Ida Craddock - Indictments

Indictments

Mass distribution of Right Marital Living through the U.S. Mail after its publication as a featured article in the medical journal The Chicago Clinic led to an 1899 Chicago Federal indictment of Craddock. She pled guilty and received a suspended sentence. A subsequent 1902 New York Federal trial on charges of sending The Wedding Night through the mail during a sting operation ended with her conviction. She refused to plead insanity as a condition to avoid prison time and was sentenced to three months in prison, much of which she served in Blackwell's Island workhouse. Upon her release, Anthony Comstock immediately re-arrested her for violations of the federal Comstock law and on October 10 she was tried and convicted, the judge declaring that The Wedding Night, was so “obscene, lewd, lascivious, dirty” that the jury should not be allowed to see it during the trial. At age forty-five, she saw her five-year sentence as a life term and so committed suicide, by slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas from the oven in her apartment, on October 16, 1902, the day before reporting to Federal prison. She penned a private final letter to her mother as well as a lengthy public suicide note condemning Comstock, her personal nemesis. Comstock first opposed Craddock almost a decade before over the Little Egypt act and effectively acted as her prosecutor during both Federal legal actions against her. He had sponsored the Comstock Act under which she was repeatedly charged.