Ida C. Craddock (1857-1902) was an American writer, freethinker and advocate of women's rights who developed an unusual religious teaching: that sexual union between husband and wife was a sacrament, a holy act through which the divine could be approached, and that ignorance and shame around it did real spiritual and physical harm.
Raised in Philadelphia by a strict Quaker mother, largely self-taught after being denied university admission, she immersed herself in comparative religion, folklore and the study of phallic and mystical traditions across cultures, and lectured and wrote on marriage and sexuality with a frankness almost unheard of for a woman of her time. She produced a series of instructional works, among them Heavenly Bridegrooms, Psychic Wedlock and The Wedding Night, offering married couples explicit and tender guidance intended to make the marriage bed reverent rather than brutal, and to protect wives from the ignorance and coercion she saw as commonplace.
Her teaching had a frankly mystical dimension. She described a spiritual marriage to an angelic being she called Soph, and drew on the wider nineteenth-century tradition of sexual and spiritual mysticism, the milieu also of figures such as Paschal Beverly Randolph, which sets her within the history of Western esotericism as well as of sexual reform.