At the turn of the 20th-century, the “Comstock Act” made it illegal to send information about sex, contraception, or abortion through the U.S. mail. But two pioneering feminists – the anarchist Emma Goldman, and the sex educator, Ida Craddock  – defied that law and advanced a prophetic vision of sexual equality.

In her autobiography, Emma Goldman called Ida Craddock “one of the bravest champions of women’s emancipation.” It’s a surprising statement, both because Craddock has been forgotten by History, and because the two women were so very different. Goldman was a fierce critic of marriage, an early advocate of contraception, an atheist, and a social radical. Craddock was a spiritualist and a religious mystic, who believed that she had a “spirit husband” from the “world beyond the grave.”  Still, the two women shared something profound in common: each was willing to risk everything – even her own life and freedom – in order to further the cause of sexual equality and free speech.

Sex Radical is a hybrid documentary that tells the story of Ida Craddock’s mortal struggle to propagate her “radical” ideas about sex. In publishing explicit instructional guides for newly married couples, Craddock not only violated U.S. obscenity laws, but raised the personal ire of the powerful Evangelical censor and patriarch, Anthony Comstock. Comstock pursued Craddock for 10 years, hounding her from city to city, arresting her multiple times, and eventually forcing her to choose between death in prison, or suicide.

By telling Craddock’s story in Emma Goldman’s voice, and from her unique perspective, Sex Radical blends the conventions of memoir, historical documentary, fiction film, and theatrical soliloquy. It blurs the boundaries between past and future, fact and fantasy, words and music. And at a time when the United States and many other countries face a cultural backlash on issues of sexuality and gender, the film retrieves the past in order that we may more fully understand the present.