many cultures into a scholarly, distilled whole. As a freethinker, she was elected Secretary of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Secular Union in 1889. Although a member of the Unitarian faith, Craddock became a student of religious eroticism and declared herself a Priestess and Pastor of the Church of Yoga. Never married, Craddock eventually claimed to have a blissful ongoing marital relationship with an angel named Soph. Craddock even stated that her intercourse with Soph was so noisy as to draw complaints from her neighbors. Her mother responded by threatening to burn Craddock's papers and unsuccessfully tried to have her institutionalized.