Craddock's frankness made her a target of Anthony Comstock, the powerful anti-vice crusader whose Comstock Act of 1873 criminalized sending obscene matter, a category that under Comstock swept in contraceptive information and honest writing about sex, through the United States mail. Because she distributed her marriage manuals by post, she was repeatedly prosecuted under obscenity law at both state and federal level.
Convicted in a federal trial in New York in 1902, facing a five-year sentence and the prospect of being committed to an asylum as insane, Craddock took her own life on the eve of imprisonment. She left two suicide letters, one private, to her mother, and one a long public indictment of Comstock and of the censorship regime that had destroyed her, which circulated afterward as a document of the free-speech cause.
Her death made her, for later advocates, a martyr to free expression and to sexual candour, and her manuscripts were preserved and studied; the occultist Aleister Crowley, encountering Heavenly Bridegrooms, praised it as among the most remarkable human documents he had read. Long obscure, Craddock has been recovered by modern scholarship, notably in Leigh Eric Schmidt's biography, as a serious, if singular, figure in the American histories of sexuality, women's rights, free speech and esoteric religion.