Annie Denton Cridge (1825–1875) was a UK-born American spiritualist, political reformer, lecturer, and writer.
Shortly after their wedding he published the book Epitome of spirit-intercourse: a condensed view of spiritualism, in its scriptural, historical, actual and scientific aspects...[3] According to back matter in the book, at the time of publication Cridge and her husband lived in St. John, New Brunswick where Annie advertised to produce "psychometric reading of character" for clients.
What else could blight the silvery laugh of youth, freeze the gushings of joy and chain the soul in everlasting night!".
In 1859 she published a monthly magazine The Home Gen.[5] In 1861 the Cridges moved to Washington, D.C. where Alfred found work in the Secret Service then in the federal Inspector Division.
The novel Man's Rights was published in book form that same year by her brother's wife, Elizabeth Melissa Foote Denton, of Wellesley, Mass.
[16] Her surviving son, Alfred Denton Cridge (1860-1922), wrote one of the earliest U.S. science fiction novels, Utopia; Or, the History of an Extinct Planet, Psychometrically Explained (1884).
[11][17][12] He went on to be a political reformer, pushing for the Henry George single tax and helping introduce referendum powers into the Oregon state constitution.
In the first seven dreams she visits the planet Mars, finding a society where traditional sex roles and stereotypes are reversed.
Although initially confined to the home and strictly controlled, they start working towards their liberation after technological advancements free them from some of their grueling domestic chores.
In the last two dreams, the narrator visits a future United States, ruled by a woman president and with an equal balance of men and women in the House and Senate.
Legislators have begun to stop fining and imprisoning female prostitutes, and it is now the male clients who get arrested and sent to reformatories.
[16] This book contains dozens of short stories, only a few pages each, in which she discusses science, religion, and feminism at a very basic level.
First, think of your merry sister and cousin, Lizzie or Emma, with their bright eyes and musical voices; and then tell me if you would not like them to be as happy and as free as you are when you are men and they women.
Many of her articles can be read in the archived issues of Vanguard found at The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals.
In the spirit of the Victorian era, two literary elements Cridge used in her work are psychological realism and stream-of-consciousness.
I arose: and, as my husband ate his breakfast, I pondered over my strange dream",[20] relaying her stories through a realistic rather than romantic means.
She appeals to children, asking them how they feel about inequality between men and women, and criticizes traditional gender stereotypes of female domesticity and fragility and male oppression of emotion.
Run, and shout too; for your lungs need full breath and pure air, as much as the flowers need the dews and sunshine"[19] merging women's rights topics with descriptive language.
Cridge shares similarities with Christine de Pizan, a medieval creative writer who wrote a Utopian story, The Book of the City of Ladies.
[13] In their utopian societies, women writers typically focus on family, sexuality, and marriage and other intangible features of human existence.
"[21] Similarly, Cridge writes about degraded women whose only "business is to get married," and in her satiric Men's Rights, in which Victorian roles of men and women are reversed, a father tells his son that all he has to do is "learn to be a good housekeeper; for you will be married one day and have to attend to your children.
Cridge wrote "feminine" fiction rather than "masculine" journalism, and explored domestic, marriage, and single life for women in comparison to men -- all focuses of Woolf's criticism.