Clothed with the Sun.
A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Freedom of Women / Formerly Foundation Principles.
1900--1904 Monthly
San Francisco, CA, and then Home, WA.
Editor: Lois Waisbrooker, editor and publisher, by the help of her friends.
Succeeds: Our Age-->Common Sense (Kansas City)-->Foundation Principles
1/1, February 1900-1904.
4 pp. (some issues with a 2 page supplement), 30-50 cents a year.

The journal was published by Waisbrooker from San Francisco and then with the February 1901 issue, from the Home Colony, an anarchist and "free-love" community near Puget Sound in Home, Washington of which she was for a while president. No issue is known after 1902 but the journal seems to have struggled on until November 1904. The name of the journal and the figure on its masthead was an allusion to the Apocalypse 12:1 which described triumph over the serpent of Genesis and regeneration from the effects of the Fall, which Waisbrooker turned to her feminist purposes. "In all the past there have been those who have sensed and symbolized the truths of the coming time--have symbolized, but have not understood the fullness of the meaning thus shadowed forth; and of none is it more true than of the vision or symbol from which I have taken the name of my paper. Clothed with the Sun, the symbol of direct power. Woman will not always shine by reflected light. She will assert herself and put the moon under her feet. Oh that all, man as well as woman, could see the significance of this symbol. The glory of the future race would then be assured."

Waisbrooker (Adeline Eliza Nichols, 1826-1909) was an indefatigable spiritualist, controversialist and reformer whose name "Waisbrooker," which she assumed as a trance speaker in 1863, almost certainly was that of her spirit husband. On her, see the notes under her other journals, Our Age and Foundation Principles. She also was editor of Moses Harmon's Lucifer in 1892-1893 while he was in jail (for which she was arrested) and then ended up in San Francisco to start this journal. The issue of December 1901 carried Waisbrooker's "The Awful Fate of Fallen Women" for which she was arrested again. She earlier had said: "If imprisoned, I will go out in my astral body and control others to talk--multiply my power, " but there is no indication she did so. The journal never prospered and must have served to a large extent as an advertising medium for Waisbrooker's books and pamphlets (including her lost "Life Issues, or Sex Experiences in the Astral"). She lost second-class mailing privileges for the journal because less than half of those to whom it sent were paying subscribers.

The journal contained articles and poems by Waisbrooker (on women, abolition of prisons, the evils of government and Christianity, anarchy, spiritualist organization, dress reform, opposition to the temperance movement, etc.), contributions by Margaret Howard, as well as excerpts from Tolstoi, Suggestive Therapeutics, J. William Lloyd, and Wheeler Wilcox (whom she later scoffed at), and from Spirit Mothers and a novelette by Enola Starr. She was known for her 1893 Edith Bramley's Vision: Vivid Description of A Jesuit Spirit Conclave, Subtle Methods Employed by these Enemies of Truth to Prolong their Power Over Mankind (1893) which described a Jesuit Spirit Conclave working against the good of humanity (apparently Jesuits continued their subtle ways in the hereafter). The journal also published a letter from E.H. Brown of the Eulian Publishing Company which published Paschal Beverly Randolph and Freeman B. Dowd's works: "The Order of the Rosy Cross teaches, as I have discovered from Nature's law, that sex is the basis of regeneration, but the how, the law of growth that brings us it, as it is presented in Mr. Dowd's books, 'Regeneration' and 'The Temple of the Rosy Cross,' sees to me more mystical than rational." She also snidely condemned all such as titles as "Hermetic Brotherhoods"which excluded mention of women from their names and made "woman seem to be only an adjunct." She had no time for the things of the past, she opined. University of Michigan; Harvard University; Huntington Library; University of Michigan

Portions of this run of Clothed with the Sun are sourced from The Louise Crowley Library.

IAPSOP materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
IAPSOP respects people's privacy and personal data rights.