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The Secret History of Wonder Woman
A cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story.
Examines the life of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and his polyamorous relationship with wife Elizabeth Holloway and mistress Olive Byrne, both of whom inspired and influenced the comic book character's creation and development.
-Abstract from WorldCat
Examines the life of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and his polyamorous relationship with wife Elizabeth Holloway and mistress Olive Byrne, both of whom inspired and influenced the comic book character's creation and development.
-Abstract from WorldCat
410 pages, Hardcover
First published October 28, 2014
About the author
Jill Lepore
40 books1,233 followersJill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,401 reviews
June 4, 2017
If you are looking for a quick book that primarily focuses on Wonder Woman (as the cover and title would expect you to encounter) and an analysis of her origin story, look elsewhere. I just read Ron Rege's alt comic form version of her origin story, Diana, which I suggest you check out if you have any interest in WW origins, but Lepore's book isn't about that, really; or, it IS about Wonder Woman's "origins" and abiding place in the history of feminism extending from the suffragette and early birth control period, through the sixties Women's Liberation movement and through today. As one might expect, Lepore shows you how the series has always reflected womens' and other cultural values. But it also gets stranger than just that.
Lepore is a Harvard American History professor and a prolific and best-selling historian; she's also a very good writer who creates a popular text that draws you into a serious historian's interests and approach. In other words, she isn't just interested in comics and feminism. She's interested in American history and how it came about and what it means for us today. We don't really read much about Wonder Woman per se for almost half of the book, which not surprisingly disappointed a few readers.
While we do get a section of full-color examples of important moments in the strip's history, and some good analysis of those panels, this book is really more of a biography of the Harvard-trained psychologist William Moulton Marston--the man that created Wonder Woman--and a sort of history of the unconventional family he created and the other women involved seemed to agree to. It's finally a sort of a sensational tell-all mystery that reveals aspects of the secrets of that family history behind Wonder Woman that were kept secret for decades. Lepore successfully makes this into a page turner, which was surprising for me from a Harvard academic. It's really, really good.
You can read better reviews laying out all the details, but I'll say a few things here that might spoil things for you if you still want to read the book and encounter these Big Reveals in the usual way, but I think a lot of you may have already heard of those reveals of the book from early splashy articles and interviews with Lepore from more than a year ago. I'll admit I read this book because of hearing about a couple of those racy aspects of this story.
Here's some interesting aspects of the story for me, in brief, and it's all too layered and complex to just summarize, but, here goes:
--Marston was a smart guy who is known for having invented the lie detector. He also was the originator of Wonder Woman, wrote a lot of the original strips and insisted on its being true to his original conception as it developed, and helped to shape the series' reputation of the series as basically feminist, of freeing women from the bonds, the chains, created by patriarchal society. His teacher at Harvard was a misogynist, mostly, but Marston went in a different direction, in part because of his association with his capable and smart student Olive Byrne, whose mother Ethel Byrne became famous for a hunger strike after having been jailed for birth control activism. Ethel's sister is better known to us in the history of women's rights: Margaret Sanger, and learning of her story helped to shape Marston's feminist directions. Olive brought her strong feminist views to her relationship with Marston. She also felt largely abandoned by her mother, Ethel, so that figures into her choices, too.
--Marston, Mr. Lie Detector, also was, as it turns out, a pretty amazing liar, throughout his life, and kept it up for decades, with his wife and other women, a deception that certainly had implications for Wonder Woman in surprising ways. Marston couldn't really keep an academic job, but he wrote screenplays, and wrote numerous articles defending both film and comics. A complex guy, as Lepore lays out his story. There's lots of good stuff about him suggesting he was extraordinary, seeing a future in which it would be a good thing for women/Amazons to rule the world, and then he's also this American male charlatan who may have in a fairly typical way also used women for his own ends.
--Marston was married to Sadie Holloway, who also got her PhD in psychology and was in many ways smarter than him, but without the biz pizzazz, the huckster aspect. She worked all of her life to support him and her children, AND the "other" women Marston insisted live with them (and the two children he fathered with one of those other women).
--Here's the quasi-sensational secret stuff: Marston and Holloway were part of an open sex relationships exploration with a group that documented the process, early in the twentieth century. Lepore got her hands on this juicy stuff and knew it would figure in as we considered Wonder Woman's particular brand of feminism. In this context, Marston invited (insisted on Holloway's accepting?) his talented student Olive Byrne into their household. Byrne was Ethel's daughter and Sanger's niece, so out of this nexus she was highly influential on the part of Marston's views that were conventionally feminist. He was also fairly influential on her in impregnating her as they all lived in the same house.
--Marston didn't buy Olive a wedding ring; he bought her a set of gold bracelets she wore all of her life, ones you recognize Wonder Woman also wears as a symbol of her power, though these bracelets,which have rings attached to them, are also recognizably bdsm devices. Olive has children with him and raised all four of her and Holloway's four children so his wife could work, keeping all of this a secret (lie) even to the kids through most of their adult lives. A pretty nice deal for "feminist" Marston, to get one women to raise his kids for him and another to support him since he hardly made any money for most of his life. So, he was anti-domination of women in chains. . . and also way into women in bondage/chains. So was Olive, apparently, so it was understood to be consensual. Symbolic of "love bonds," he insisted in characterizing them. But who knows what might be the layers of truth behind all this?
--As Lepore makes clear, there was hardly an issue's worth of Wonder Woman comics that didn't involve her and all sorts of other women being attached by chains to the wrists and necks and ankles, directed with amazingly detailed scripts by Marston. I pulled some Wonder Woman comics off my shelf and viewed the examples Lepore shares with us, so it's pretty eye-opening and complex and interesting, to say the least. And there's a history of people who saw it right from the start as a little kinky/strange, but as you may know, she is also one of the most celebrated and loved comics figures in history.
I really liked this book a lot, found it hard to put down. Or "unputdownable,"as Chris Ware says of it. It's not mainly about this kinky aspect of the story, we get no salacious details about any of that, really, (sorry) but it does examine how the lie detecting/lies/deception make their ways into a feminist comic; well, a feminist comic about a Justice League superhero that looked like a Vargas girl or pinup model. This is a fascinating cultural text, really well written, that also takes comics history seriously. Highly recommend for comics fans, Wonder Woman fans, feminists, those interested in American history and a good yarn!
Lepore is a Harvard American History professor and a prolific and best-selling historian; she's also a very good writer who creates a popular text that draws you into a serious historian's interests and approach. In other words, she isn't just interested in comics and feminism. She's interested in American history and how it came about and what it means for us today. We don't really read much about Wonder Woman per se for almost half of the book, which not surprisingly disappointed a few readers.
While we do get a section of full-color examples of important moments in the strip's history, and some good analysis of those panels, this book is really more of a biography of the Harvard-trained psychologist William Moulton Marston--the man that created Wonder Woman--and a sort of history of the unconventional family he created and the other women involved seemed to agree to. It's finally a sort of a sensational tell-all mystery that reveals aspects of the secrets of that family history behind Wonder Woman that were kept secret for decades. Lepore successfully makes this into a page turner, which was surprising for me from a Harvard academic. It's really, really good.
You can read better reviews laying out all the details, but I'll say a few things here that might spoil things for you if you still want to read the book and encounter these Big Reveals in the usual way, but I think a lot of you may have already heard of those reveals of the book from early splashy articles and interviews with Lepore from more than a year ago. I'll admit I read this book because of hearing about a couple of those racy aspects of this story.
Here's some interesting aspects of the story for me, in brief, and it's all too layered and complex to just summarize, but, here goes:
--Marston was a smart guy who is known for having invented the lie detector. He also was the originator of Wonder Woman, wrote a lot of the original strips and insisted on its being true to his original conception as it developed, and helped to shape the series' reputation of the series as basically feminist, of freeing women from the bonds, the chains, created by patriarchal society. His teacher at Harvard was a misogynist, mostly, but Marston went in a different direction, in part because of his association with his capable and smart student Olive Byrne, whose mother Ethel Byrne became famous for a hunger strike after having been jailed for birth control activism. Ethel's sister is better known to us in the history of women's rights: Margaret Sanger, and learning of her story helped to shape Marston's feminist directions. Olive brought her strong feminist views to her relationship with Marston. She also felt largely abandoned by her mother, Ethel, so that figures into her choices, too.
--Marston, Mr. Lie Detector, also was, as it turns out, a pretty amazing liar, throughout his life, and kept it up for decades, with his wife and other women, a deception that certainly had implications for Wonder Woman in surprising ways. Marston couldn't really keep an academic job, but he wrote screenplays, and wrote numerous articles defending both film and comics. A complex guy, as Lepore lays out his story. There's lots of good stuff about him suggesting he was extraordinary, seeing a future in which it would be a good thing for women/Amazons to rule the world, and then he's also this American male charlatan who may have in a fairly typical way also used women for his own ends.
--Marston was married to Sadie Holloway, who also got her PhD in psychology and was in many ways smarter than him, but without the biz pizzazz, the huckster aspect. She worked all of her life to support him and her children, AND the "other" women Marston insisted live with them (and the two children he fathered with one of those other women).
--Here's the quasi-sensational secret stuff: Marston and Holloway were part of an open sex relationships exploration with a group that documented the process, early in the twentieth century. Lepore got her hands on this juicy stuff and knew it would figure in as we considered Wonder Woman's particular brand of feminism. In this context, Marston invited (insisted on Holloway's accepting?) his talented student Olive Byrne into their household. Byrne was Ethel's daughter and Sanger's niece, so out of this nexus she was highly influential on the part of Marston's views that were conventionally feminist. He was also fairly influential on her in impregnating her as they all lived in the same house.
--Marston didn't buy Olive a wedding ring; he bought her a set of gold bracelets she wore all of her life, ones you recognize Wonder Woman also wears as a symbol of her power, though these bracelets,which have rings attached to them, are also recognizably bdsm devices. Olive has children with him and raised all four of her and Holloway's four children so his wife could work, keeping all of this a secret (lie) even to the kids through most of their adult lives. A pretty nice deal for "feminist" Marston, to get one women to raise his kids for him and another to support him since he hardly made any money for most of his life. So, he was anti-domination of women in chains. . . and also way into women in bondage/chains. So was Olive, apparently, so it was understood to be consensual. Symbolic of "love bonds," he insisted in characterizing them. But who knows what might be the layers of truth behind all this?
--As Lepore makes clear, there was hardly an issue's worth of Wonder Woman comics that didn't involve her and all sorts of other women being attached by chains to the wrists and necks and ankles, directed with amazingly detailed scripts by Marston. I pulled some Wonder Woman comics off my shelf and viewed the examples Lepore shares with us, so it's pretty eye-opening and complex and interesting, to say the least. And there's a history of people who saw it right from the start as a little kinky/strange, but as you may know, she is also one of the most celebrated and loved comics figures in history.
I really liked this book a lot, found it hard to put down. Or "unputdownable,"as Chris Ware says of it. It's not mainly about this kinky aspect of the story, we get no salacious details about any of that, really, (sorry) but it does examine how the lie detecting/lies/deception make their ways into a feminist comic; well, a feminist comic about a Justice League superhero that looked like a Vargas girl or pinup model. This is a fascinating cultural text, really well written, that also takes comics history seriously. Highly recommend for comics fans, Wonder Woman fans, feminists, those interested in American history and a good yarn!
October 28, 2014
Jill Lepore is a bit of a wonder woman herself, certainly a wonder of a historian. She uncovers, unclothes, and satisfactorily binds with ropes and chains (the better to dispose of it) the myth that Wonder Woman was a feature of woman’s liberation rather than one of male dominance. Sadly, the scantily clad Wonder Woman was modeled on the real-life live-in girlfriend of the psychologist who created her, and who himself exhibited the dominant male model all too well.
Lepore not only gives us the background of William Moulton Marston, Harvard-trained psychologist and developer of the systolic blood-pressure polygraph, but also of his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, herself an almost-PhD (All But Dissertation) who studied psychology and law. Olive Richard Byrne is the younger woman, a former student of Marston’s, who shares their homes, their children, and their beds. Marston and his smart and admiring women lovers lived unconventional family lives in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in New England, with Marston fathering the children of at least two of the women in their large and ramshackle house to which they moved near the coast in Rye, New York.
Although Marston had lots of experience with strong women and claimed to like, admire, even love them, he (and the women themselves) never really progressed beyond the idea of equality between the sexes to the thing itself. Feminists in name only, I’d have to say, since one might argue that Marston was simply a failure as a wage-earner rather than a dependent louche. His wife Elizabeth earned wages for family upkeep, Olive took care of the children, and Marston…must have…hopefully…kept them happy sexually, though they probably could have done without him there, also.
Lepore probably knows more about W.M.M. (in my mind I call him Willie) than any single person alive and she was frank about his delusions. He began his comic Wonder Woman as an answer to male superheroes and debuted Wonder Woman in hot pants and a tiara in December 1941. Maybe he wasn’t such a talented guy, though his women were pretty admirable and talented. No wonder Wonder Woman. But there was not to be a straight line from 1920s feminism and the right to vote to Wonder Women and equality for women. Marston died in 1947, someone else took over the writing of the comic, and all advances made with a woman forging a new path during the war years were rolled back.
Somehow Wonder Woman never really made the leap from helping out to helping herself. Marston may have been enlightened for his time (god bless his little willie) but he would have been sacrificed at the altar of equality long before this at the hand of Amazons living today in America. Lepore does a good job of reminding us of our past, present, and future --if we don’t manage to prove her wrong. She would like that. Wonder Women Live!
I listened to the Random House Audio production of this title, read by Lepore herself. Lepore has an energetic style and a young-sounding squeaky voice: I appreciate having her add the emphases where she intended, as well as wringing the humor from her writing. I can’t say I found the history of the self-important Marston and his often bound-and-chained Wonder Woman as interesting as Lepore did, but she fortunately puts Marston’s self-promotion in the perspective of the times, and he and his ladies tried for something different with their educations and their lives.
Lepore not only gives us the background of William Moulton Marston, Harvard-trained psychologist and developer of the systolic blood-pressure polygraph, but also of his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, herself an almost-PhD (All But Dissertation) who studied psychology and law. Olive Richard Byrne is the younger woman, a former student of Marston’s, who shares their homes, their children, and their beds. Marston and his smart and admiring women lovers lived unconventional family lives in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in New England, with Marston fathering the children of at least two of the women in their large and ramshackle house to which they moved near the coast in Rye, New York.
Although Marston had lots of experience with strong women and claimed to like, admire, even love them, he (and the women themselves) never really progressed beyond the idea of equality between the sexes to the thing itself. Feminists in name only, I’d have to say, since one might argue that Marston was simply a failure as a wage-earner rather than a dependent louche. His wife Elizabeth earned wages for family upkeep, Olive took care of the children, and Marston…must have…hopefully…kept them happy sexually, though they probably could have done without him there, also.
Lepore probably knows more about W.M.M. (in my mind I call him Willie) than any single person alive and she was frank about his delusions. He began his comic Wonder Woman as an answer to male superheroes and debuted Wonder Woman in hot pants and a tiara in December 1941. Maybe he wasn’t such a talented guy, though his women were pretty admirable and talented. No wonder Wonder Woman. But there was not to be a straight line from 1920s feminism and the right to vote to Wonder Women and equality for women. Marston died in 1947, someone else took over the writing of the comic, and all advances made with a woman forging a new path during the war years were rolled back.
Somehow Wonder Woman never really made the leap from helping out to helping herself. Marston may have been enlightened for his time (god bless his little willie) but he would have been sacrificed at the altar of equality long before this at the hand of Amazons living today in America. Lepore does a good job of reminding us of our past, present, and future --if we don’t manage to prove her wrong. She would like that. Wonder Women Live!
I listened to the Random House Audio production of this title, read by Lepore herself. Lepore has an energetic style and a young-sounding squeaky voice: I appreciate having her add the emphases where she intended, as well as wringing the humor from her writing. I can’t say I found the history of the self-important Marston and his often bound-and-chained Wonder Woman as interesting as Lepore did, but she fortunately puts Marston’s self-promotion in the perspective of the times, and he and his ladies tried for something different with their educations and their lives.
Read
June 16, 2022Lepore convincingly makes Wonder Woman the connective tissue between the suffragists and the women's movement, but the story behind her genesis is just fricken' amazing and almost unbelievable. William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator and a man Glen Weldon accurately describes as "decidedly skeevy," was, A, a man, B, married to one woman, sleeping with two others and living happily with all three, C, was fascinated by bondage and tied, chained, fettered and imprisoned WW, the first female superhero, in every comic cell he could, D, a Harvard graduate whose lazy, sloppy research and weird teaching practices pretty much had him drummed out of academia, E, invented the lie detector, F through Z I could go on but why should I spoil it for you? You're so going to want to read this book for yourself.
Remember Margaret Sanger? Mother of birth control, we pretty much have the Pill because of her? She's the model for Wonder Woman, although she never acknowledged that she knew Marston or said she was his second wife's aunt, and she would have died a thousand deaths if she'd lived to have seen the David Levine cartoon of her dressed in a Wonder Woman-inspired costume, trampolining off a diaphragm. Levine had no idea of her relationship to the Marston menage because the family kept their living situation such a deep dark secret. Nevertheless
Voluntary motherhood, Sanger argued in Woman and the New Race, "is for woman the key to the temple of liberty."...It was a matter of liberating the "feminine spirit"--a spirit well represented in the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, who, Sanger explained, "sought to arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves," their sexual selves. The feminine spirit, Sanger wrote, "manifests itself most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than maternity...The philosophy of Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman...Years later, when Marston hired a young woman named Joye Hummel to help him write Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne [Marston's second wife] gave Hummel a copy of Woman and the New Race. Read this, she told her, and you'll know everything you need to know about Wonder Woman.
The last 150 pages of this book are notes, bibliography and index, she's really done her homework, but Lepore never lets the research get in the way of the story, or of the general air of bemusement that wafts up from every page. Along the way you come across such historical tidbits as this post-World War II snapshot
Women went home. Women's rights went underground. And homosexuals were persecuted. Is there a "quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?" U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked in hearings about homosexuality in 1950.
Et tu, Margaret?
Marston died in 1947 and DC Comics abandoned Wonder Woman to the merciless care of writer Robert Kanigher, who
hated the character he called "the grotesque inhuman original Wonder Woman."...Wonder Woman became a babysitter, a fashion model, and a movie star. She wanted, desperately, to marry Steve. She gave advice to the lovelorn, as the author of a lonely-hearts newspaper advice column.
From helping defeat the Germans and the Japanese in World War II, to this. Later they even took away her powers and her magic lasso and her invisible plane. Someone at DC Comics should have been shot. She was rehabilitated (and pretty much reimagined) by Gloria Steinem on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine, and along with Batman and Superman is the only comic book superhero to have survived from inception into the present day. No matter what horrible thing they did to her character, she's still here.
This is a terrific book about American history, women's history, comic book history, the ability of families to hide reality and to hide from it, and the truly amazing facility of all human beings to ignore what is right in front of them. Highly, highly recommended.
Remember Margaret Sanger? Mother of birth control, we pretty much have the Pill because of her? She's the model for Wonder Woman, although she never acknowledged that she knew Marston or said she was his second wife's aunt, and she would have died a thousand deaths if she'd lived to have seen the David Levine cartoon of her dressed in a Wonder Woman-inspired costume, trampolining off a diaphragm. Levine had no idea of her relationship to the Marston menage because the family kept their living situation such a deep dark secret. Nevertheless
Voluntary motherhood, Sanger argued in Woman and the New Race, "is for woman the key to the temple of liberty."...It was a matter of liberating the "feminine spirit"--a spirit well represented in the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, who, Sanger explained, "sought to arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves," their sexual selves. The feminine spirit, Sanger wrote, "manifests itself most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than maternity...The philosophy of Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman...Years later, when Marston hired a young woman named Joye Hummel to help him write Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne [Marston's second wife] gave Hummel a copy of Woman and the New Race. Read this, she told her, and you'll know everything you need to know about Wonder Woman.
The last 150 pages of this book are notes, bibliography and index, she's really done her homework, but Lepore never lets the research get in the way of the story, or of the general air of bemusement that wafts up from every page. Along the way you come across such historical tidbits as this post-World War II snapshot
Women went home. Women's rights went underground. And homosexuals were persecuted. Is there a "quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?" U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked in hearings about homosexuality in 1950.
Et tu, Margaret?
Marston died in 1947 and DC Comics abandoned Wonder Woman to the merciless care of writer Robert Kanigher, who
hated the character he called "the grotesque inhuman original Wonder Woman."...Wonder Woman became a babysitter, a fashion model, and a movie star. She wanted, desperately, to marry Steve. She gave advice to the lovelorn, as the author of a lonely-hearts newspaper advice column.
From helping defeat the Germans and the Japanese in World War II, to this. Later they even took away her powers and her magic lasso and her invisible plane. Someone at DC Comics should have been shot. She was rehabilitated (and pretty much reimagined) by Gloria Steinem on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine, and along with Batman and Superman is the only comic book superhero to have survived from inception into the present day. No matter what horrible thing they did to her character, she's still here.
This is a terrific book about American history, women's history, comic book history, the ability of families to hide reality and to hide from it, and the truly amazing facility of all human beings to ignore what is right in front of them. Highly, highly recommended.
August 10, 2017
The bizarre history behind the creation of Wonder Woman is weird even for the world of superheroes.
Jill Lepore (who is amazing in her own right in that she's a history professor at Harvard and she writes for The New Yorker) gives us the story of William Moulton Marston, an American psychologist and the man who invented the lie detector test. After trying and failing in several careers, in 1941 he turned to the burgeoning field of comic books, and created Wonder Woman with the help of his wife and his longtime mistress. Marston considered himself a feminist and had been influenced by the suffragist movement in the early 1900s.
The discussions about the appearance of Wonder Woman were interesting, and it's not surprising that the character caused a fair amount of controversy in those early years, especially since she was practically naked and the comics featured a lot of bondage. Lepore's book includes some great panels from various comics and lots of photographs; I listened to this book on audio, but I was glad I had a print copy to flip through because the illustrations were so helpful.
I was inspired to read this book after seeing the Wonder Woman movie (I heart Gal Godot), and I enjoyed learning about this unusual bit of history. I was especially intrigued to hear about the early days of other comic book heroes, including Superman and Batman, and to learn more about the women's movement in America. This is a fascinating story and I would recommend Lepore's book to other readers.
Meaningful Passage
Jill Lepore (who is amazing in her own right in that she's a history professor at Harvard and she writes for The New Yorker) gives us the story of William Moulton Marston, an American psychologist and the man who invented the lie detector test. After trying and failing in several careers, in 1941 he turned to the burgeoning field of comic books, and created Wonder Woman with the help of his wife and his longtime mistress. Marston considered himself a feminist and had been influenced by the suffragist movement in the early 1900s.
The discussions about the appearance of Wonder Woman were interesting, and it's not surprising that the character caused a fair amount of controversy in those early years, especially since she was practically naked and the comics featured a lot of bondage. Lepore's book includes some great panels from various comics and lots of photographs; I listened to this book on audio, but I was glad I had a print copy to flip through because the illustrations were so helpful.
I was inspired to read this book after seeing the Wonder Woman movie (I heart Gal Godot), and I enjoyed learning about this unusual bit of history. I was especially intrigued to hear about the early days of other comic book heroes, including Superman and Batman, and to learn more about the women's movement in America. This is a fascinating story and I would recommend Lepore's book to other readers.
Meaningful Passage
Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism, which hasn't been altogether good for feminism. Superheroes, who are supposed to be better than everyone else, are excellent at clobbering people; they're lousy at fighting for equality.
But Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book superhero. The secrets this book reveals and the story it tells place Wonder Woman not only within the history of comic books and superheroes but also at the very center of the histories of science, law, and politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hard-boiled detective. Wonder Woman's debt is to the fictional feminist utopia and to the struggle for women's rights. Her origins lie in William Moulton Marston's past, and in the lives of the women he loved; they created Wonder Woman, too. Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book character because Marston was no ordinary man and his family was no ordinary family. Marston was a polymath. He was an expert in deception: he invented the lie detector test. He led a secret life: he had four children by two women; they lived together under one roof. They were masters of the art of concealment.
Their favorite hiding place was the comics they produced. Marston was a scholar, a professor, and a scientist; Wonder Woman began on a college campus, in a lecture hall, and in a laboratory. Marston was a lawyer and a filmmaker; Wonder Woman began in a courthouse and a movie theater. The women Marston loved were suffragists, feminists, and birth control advocates. Wonder Woman began in a protest march, a bedroom, and a birth control clinic. The red bustier isn't the half of it.
March 4, 2024
The definitive work on Wonder Woman (WW). Jill Lepore explores all aspects of WW and her creator (William Moulton Marston) including many that have never seen the light of day before. When you consider the amount of 'projection' WW has absorbed over the years; how many groups have used her for their own agenda while denying her a place in a broader social context. Highest recommendation.
November 23, 2014
There's no doubt Lepore has done a stellar job of researching this material—a good example comes in the footnotes where she reveals how a murder trial William Moulton Marston (Wonder Woman's creator) testified as an expert at had been covered by no less than three different historical overviews, and nobody had realized the attorneys on the case were students of Marston. Lepore digs deep into the historial trends of the time (particularly the suffrage and birth control movements of the early 20th Century, which have surprising connections to the origin of Wonder Woman) and family records.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot in the book to suggest Lepore is especially interested in Wonder Woman, or in Marston. While the most interesting part of the book (hands down) is the open marriage Marston lived in with two other women (both of whom contributed significantly to the origin of and influences on Wonder Woman), and their roles are inarguably the ones most needed to be brought into the historical record, it all flattens out pretty quick. The author is either so indebted to her sources (the surviving members of the Marston family, who gave her extensive access to their papers) or those papers are themselves so discreet you never get much of a feeling for anyone in any particular situation. Lepore insinuates how Marston's two wives felt, but it is a very meager insinuation.
And the situation grows ever more dire as Lepore recounts the story of Wonder Woman with the occasional insight but usually a tremendous lack of clarity. I know I'm the salacious type, but Lepore gains access to 95 pages of notes of a likely New Age orgy between Marston, his two wives, his aunt(!), and his wife's lover, and not only does Lepore barely manage to eke four pages out of it, the only connection she bothers to make between the bits of the Wonder Woman mythos and a transcript that refers to "Love Girls," "Mothers," and "Love Leaders" is that the nickname of one of the participants later pops up as the name of a cult leader in a comic. As a historian, Lepore only really seems excited by the idea of history being obscured or overwritten. She obviously enjoys the irony behind the creation of Marston's surprisingly enduring creation, but she seems to enjoy the creation itself not at all.
Anyway, it's an invaluable read if you're a fan of the original Wonder Woman stories, and if you get a kick out of imagining how and where a TV show or material based on the material might arouse emotions for all involved that Lepore herself doesn't bother with. Marston is a larger than life character, a huckster and a quack and probably a drunk, but one who quite clearly believed the feminist lifestyle he was espousing (even when he had difficulties transcending his era in other ways). It would be wonderful if he'd been given an ounce of complexity: instead, it's all too easy to imagine Lepore standing to the side, rolling a pointed finger around the side of her head as she recounts stories about him. Maybe Marston really doesn't deserve any better, but Wonder Woman does, and I'm sorry this isn't the book to do her amazing situation justice.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot in the book to suggest Lepore is especially interested in Wonder Woman, or in Marston. While the most interesting part of the book (hands down) is the open marriage Marston lived in with two other women (both of whom contributed significantly to the origin of and influences on Wonder Woman), and their roles are inarguably the ones most needed to be brought into the historical record, it all flattens out pretty quick. The author is either so indebted to her sources (the surviving members of the Marston family, who gave her extensive access to their papers) or those papers are themselves so discreet you never get much of a feeling for anyone in any particular situation. Lepore insinuates how Marston's two wives felt, but it is a very meager insinuation.
And the situation grows ever more dire as Lepore recounts the story of Wonder Woman with the occasional insight but usually a tremendous lack of clarity. I know I'm the salacious type, but Lepore gains access to 95 pages of notes of a likely New Age orgy between Marston, his two wives, his aunt(!), and his wife's lover, and not only does Lepore barely manage to eke four pages out of it, the only connection she bothers to make between the bits of the Wonder Woman mythos and a transcript that refers to "Love Girls," "Mothers," and "Love Leaders" is that the nickname of one of the participants later pops up as the name of a cult leader in a comic. As a historian, Lepore only really seems excited by the idea of history being obscured or overwritten. She obviously enjoys the irony behind the creation of Marston's surprisingly enduring creation, but she seems to enjoy the creation itself not at all.
Anyway, it's an invaluable read if you're a fan of the original Wonder Woman stories, and if you get a kick out of imagining how and where a TV show or material based on the material might arouse emotions for all involved that Lepore herself doesn't bother with. Marston is a larger than life character, a huckster and a quack and probably a drunk, but one who quite clearly believed the feminist lifestyle he was espousing (even when he had difficulties transcending his era in other ways). It would be wonderful if he'd been given an ounce of complexity: instead, it's all too easy to imagine Lepore standing to the side, rolling a pointed finger around the side of her head as she recounts stories about him. Maybe Marston really doesn't deserve any better, but Wonder Woman does, and I'm sorry this isn't the book to do her amazing situation justice.
January 7, 2015
God, I wanted to like this. So. Much. Excruciating. Detail. At first I found the detail interesting, but it wore thin when I found myself 20 percent of the way through the book with no comic-book creation in sight. I gave up soon after.
Read
February 10, 2017A fascinating account of William Moulton Marston, the man who created Wonder Woman, and the many women – especially his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and his partner, Olive Byrne – who contributed to Marston’s odd blend of psychosexual feminism. I’m a historian by training and a comics fan by chance, so combine the two and I’m happy as a clam.
— Megan Cavitt
from The Best Books We Read In November 2016: http://bookriot.com/2016/12/01/the-be...
____________________
If you want a non-fiction read that’s weird and wonderful and KINKY, look no further than The Secret History of Wonder Woman. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of Wonder Woman, was a progressive suffragist and feminist with a penchant for BDSM and a secret polygamous family. One of his wives was the niece of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Oh, and he also invented the lie detector test, as one does. The whole book is beyond fascinating, but most of all I loved reading about the badass ladies of the early birth control movement. This is one of those books that will have you nudging everyone within elbow distance to say “Holy shit! Did you know… ?” — Rachel Smalter Hall
From The Best Books We Read In February: http://bookriot.com/2015/03/02/riot-r...
— Megan Cavitt
from The Best Books We Read In November 2016: http://bookriot.com/2016/12/01/the-be...
____________________
If you want a non-fiction read that’s weird and wonderful and KINKY, look no further than The Secret History of Wonder Woman. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of Wonder Woman, was a progressive suffragist and feminist with a penchant for BDSM and a secret polygamous family. One of his wives was the niece of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Oh, and he also invented the lie detector test, as one does. The whole book is beyond fascinating, but most of all I loved reading about the badass ladies of the early birth control movement. This is one of those books that will have you nudging everyone within elbow distance to say “Holy shit! Did you know… ?” — Rachel Smalter Hall
From The Best Books We Read In February: http://bookriot.com/2015/03/02/riot-r...
October 27, 2014
What does Wonder Woman, the superhero who first appeared in 1941, have to do with polyamory, pessaries, and the polygraph? As Jill Lepore reports in her fascinating new work of nonfiction, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, everything. Here are some of the book’s most fascinating revelations:
1. Psychologist and storyteller William Moulton Marston invented the first lie detector test while an undergraduate at Harvard. He then created Wonder Woman, whose magic lasso could force men to tell the truth, at age 48.
2. Unfortunately, Lepore writes, “for all of Marston’s charm, his [lie detector's] near-perfect laboratory results generally failed to impress men involved in actual criminal investigation” (pg. 51). He couldn’t sell or make any real money off of his invention. A trial judge dismissed evidence produced by the lie detector in 1922, saying, “When it is developed to the perfection of the telephone and the telegraph and wireless and a few other things we will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably, and it will bother some other judge, not me” (pg. 69). The defendant whom Marston was hoping to help was sentenced to life in prison. Another man later read Marston’s research and created his own similar lie detector, which he patented as the polygraph. There are now millions in use all over the country.
3. Marston was a well-born bohemian who drew on staunch feminist and free love ideals from the early 20th century and the influences of the two women he loved: his official wife, Betty Holloway Marston, who supported the family because, until Wonder Woman, Marston could not hold down a job; and his long-term live-in mistress, Olive Byrne, originally a student of Marston’s, who raised all of his children. In lieu of a wedding ring, Olive wore bracelets on which Wonder Woman’s bullet-deflecting bracelets were based. A third woman also shared the house with them, off and on; it’s implied she was Holloway’s lover and possibly Byrne’s, too.
4. Margaret Sanger, who went on to found what became Planned Parenthood, delivered a baby for the first time “when she was only eight years old” (pg. 82)—her niece, Olive Byrne. She then saved Olive’s life when Olive’s father, irritated by her crying, threw the baby into a snowbank. She went on to dedicate her life to making birth control available, affordable, and safe for women. Marston was a great admirer of hers.
5. The Amazons of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island, including Diana Prince herself, are based on Utopian feminist literature of the early 20th century, including Inez Haynes Gilmore’s Angel Island, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, and Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race. “The philosophy of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman, precisely” (pg. 102).
6. Dr. Psycho, a Wonder Woman nemesis, was based on a real-life, anti-feminist German psychology professor of Marston’s at Harvard. When Wonder Woman frees Dr. Psycho’s mistreated wife, the wife asks, “What can a weak girl do?” The superhero replies, “Get strong! Earn your own living!” Wonder Woman becomes a General in the army and even, later, President of the United States. Lepore puts it this way: “What the king of the Mole Men and all villains in Wonder Woman share is their opposition to women’s equality. Against each of them, Wonder Woman fights for women’s rights of work, to run for political office, and to lead” (217).
7. Wonder Woman constantly finds herself chained up in the comics, in part because Marston drew on early 20th-century feminist iconography, which often portrayed women bound by the ties of patriarchy, and in part because Marston was a kinkster who found BDSM hot.
8. Marston got started in comics because Olive Byrne wrote puff pieces about him for Family Circle magazine, without disclosing that he was the co-parent of her two children. In one of those interviews, Marston praised the effect of comics on children, and Charles Gaines of DC Comics hired Marston as a consulting psychologist and adviser. It was Marston’s idea to stamp the DC logo on all comic books as a mark of quality. Urged by Holloway, he also told Gaines that a female superhero would help disarm comic book naysayers, who were legion and rabid.
9. The DC in DC Comics stands for “Detective Comics,” making “DC Comics” as redundant as “ATM machine.” (Marvel Comics, their chief rival, was originally called Timely Comics.) Charles Gaines, who founded what became DC Comics, believed in Superman when all other publishers passed, and took on the risk of Wonder Woman too.
10. “Wonder Woman sold like crazy. No one, aside from Superman and Batman, came close” (pg. 209).
11. Critics and psychologists denounced Wonder Woman for the strip’s “lesbian undertones.” One of Wonder Woman’s favorite exclamations is “Suffering Sappho!” Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, from which the word “lesbian” is derived. She also has various female friends and sidekicks, including Etta Candy, a chubby, cheerful college girl with whom Wonder Woman has this delightful exchange:
“Etta, you know, you ought to cut down on the candy. It will ruin your constitution.”
“My constitution has room for plenty of amendments.”
12. Dorothy Roubicek, probably the first female editor at DC Comics, worked on Wonder Woman and also was the person who suggested that Superman be given a vulnerability to Kryptonite, a detail which was worked into his storyline in 1943. She objected to Wonder Woman being tied up all the time, but Marston assured her that secretly “women enjoy submission,” at least when it came to sex.
13. Most superheroes foundered after WWII. Forgotten comic book heroes from the early days include The Wildcat, Mr. Terrific, The Black Pirate, Little Boy Blue, and the Gay Ghost. Wonder Woman, like Batman and Superman, marched on, but her brand got badly diluted after Marston died in 1947, stricken by polio and cancer, and then Gaines died as well. Censors imposed a strict code on the content of comic books. “Wonder Woman lived on but was scarcely recognizable…smiling, daffy, helpless” (pg. 271).
14. Second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, who loved Wonder Woman in the 1940s, brought her back in 1972, featuring her on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine with the headline “Wonder Woman for President.” As Lepore writes, “Wonder Woman is best understood as the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s equality, a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a full century later” (pg. 210).
15. In early 1973, DC Comics began publishing “New Adventures of the Original Wonder Woman.” And in 1975, she moved to television: “ABC launched The New Original Wonder Woman. Set in the 1940s, it was based very closely on Marston’s comics” and ran for four years, starring Lynda Carter.
Bonus Random Delightful Facts
1. “The price to get into a nickelodeon was almost never a nickel.” (pg. 33).
2. “In 1910, 4 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one went to college; by 1920, that number had risen to 8 percent, 40 percent of which were women.” (pg. 17).
3. In the magazine The Nation in 1926, a woman explained that a modern woman was “not altogether satisfied with love, marriage, and a purely domestic career. She wants money of her own. She wants some means of self-expression, perhaps, some way of satisfying her personal ambitions. But she wants a husband, home, and children, too. How to reconcile these two desires in real life, that is the question.” (pg. 121).
4. “The word ‘feminism,’ hardly ever used before 1910, was everywhere by 1913″ and advocated for the belief that “women were in every way equal to men” (19).
5. At the turn of the century, “married women were not allowed to train as nurses” (83).
From my review for Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/15...
1. Psychologist and storyteller William Moulton Marston invented the first lie detector test while an undergraduate at Harvard. He then created Wonder Woman, whose magic lasso could force men to tell the truth, at age 48.
2. Unfortunately, Lepore writes, “for all of Marston’s charm, his [lie detector's] near-perfect laboratory results generally failed to impress men involved in actual criminal investigation” (pg. 51). He couldn’t sell or make any real money off of his invention. A trial judge dismissed evidence produced by the lie detector in 1922, saying, “When it is developed to the perfection of the telephone and the telegraph and wireless and a few other things we will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably, and it will bother some other judge, not me” (pg. 69). The defendant whom Marston was hoping to help was sentenced to life in prison. Another man later read Marston’s research and created his own similar lie detector, which he patented as the polygraph. There are now millions in use all over the country.
3. Marston was a well-born bohemian who drew on staunch feminist and free love ideals from the early 20th century and the influences of the two women he loved: his official wife, Betty Holloway Marston, who supported the family because, until Wonder Woman, Marston could not hold down a job; and his long-term live-in mistress, Olive Byrne, originally a student of Marston’s, who raised all of his children. In lieu of a wedding ring, Olive wore bracelets on which Wonder Woman’s bullet-deflecting bracelets were based. A third woman also shared the house with them, off and on; it’s implied she was Holloway’s lover and possibly Byrne’s, too.
4. Margaret Sanger, who went on to found what became Planned Parenthood, delivered a baby for the first time “when she was only eight years old” (pg. 82)—her niece, Olive Byrne. She then saved Olive’s life when Olive’s father, irritated by her crying, threw the baby into a snowbank. She went on to dedicate her life to making birth control available, affordable, and safe for women. Marston was a great admirer of hers.
5. The Amazons of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island, including Diana Prince herself, are based on Utopian feminist literature of the early 20th century, including Inez Haynes Gilmore’s Angel Island, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, and Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race. “The philosophy of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman, precisely” (pg. 102).
6. Dr. Psycho, a Wonder Woman nemesis, was based on a real-life, anti-feminist German psychology professor of Marston’s at Harvard. When Wonder Woman frees Dr. Psycho’s mistreated wife, the wife asks, “What can a weak girl do?” The superhero replies, “Get strong! Earn your own living!” Wonder Woman becomes a General in the army and even, later, President of the United States. Lepore puts it this way: “What the king of the Mole Men and all villains in Wonder Woman share is their opposition to women’s equality. Against each of them, Wonder Woman fights for women’s rights of work, to run for political office, and to lead” (217).
7. Wonder Woman constantly finds herself chained up in the comics, in part because Marston drew on early 20th-century feminist iconography, which often portrayed women bound by the ties of patriarchy, and in part because Marston was a kinkster who found BDSM hot.
8. Marston got started in comics because Olive Byrne wrote puff pieces about him for Family Circle magazine, without disclosing that he was the co-parent of her two children. In one of those interviews, Marston praised the effect of comics on children, and Charles Gaines of DC Comics hired Marston as a consulting psychologist and adviser. It was Marston’s idea to stamp the DC logo on all comic books as a mark of quality. Urged by Holloway, he also told Gaines that a female superhero would help disarm comic book naysayers, who were legion and rabid.
9. The DC in DC Comics stands for “Detective Comics,” making “DC Comics” as redundant as “ATM machine.” (Marvel Comics, their chief rival, was originally called Timely Comics.) Charles Gaines, who founded what became DC Comics, believed in Superman when all other publishers passed, and took on the risk of Wonder Woman too.
10. “Wonder Woman sold like crazy. No one, aside from Superman and Batman, came close” (pg. 209).
11. Critics and psychologists denounced Wonder Woman for the strip’s “lesbian undertones.” One of Wonder Woman’s favorite exclamations is “Suffering Sappho!” Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, from which the word “lesbian” is derived. She also has various female friends and sidekicks, including Etta Candy, a chubby, cheerful college girl with whom Wonder Woman has this delightful exchange:
“Etta, you know, you ought to cut down on the candy. It will ruin your constitution.”
“My constitution has room for plenty of amendments.”
12. Dorothy Roubicek, probably the first female editor at DC Comics, worked on Wonder Woman and also was the person who suggested that Superman be given a vulnerability to Kryptonite, a detail which was worked into his storyline in 1943. She objected to Wonder Woman being tied up all the time, but Marston assured her that secretly “women enjoy submission,” at least when it came to sex.
13. Most superheroes foundered after WWII. Forgotten comic book heroes from the early days include The Wildcat, Mr. Terrific, The Black Pirate, Little Boy Blue, and the Gay Ghost. Wonder Woman, like Batman and Superman, marched on, but her brand got badly diluted after Marston died in 1947, stricken by polio and cancer, and then Gaines died as well. Censors imposed a strict code on the content of comic books. “Wonder Woman lived on but was scarcely recognizable…smiling, daffy, helpless” (pg. 271).
14. Second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, who loved Wonder Woman in the 1940s, brought her back in 1972, featuring her on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine with the headline “Wonder Woman for President.” As Lepore writes, “Wonder Woman is best understood as the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s equality, a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a full century later” (pg. 210).
15. In early 1973, DC Comics began publishing “New Adventures of the Original Wonder Woman.” And in 1975, she moved to television: “ABC launched The New Original Wonder Woman. Set in the 1940s, it was based very closely on Marston’s comics” and ran for four years, starring Lynda Carter.
Bonus Random Delightful Facts
1. “The price to get into a nickelodeon was almost never a nickel.” (pg. 33).
2. “In 1910, 4 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one went to college; by 1920, that number had risen to 8 percent, 40 percent of which were women.” (pg. 17).
3. In the magazine The Nation in 1926, a woman explained that a modern woman was “not altogether satisfied with love, marriage, and a purely domestic career. She wants money of her own. She wants some means of self-expression, perhaps, some way of satisfying her personal ambitions. But she wants a husband, home, and children, too. How to reconcile these two desires in real life, that is the question.” (pg. 121).
4. “The word ‘feminism,’ hardly ever used before 1910, was everywhere by 1913″ and advocated for the belief that “women were in every way equal to men” (19).
5. At the turn of the century, “married women were not allowed to train as nurses” (83).
From my review for Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/15...
February 15, 2017
Actual rating: 3.5 stars.
This is a fascinating read about the creator of Wonder Woman, who was one exceptionally odd man. He seems to have genuinely believed that women would rule the world, but his own home was far from a matriarchy: he had one wife to work twelve hours a day in New York City, supporting the family, and another one (both Margaret Sanger's niece, and a former student) to raise the four children the two women managed to produce with him in the 1930s - when she was not writing puff pieces about him for Family Circle.
In background, he was a psychologist, and invented a lie detector (using blood pressure readings) while still an undergraduate at Harvard, but never patented it, and went on to be blacklisted from academe for the combination of his esoteric teachings and his very odd home life (which also included, in the 1920s, sex club meetings). Then, after failing to make a splash in Hollywood, he let his two wives support his family and raise it, while he pottered about the house in his underwear, only getting dressed for the occasional private client visit. His attempts to sell the FBI on his lie detector only resulted in J. Edgar Hoover opening a file on him.
And then in 1941 he invented Wonder Woman, and suddenly had a massive success on his hands. And she's a reflection of her strange creator, who genuinely believed in feminism and women's rights, but also was one very kinky man. She's as obsessed with lie detecting as he was, too.
Lepore claims, however, that American feminism having molded Wonder Woman (which she proves thoroughly), that Wonder Woman then went on to mold American feminism, and that's the problem it's had since 1972.
She goes nowhere near proving this supposition. (And only makes a feeble attempt at it in the last chapter or so.) It would be a stronger work without it.
This is a fascinating read about the creator of Wonder Woman, who was one exceptionally odd man. He seems to have genuinely believed that women would rule the world, but his own home was far from a matriarchy: he had one wife to work twelve hours a day in New York City, supporting the family, and another one (both Margaret Sanger's niece, and a former student) to raise the four children the two women managed to produce with him in the 1930s - when she was not writing puff pieces about him for Family Circle.
In background, he was a psychologist, and invented a lie detector (using blood pressure readings) while still an undergraduate at Harvard, but never patented it, and went on to be blacklisted from academe for the combination of his esoteric teachings and his very odd home life (which also included, in the 1920s, sex club meetings). Then, after failing to make a splash in Hollywood, he let his two wives support his family and raise it, while he pottered about the house in his underwear, only getting dressed for the occasional private client visit. His attempts to sell the FBI on his lie detector only resulted in J. Edgar Hoover opening a file on him.
And then in 1941 he invented Wonder Woman, and suddenly had a massive success on his hands. And she's a reflection of her strange creator, who genuinely believed in feminism and women's rights, but also was one very kinky man. She's as obsessed with lie detecting as he was, too.
Lepore claims, however, that American feminism having molded Wonder Woman (which she proves thoroughly), that Wonder Woman then went on to mold American feminism, and that's the problem it's had since 1972.
She goes nowhere near proving this supposition. (And only makes a feeble attempt at it in the last chapter or so.) It would be a stronger work without it.
February 4, 2018
'The Secret History of Wonder Woman' is a terrific exposé. The book is a well-researched biography of the quirky man who invented the Wonder Woman comic strip and character. He successfully hid an unusual hive home life while in plain sight as a minor celebrity. The world knew him as a psychologist and a somewhat nutty university professor, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947). He was known as well as the inventor of the lie detector. However, since he was a Harvard man, people did not particularly notice the more unusual aspects of his scientific pursuits or his attraction to women being bound in chains. Besides, he was a noted supporter of women's rights, and his biography also uncovers early feminist history.
I think the book suffers only from the lack of an explanatory foreword. A lot of readers did not know this book was a biography of Marston and his family. Some pick it up thinking it a collection of Wonder Woman comics. Instead, readers find an academic biography, backed by historical documents, going deep into the true life stories of several generations of the Marston tribe. There are more biographies included than expected because Marston's household ended up being more commune than nuclear family. Marston had one wife. Officially.
Ladies, before too many imaginative images of a man and his secret harem fill your mind, I'm tossing in the fun fact Marston was the kept man, a trophy drone, to 'his' women, all suffragettes and birth control advocates. While family members wrote articles for Family Circle Magazine, and other publications, extolling the virtues of nuclear family home comforts, Marston was giving two of his 'wives' children while another woman friend with benefits occasionally lived in the attic. Marston also worked with horror movie producers (Frankenstein, Dracula), and created with DC artists Wonder Woman comics.
From Wikipedia:
"In a 1943 issue of The American Scholar, Marston wrote: "Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.""
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi...
Gentle reader, Marston's biography fits entirely in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction shelf. Historian Jill Lepore has chosen a marvelous subject to research! Marston's life is a carnival house of mirrors when it comes to his public image and his private pursuits. As his life rolled on, Margaret Sanger, yes, THAT one, the feminist, was sort of an aunt to Marston, if her niece Olive Byrne had married Marston instead of the 'official' wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway. However, this was not a family that believed in conformity. Telling the tale of William Moulton Marston manages to hit the highs, as well as ironic and shameful lows, of the beginnings of the women's liberation movement in America. Marston's personal obsessions with bondage and submission, in my opinion, were probably not only due to his personal predilections and fantasies (as far as we know, only expressed in the comic pages of Wonder Woman). He was in college just before World War I and lived through World War II. Sigismund Schlomo Freud was developing his theories of psychoanalysis - which Freud gave over entirely in time to being about rooting out sexual dysfunction as the main causes of mental disorders - and I can't help wonder if Marston or his partners ran across Freud's books. If so, is this why they all were so incredibly guilt-free, strong-minded and free-thinking, even while hiding their domestic arrangements? Hehe.
I think the information and writing was a little disorganized and choppy, but I think this is a fascinating read, if very nerdy. Very very nerdy. Consider yourself warned.
In back, there is a comics index, a huge and lengthy notes section on source materials, and a regular index to the book's pages.
I think the book suffers only from the lack of an explanatory foreword. A lot of readers did not know this book was a biography of Marston and his family. Some pick it up thinking it a collection of Wonder Woman comics. Instead, readers find an academic biography, backed by historical documents, going deep into the true life stories of several generations of the Marston tribe. There are more biographies included than expected because Marston's household ended up being more commune than nuclear family. Marston had one wife. Officially.
Ladies, before too many imaginative images of a man and his secret harem fill your mind, I'm tossing in the fun fact Marston was the kept man, a trophy drone, to 'his' women, all suffragettes and birth control advocates. While family members wrote articles for Family Circle Magazine, and other publications, extolling the virtues of nuclear family home comforts, Marston was giving two of his 'wives' children while another woman friend with benefits occasionally lived in the attic. Marston also worked with horror movie producers (Frankenstein, Dracula), and created with DC artists Wonder Woman comics.
From Wikipedia:
"In a 1943 issue of The American Scholar, Marston wrote: "Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.""
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi...
Gentle reader, Marston's biography fits entirely in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction shelf. Historian Jill Lepore has chosen a marvelous subject to research! Marston's life is a carnival house of mirrors when it comes to his public image and his private pursuits. As his life rolled on, Margaret Sanger, yes, THAT one, the feminist, was sort of an aunt to Marston, if her niece Olive Byrne had married Marston instead of the 'official' wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway. However, this was not a family that believed in conformity. Telling the tale of William Moulton Marston manages to hit the highs, as well as ironic and shameful lows, of the beginnings of the women's liberation movement in America. Marston's personal obsessions with bondage and submission, in my opinion, were probably not only due to his personal predilections and fantasies (as far as we know, only expressed in the comic pages of Wonder Woman). He was in college just before World War I and lived through World War II. Sigismund Schlomo Freud was developing his theories of psychoanalysis - which Freud gave over entirely in time to being about rooting out sexual dysfunction as the main causes of mental disorders - and I can't help wonder if Marston or his partners ran across Freud's books. If so, is this why they all were so incredibly guilt-free, strong-minded and free-thinking, even while hiding their domestic arrangements? Hehe.
I think the information and writing was a little disorganized and choppy, but I think this is a fascinating read, if very nerdy. Very very nerdy. Consider yourself warned.
In back, there is a comics index, a huge and lengthy notes section on source materials, and a regular index to the book's pages.
January 17, 2015
A great history that's entertaining and credible on four fronts:
1) as a history of feminism which shows how Margaret Sanger's crusades as an advocate of birth control are inextricably tied with the origins of Wonder Woman.
2) as a biography of polymath William Moulton Marston, psychologist and lawyer, who invented the first systolic blood pressure lie detector test and tried unsuccessfully to push it into the forefront of American law. Who also created and scripted Wonder Woman.
3) as an essential text in the history of the Golden Age of the American comic book, the personalities involved, and the attempts to censor comics. (M. C. Gaines, publisher of National Comics, and later of E.C., usually portrayed as an ogre in other histories, is given a revelatory sympathetic portrait here.)
4) a look into an unorthodox polyamorous family. A real life "Big Love", if you will. If you're like me, you'll come out of reading this book very fond of Marston, his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and his secretary/other wife Olive Byrne. And their four kids.
1) as a history of feminism which shows how Margaret Sanger's crusades as an advocate of birth control are inextricably tied with the origins of Wonder Woman.
2) as a biography of polymath William Moulton Marston, psychologist and lawyer, who invented the first systolic blood pressure lie detector test and tried unsuccessfully to push it into the forefront of American law. Who also created and scripted Wonder Woman.
3) as an essential text in the history of the Golden Age of the American comic book, the personalities involved, and the attempts to censor comics. (M. C. Gaines, publisher of National Comics, and later of E.C., usually portrayed as an ogre in other histories, is given a revelatory sympathetic portrait here.)
4) a look into an unorthodox polyamorous family. A real life "Big Love", if you will. If you're like me, you'll come out of reading this book very fond of Marston, his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and his secretary/other wife Olive Byrne. And their four kids.
March 18, 2022
"Wonder Woman" currently continues to break box office records, and it should: it's an amazingly entertaining film that manages to reinvigorate the failing DC studios as well as put an end to the ridiculously sexist belief that superhero movies are for boys only. I read and reviewed this book in December 2014. It's a fascinating account of the true origins of Wonder Woman and a biography of WW's creator, William Marston. The movie does an excellent job of capturing the feminist ideology that Marston laid out in the original WW comics and which, sadly, got downplayed and completely subverted when Marston left the comic book series in other, less capable, hands.
Comic book fans may know the secret origin of Wonder Woman, but, up until Jill Lepore’s book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman”, they didn’t know the full story. It’s a fascinating, weird, sometimes-funny, more-often-than-not disturbing, and surprisingly moving tale that involves the early days of feminism, pop psychology, polygamy, bondage, and satin tights.
The scantily-clad Amazon in her red-gold-and-blue bikini, metal bracelets, and golden lasso made her debut in December 1941 in the pulpy pages of All-Star Comics #8. A month later she was in Sensation Comics #1, a comic devoted solely to her by the famous comics publisher, Maxwell Charles Gaines.
Wonder Woman was the brain-child of William Moulton Marston: a Harvard graduate, an ardent feminist, a crank psychologist, the inventor of the lie detector, and a secret polygamist.
If there is one thing one should know about Marston it is that he loved women.
Okay, that makes him sound like a cad, or a player. He was neither. In truth, Marston was deeply devoted to the idea of gender equality, long before it was cool to do so. He was a strong supporter of the woman suffrage movement, and he believed intensely in the idea that women would one day rule the world in a matriarchal system that would usher in an era of peace and scientific breakthroughs the likes of which has never been seen in human history.
There was, apparently, something extremely charming about Marston. In pictures of his early college days, he was a thin, bookish kid with thick-framed glasses. He was, by today’s standards anyway, the epitome of a nerd. He dated Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, a student at Mount Holyoke College, who was an activist for many women’s rights issues---voting rights and birth control, primarily. They married in 1915, after Holloway graduated.
While the logistics of Marston and Holloway’s marriage are speculative, it’s clear that Holloway didn’t have a problem with her husband engaging in extra-marital affairs with other women. In fact, when Marston met a divorcee named Marjorie Huntley, she would repeatedly visit the Marston household. In her own words, the trio comprised a “threesome”. Regardless of what may or may not have happened behind closed doors, the relationship between Holloway and Huntley was more than amicable and remained so their entire lives.
Huntley, of course, would not be the last of Marston’s charmed women. While teaching briefly at Tufts, Marston met and fell in love with a young student named Olive Byrne. The feelings were mutual. When Marston brought her home to live with them, Holloway was not keen on the idea. While her relationship with Byrne later developed into a close friendship, it started off rocky, especially when Marston delivered an ultimatum: either Byrne stays or I leave. Holloway chose to stay with Marston and Byrne. As it turned out, the living arrangement worked out well for Holloway. Byrne, a very affectionate young woman, helped raise Marston’s and Holloway’s children, as Holloway was not very good with children. She apparently liked them better as concepts rather than actual mouths to feed. It also freed up her schedule to be able to work full time, which she absolutely wanted. Holloway was a career woman in a time when women simply did not have, or want, careers. Indeed, Holloway, as it turned out, would be the primary money-maker in the household.
For all the letters and degrees that Marston acquired in his many years of college and graduate school, and for as book-smart as he was, he wasn’t very smart when it came to holding down jobs. Of course, his shady business practices, eccentric behaviors, and his penchant for “fudging” numbers in the many journal articles he wrote were most likely the reasons he was constantly getting fired.
Despite his flaws, however, Marston was the inventor of a revolutionary technology that is still being used today: the lie detector. In its primitive form, Marston’s machine would be able to detect subtle changes in a person’s blood pressure that would indicate whether they were telling the truth or a lie. Sadly, Marston was unable to get the legal profession at the time to truly grasp the significance of the technology. In a famous murder case, Frye v. United States, Marston ��proved” that the defendant, a young back man named James Frye, was innocent of the crime of which he was accused, but the judge would not accept his evidence as admissible, owing to the fact that it was a completely new and untested---and therefore untrustworthy---technology. It would be many years later that lie detector results could be used as admissible evidence.
How Marston---a failure at keeping a job, a crank psychologist, and a secret polygamist---came to invent Wonder Woman is understandable only by placing him in the context of his time.
During his many days of unemployment (and he was unemployed quite a bit), Marston would often lounge all day in his pajamas reading nothing but comic books. He would tend to buy every comic book on the newsstand. He was a voracious comics lover.
Comic books, however, were under attack. Parent’s groups, church groups, child psychologists, politicians, librarians: everyone had a say on how comic books were destroying the minds (and the moral values) of our nation’s youth.
Marston, who apparently still had a reputable (enough) name in the field, was still publishing articles for a wide variety of publications. One of those magazines, Family Circle, published an article by Olive Byrne, in which she interviewed the famous psychologist William Marston. (Granted, no mention was made of the fact that she lived with him in a polygamist household with his first wife and that she had already had two children with him.) In the article, Marston gave a glowing endorsement of comic books, claiming that they were “pure wish fulfillment” for children. Working on reader’s patriotism, Marston added, “And the two wishes behind Superman are certainly the soundest of all; they are, in fact, our national aspirations of the moment---to develop unbeatable national might, and to use this great power, when we get it, to protect innocent, peace-loving people from destructive, ruthless evil. You don’t think for a minute that it is wrong to imagine the fulfillment of those two aspirations for the United States of America, do you? Then why should it be wrong or harmful for children to imagine the same things for themselves, personally, when they read ‘Superman’? (p.185)”
M.C. Gaines, the publisher of DC Comics (the home of Superman and Batman, two of the most popular comic book heroes at the time), liked what Marston was saying in the article. He liked it so much that he hired Marston to be a Consulting Psychologist on the DC Comics’ Editorial Advisory Board.
It was during his stint on the board that Marston pitched the idea for Wonder Woman, borne out of his many feminist ideals, pop psychological fancies, and an observation that he had noted about comics for a long time---a clear lack of any strong female superheroines.
The rest, they say, is history. At least, the history we all know about Wonder Woman: Daughter of Queen Hippolyte, ruler of the Amazons on Paradise Island, cut off for centuries from the cruelties and madness of the masculine world, Princess Diana finds an American Army officer, Captain Steve Trevor, washed up on shore after his plane crashes in the Atlantic. She nurses him to health, falls in love with him, and returns with him to the U.S., where she dons her secret identity of Diana Prince, a mild-mannered secretary working at the War Department. Unbeknownst to Trevor and the rest of the world, Diana is also the brunette with the super powers that swoops in occasionally in her invisible jet to save the day.
Wonder Woman’s success was immediate and huge. Marston had successfully called it: there was a huge demand for a strong superheroine. Other comic book companies tried to ride the wave by creating a slew of other super female characters, most of them unsuccessful. Wonder Woman was the first and the best.
Over the years, her popularity waxed and waned, depending on who was writing the stories. For a long period in the 50s and 60s, the series was being written by men who did not share Marston’s feminist beliefs. Marston died of cancer and complications with polio on May 2, 1947.
Byrne and Holloway lived together, happily, for the rest of their lives. They were vocal feminists until their deaths.
Lepore’s book is a must-read for anyone who grew up reading comic books and, specifically, fans of Wonder Woman. It is also a fascinating history of American feminism and a humorous and moving biography of a unique individual.
Thank you, Ms. Lepore, for letting the secret out...
Comic book fans may know the secret origin of Wonder Woman, but, up until Jill Lepore’s book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman”, they didn’t know the full story. It’s a fascinating, weird, sometimes-funny, more-often-than-not disturbing, and surprisingly moving tale that involves the early days of feminism, pop psychology, polygamy, bondage, and satin tights.
The scantily-clad Amazon in her red-gold-and-blue bikini, metal bracelets, and golden lasso made her debut in December 1941 in the pulpy pages of All-Star Comics #8. A month later she was in Sensation Comics #1, a comic devoted solely to her by the famous comics publisher, Maxwell Charles Gaines.
Wonder Woman was the brain-child of William Moulton Marston: a Harvard graduate, an ardent feminist, a crank psychologist, the inventor of the lie detector, and a secret polygamist.
If there is one thing one should know about Marston it is that he loved women.
Okay, that makes him sound like a cad, or a player. He was neither. In truth, Marston was deeply devoted to the idea of gender equality, long before it was cool to do so. He was a strong supporter of the woman suffrage movement, and he believed intensely in the idea that women would one day rule the world in a matriarchal system that would usher in an era of peace and scientific breakthroughs the likes of which has never been seen in human history.
There was, apparently, something extremely charming about Marston. In pictures of his early college days, he was a thin, bookish kid with thick-framed glasses. He was, by today’s standards anyway, the epitome of a nerd. He dated Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, a student at Mount Holyoke College, who was an activist for many women’s rights issues---voting rights and birth control, primarily. They married in 1915, after Holloway graduated.
While the logistics of Marston and Holloway’s marriage are speculative, it’s clear that Holloway didn’t have a problem with her husband engaging in extra-marital affairs with other women. In fact, when Marston met a divorcee named Marjorie Huntley, she would repeatedly visit the Marston household. In her own words, the trio comprised a “threesome”. Regardless of what may or may not have happened behind closed doors, the relationship between Holloway and Huntley was more than amicable and remained so their entire lives.
Huntley, of course, would not be the last of Marston’s charmed women. While teaching briefly at Tufts, Marston met and fell in love with a young student named Olive Byrne. The feelings were mutual. When Marston brought her home to live with them, Holloway was not keen on the idea. While her relationship with Byrne later developed into a close friendship, it started off rocky, especially when Marston delivered an ultimatum: either Byrne stays or I leave. Holloway chose to stay with Marston and Byrne. As it turned out, the living arrangement worked out well for Holloway. Byrne, a very affectionate young woman, helped raise Marston’s and Holloway’s children, as Holloway was not very good with children. She apparently liked them better as concepts rather than actual mouths to feed. It also freed up her schedule to be able to work full time, which she absolutely wanted. Holloway was a career woman in a time when women simply did not have, or want, careers. Indeed, Holloway, as it turned out, would be the primary money-maker in the household.
For all the letters and degrees that Marston acquired in his many years of college and graduate school, and for as book-smart as he was, he wasn’t very smart when it came to holding down jobs. Of course, his shady business practices, eccentric behaviors, and his penchant for “fudging” numbers in the many journal articles he wrote were most likely the reasons he was constantly getting fired.
Despite his flaws, however, Marston was the inventor of a revolutionary technology that is still being used today: the lie detector. In its primitive form, Marston’s machine would be able to detect subtle changes in a person’s blood pressure that would indicate whether they were telling the truth or a lie. Sadly, Marston was unable to get the legal profession at the time to truly grasp the significance of the technology. In a famous murder case, Frye v. United States, Marston ��proved” that the defendant, a young back man named James Frye, was innocent of the crime of which he was accused, but the judge would not accept his evidence as admissible, owing to the fact that it was a completely new and untested---and therefore untrustworthy---technology. It would be many years later that lie detector results could be used as admissible evidence.
How Marston---a failure at keeping a job, a crank psychologist, and a secret polygamist---came to invent Wonder Woman is understandable only by placing him in the context of his time.
During his many days of unemployment (and he was unemployed quite a bit), Marston would often lounge all day in his pajamas reading nothing but comic books. He would tend to buy every comic book on the newsstand. He was a voracious comics lover.
Comic books, however, were under attack. Parent’s groups, church groups, child psychologists, politicians, librarians: everyone had a say on how comic books were destroying the minds (and the moral values) of our nation’s youth.
Marston, who apparently still had a reputable (enough) name in the field, was still publishing articles for a wide variety of publications. One of those magazines, Family Circle, published an article by Olive Byrne, in which she interviewed the famous psychologist William Marston. (Granted, no mention was made of the fact that she lived with him in a polygamist household with his first wife and that she had already had two children with him.) In the article, Marston gave a glowing endorsement of comic books, claiming that they were “pure wish fulfillment” for children. Working on reader’s patriotism, Marston added, “And the two wishes behind Superman are certainly the soundest of all; they are, in fact, our national aspirations of the moment---to develop unbeatable national might, and to use this great power, when we get it, to protect innocent, peace-loving people from destructive, ruthless evil. You don’t think for a minute that it is wrong to imagine the fulfillment of those two aspirations for the United States of America, do you? Then why should it be wrong or harmful for children to imagine the same things for themselves, personally, when they read ‘Superman’? (p.185)”
M.C. Gaines, the publisher of DC Comics (the home of Superman and Batman, two of the most popular comic book heroes at the time), liked what Marston was saying in the article. He liked it so much that he hired Marston to be a Consulting Psychologist on the DC Comics’ Editorial Advisory Board.
It was during his stint on the board that Marston pitched the idea for Wonder Woman, borne out of his many feminist ideals, pop psychological fancies, and an observation that he had noted about comics for a long time---a clear lack of any strong female superheroines.
The rest, they say, is history. At least, the history we all know about Wonder Woman: Daughter of Queen Hippolyte, ruler of the Amazons on Paradise Island, cut off for centuries from the cruelties and madness of the masculine world, Princess Diana finds an American Army officer, Captain Steve Trevor, washed up on shore after his plane crashes in the Atlantic. She nurses him to health, falls in love with him, and returns with him to the U.S., where she dons her secret identity of Diana Prince, a mild-mannered secretary working at the War Department. Unbeknownst to Trevor and the rest of the world, Diana is also the brunette with the super powers that swoops in occasionally in her invisible jet to save the day.
Wonder Woman’s success was immediate and huge. Marston had successfully called it: there was a huge demand for a strong superheroine. Other comic book companies tried to ride the wave by creating a slew of other super female characters, most of them unsuccessful. Wonder Woman was the first and the best.
Over the years, her popularity waxed and waned, depending on who was writing the stories. For a long period in the 50s and 60s, the series was being written by men who did not share Marston’s feminist beliefs. Marston died of cancer and complications with polio on May 2, 1947.
Byrne and Holloway lived together, happily, for the rest of their lives. They were vocal feminists until their deaths.
Lepore’s book is a must-read for anyone who grew up reading comic books and, specifically, fans of Wonder Woman. It is also a fascinating history of American feminism and a humorous and moving biography of a unique individual.
Thank you, Ms. Lepore, for letting the secret out...
February 24, 2017
I've been wanting to read this book at least since 2014 when a couple GR friends pointed me in the direction of this New Yorker article. Wonder Woman! She's bad-ass! I wanted to know her secret history!
I expected this secret history to involve feminism because that's a pretty big deal these days, rightly so, and Wonder Woman was this character that broke a lot of barriers because she was a bad-ass female character when all the other comic book characters of the day were male. There is a history there along that line, and Lepore details it very carefully.
But the other part of the secret history is the man who created the character. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the lie detector test, was inspired to write the Wonder Woman character inspired by a few women in his personal life who all willingly (kinda-sorta-mostly?) participated in an extended relationship. Unusual for its time, they hid this family dynamic for years, including their own children, as it was not likely to be accepted. It's not likely to be accepted today either, since polyamorous relationships still get the shaft as far any sort of rights go - it's like this dark horse of relationships, and it doesn't help that polygamy has gotten a bad rep over the years. But anyway.
Lepore had the opportunity to go through all sorts of juicy Marston papers which led her to writing this book. She has extensive knowledge about the family, the creation and evolution of Wonder Woman, and the history of feminism. But I will say I am disappointed in the final outcome when Lepore put all of those components together.
A book about Marston and his family dynamics would make for an interesting book or study in and of itself. What I was more interested in reading about was how feminism shaped Wonder Woman, and how Wonder Woman shaped the course of feminism. Because both happened, Lepore touches on a bit of it throughout... but then distracts from that by bringing us back to Marston and Co., and how this one thing then led to this other thing in the comics, and I don't know. It actually felt sloppy at times.
It didn't help that while there are extensive illustrations throughout the book (be careful of that if you choose an audio version of this book, by the way, because I think you'd miss out by not seeing some of the panels), the captions were included verbatim throughout the text. So when I would encounter the same phrasing in the body of the text, it would take me a moment as I could remember reading that already and I had to pause to decide if I read it in a caption or if I was rereading whole sections of the book without realizing it. Unfortunately I found this repetition an unnecessary distraction.
I still recommend this to anyone interested in Wonder Woman, Golden Age comics, or the history of feminism. Lepore covers a lot of ground and it's all good details, regardless of how I felt the final execution was.
I expected this secret history to involve feminism because that's a pretty big deal these days, rightly so, and Wonder Woman was this character that broke a lot of barriers because she was a bad-ass female character when all the other comic book characters of the day were male. There is a history there along that line, and Lepore details it very carefully.
But the other part of the secret history is the man who created the character. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the lie detector test, was inspired to write the Wonder Woman character inspired by a few women in his personal life who all willingly (kinda-sorta-mostly?) participated in an extended relationship. Unusual for its time, they hid this family dynamic for years, including their own children, as it was not likely to be accepted. It's not likely to be accepted today either, since polyamorous relationships still get the shaft as far any sort of rights go - it's like this dark horse of relationships, and it doesn't help that polygamy has gotten a bad rep over the years. But anyway.
Lepore had the opportunity to go through all sorts of juicy Marston papers which led her to writing this book. She has extensive knowledge about the family, the creation and evolution of Wonder Woman, and the history of feminism. But I will say I am disappointed in the final outcome when Lepore put all of those components together.
A book about Marston and his family dynamics would make for an interesting book or study in and of itself. What I was more interested in reading about was how feminism shaped Wonder Woman, and how Wonder Woman shaped the course of feminism. Because both happened, Lepore touches on a bit of it throughout... but then distracts from that by bringing us back to Marston and Co., and how this one thing then led to this other thing in the comics, and I don't know. It actually felt sloppy at times.
It didn't help that while there are extensive illustrations throughout the book (be careful of that if you choose an audio version of this book, by the way, because I think you'd miss out by not seeing some of the panels), the captions were included verbatim throughout the text. So when I would encounter the same phrasing in the body of the text, it would take me a moment as I could remember reading that already and I had to pause to decide if I read it in a caption or if I was rereading whole sections of the book without realizing it. Unfortunately I found this repetition an unnecessary distraction.
I still recommend this to anyone interested in Wonder Woman, Golden Age comics, or the history of feminism. Lepore covers a lot of ground and it's all good details, regardless of how I felt the final execution was.
November 23, 2014
Extraordinarily well researched, Harvard history professor Jill Lepore profiles the creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston. WMM was a Harvard-trained psychologist: he developed one of the first polygraphs, but could never keep employed, and relied on the income of his well-educated wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway. WMM led a most unconventional life, fathering two children with Holloway and two more with a younger paramour, Olive Richard Byrne (niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the 20th century's most influential feminists), who raised all four children and was the model for Wonder Woman, including the iconic bracelets. The book does a decent, but not terrific, job of explaining the suffragette movement, but is too much about WMM and not enough of Wonder Woman herself, whom herself is a paradox: strong when battling for justice and weak when confronting her own feelings. The section in the middle, with 16 pages of color comics and Lepore's editorial commentary was my favorite part of the book. 2.5 stars.
May 31, 2019
I admit I do not read a lot of nonfiction, but this hit such an excellent sweet spot. Suffragists, sadomasochism, secret polyamory! Oh, and also comics.
My knowledge of feminist history is really not as good as it should be, so I learned a lot here about Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement of the early 20th century. The life of William Moulton Marston is about as colorful a biography as I've found, he's a scientist, a lawyer, a feminist, a writer, a psychologist, and an insufferable blowhard. (The real mystery here is how two different women tolerated him for so long!) If you're in it just for the comics, you'll have a long wait while we get into the unusual Marston's early life and adulthood, which provided many of his Wonder Woman plots. Eventually Lepore gets into Wonder Woman's place in feminism, which I really appreciated.
I enjoyed Lepore's writing so much that I'm now considering her absolutely gigantic history of the US. She reads the audiobook and is so enthusiastic, it's a real delight.
My knowledge of feminist history is really not as good as it should be, so I learned a lot here about Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement of the early 20th century. The life of William Moulton Marston is about as colorful a biography as I've found, he's a scientist, a lawyer, a feminist, a writer, a psychologist, and an insufferable blowhard. (The real mystery here is how two different women tolerated him for so long!) If you're in it just for the comics, you'll have a long wait while we get into the unusual Marston's early life and adulthood, which provided many of his Wonder Woman plots. Eventually Lepore gets into Wonder Woman's place in feminism, which I really appreciated.
I enjoyed Lepore's writing so much that I'm now considering her absolutely gigantic history of the US. She reads the audiobook and is so enthusiastic, it's a real delight.
January 20, 2020
This wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was pretty good all the same. I think this three star rating is due to two things: 1) I was expecting more of a history of Wonder Woman the character with some stuff about her creator(s) thrown in as well, and what I got was a history of her creator(s) in full, along with a healthy side order of what was actually going on in history at the time, with an emphasis on the history of feminism, with like 15% focus on Wonder Woman herself; and 2) I listened to most of this while packing and unpacking for my move, and I was very distracted and didn’t pay it my full attention.
The general gist of this book is actually pretty well known now, thanks to this book, and to the film from a couple of years ago, but just in case you’re not aware, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was in a polyamorous relationship with two women (and sometimes a third who wandered in and out), one whom he was married to, and the other who lived with him and told everyone her children’s father was dead, but Marston was the father of all four children who lived in the house. Marston and his wife Betty adopted the other two kids, but all three acted as parents, and Olive Byrne went to her grave refusing to admit the true nature of her relationship. The children themselves only had confirmation of their parentage when Betty told her son’s new wife (noted feminist Margaret Sanger’s grandchild; Olive Byrne was Sanger’s niece). Betty (or Holloway, as the author calls her throughout the book) and Olive were the inspiration for Wonder Woman, along with Sanger, but the connection remained hidden for decades because Byrne refused to acknowledge her relationship to Marston. (After Marston died, Olive and Betty stayed together until the end of their lives. In total, the two women lived together for sixty-four years and were most likely involved romantically themselves, although the historical data there is lacking, excepting a letter from Margaret Sanger asking that the two of them make sure to stay in the room with the separate beds, not her room, while they housesat for her.)
Marston, who was also the inventor of the lie detector test, was a weird guy who professed loudly and publicly his support of feminism, and even once held a press conference saying that in a 1,000 years, women would rule the world (after the gender wars, of course). He had sexual proclivities that he slipped into his comics, and which got him into trouble (an editor once pleaded with him to at least cut back the bondage scenes to a reasonable number). And yet he barely made any money, and while he was the nominal head of the household, the actual head was Betty, who made all the money, and Olive, who cared for the children. To note the kind of guy Marston was, he genuinely almost killed himself when he was eighteen because he wasn’t doing perfectly in all of his classes, and if he couldn’t be the best, then what is even the point of living? He was saved by his philosophy professor, who gave Marston a subject to become obsessed with, and to channel all his very weird energy into.
As a background to all of this, Lepore traces the feminist movement from the early 1900s all the way through the deaths of Marston, Olive and Betty. The focus here is very historical, and Lepore mentions Wonder Woman stories and characteristics as a way to illuminate real life or the life of her subjects, and not the other way around. She does also talk a bit about the obscenity controversies in the 1930s, in regards to both birth control and comics. There’s really a lot of interesting information packed in to this book, but I just couldn’t get over wanting it to be more of a history of Wonder Woman herself, and her evolution, when it really wasn’t.
Still, worth checking out, I think, if you’re interested in the history of feminism, and seeing what a historical polyamorous relationship looked like.
The general gist of this book is actually pretty well known now, thanks to this book, and to the film from a couple of years ago, but just in case you’re not aware, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was in a polyamorous relationship with two women (and sometimes a third who wandered in and out), one whom he was married to, and the other who lived with him and told everyone her children’s father was dead, but Marston was the father of all four children who lived in the house. Marston and his wife Betty adopted the other two kids, but all three acted as parents, and Olive Byrne went to her grave refusing to admit the true nature of her relationship. The children themselves only had confirmation of their parentage when Betty told her son’s new wife (noted feminist Margaret Sanger’s grandchild; Olive Byrne was Sanger’s niece). Betty (or Holloway, as the author calls her throughout the book) and Olive were the inspiration for Wonder Woman, along with Sanger, but the connection remained hidden for decades because Byrne refused to acknowledge her relationship to Marston. (After Marston died, Olive and Betty stayed together until the end of their lives. In total, the two women lived together for sixty-four years and were most likely involved romantically themselves, although the historical data there is lacking, excepting a letter from Margaret Sanger asking that the two of them make sure to stay in the room with the separate beds, not her room, while they housesat for her.)
Marston, who was also the inventor of the lie detector test, was a weird guy who professed loudly and publicly his support of feminism, and even once held a press conference saying that in a 1,000 years, women would rule the world (after the gender wars, of course). He had sexual proclivities that he slipped into his comics, and which got him into trouble (an editor once pleaded with him to at least cut back the bondage scenes to a reasonable number). And yet he barely made any money, and while he was the nominal head of the household, the actual head was Betty, who made all the money, and Olive, who cared for the children. To note the kind of guy Marston was, he genuinely almost killed himself when he was eighteen because he wasn’t doing perfectly in all of his classes, and if he couldn’t be the best, then what is even the point of living? He was saved by his philosophy professor, who gave Marston a subject to become obsessed with, and to channel all his very weird energy into.
As a background to all of this, Lepore traces the feminist movement from the early 1900s all the way through the deaths of Marston, Olive and Betty. The focus here is very historical, and Lepore mentions Wonder Woman stories and characteristics as a way to illuminate real life or the life of her subjects, and not the other way around. She does also talk a bit about the obscenity controversies in the 1930s, in regards to both birth control and comics. There’s really a lot of interesting information packed in to this book, but I just couldn’t get over wanting it to be more of a history of Wonder Woman herself, and her evolution, when it really wasn’t.
Still, worth checking out, I think, if you’re interested in the history of feminism, and seeing what a historical polyamorous relationship looked like.
March 5, 2015
I only got to 19% (Chapter 13). Too much detail (which I enjoyed at first, but now it distracts from the story), boring as shit, not even CLOSE to talking about Wonder Woman or the comic (at almost 20%!!!), and it seems the writer has ADD or something (switches story suddenly, a bit confusing and frustrating).
I can't force myself to read books anymore. Ugh.
Also, I put the book down for a week because it was so mind-numbingly boring and picked back up on Chapter 13. I already forgot who the people where. So I have to either backtrack somehow (I tried reading part of the last chapter but it didn't help) or start over...or something. Good god, this book is TERRIBLE.
GREAT sleep aide though. ;)
I can't force myself to read books anymore. Ugh.
Also, I put the book down for a week because it was so mind-numbingly boring and picked back up on Chapter 13. I already forgot who the people where. So I have to either backtrack somehow (I tried reading part of the last chapter but it didn't help) or start over...or something. Good god, this book is TERRIBLE.
GREAT sleep aide though. ;)
July 20, 2015
Jill Lepore's recent essays have taken offbeat topics (often related to popular culture) and used them to explore deeper themes in American history. Here, she builds a similar approach into a longer narrative, tracing a hidden path from the ideology and popular culture of the suffragists to the pop culture icon that influenced a slew of first wave feminists: the superhero Wonder Woman. That path consisted of the household of William Moulton Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway, and his mistress Olive Byrne. This book is essentially their group biography. The key links are that Byrne, inspiration for Wonder Woman's armbands, was the niece of suffragist Margaret Sanger; and the artist who first inked the comic was a political cartoonist from the suffragist era.
Lepore conducted remarkable research to bring this story to light. But stripped down to the bare essentials, her findings would not have sustained a book-length treatment. What really holds Lepore's story together is the smart way she pairs illustrations from the early 1900s with panels from later Wonder Woman comics. By the time a reader reaches the linchpin of her written argument, it's already obvious that the Wonder Woman comics directly borrow suffragist tropes, especially in their emphasis on captivity and release from bondage. At the same time, the bondage theme reflects Marston's highly idiosyncratic theories of human sexuality.
What ultimately makes the book so compelling is its ambiguity. Marston announces publicly that when it comes to love, women hold power over men, and will come to rule the world. At the same time, Marston lives with four children by two women, and a third mistress, all under one roof. One women works full time to support the household, and one works full time caring for the children, while Marston pursues his interests. Is he a hypocrite? Or is this household somehow consistent with the values Marston claimed to espouse?
I finished the book feeling empathy for Marston's children, and hoping they've had rewarding lives - perhaps out of respect for the living (and more specifically, her sources), Lepore doesn't share much about the children's lives after they reached adulthood and married.
Lepore conducted remarkable research to bring this story to light. But stripped down to the bare essentials, her findings would not have sustained a book-length treatment. What really holds Lepore's story together is the smart way she pairs illustrations from the early 1900s with panels from later Wonder Woman comics. By the time a reader reaches the linchpin of her written argument, it's already obvious that the Wonder Woman comics directly borrow suffragist tropes, especially in their emphasis on captivity and release from bondage. At the same time, the bondage theme reflects Marston's highly idiosyncratic theories of human sexuality.
What ultimately makes the book so compelling is its ambiguity. Marston announces publicly that when it comes to love, women hold power over men, and will come to rule the world. At the same time, Marston lives with four children by two women, and a third mistress, all under one roof. One women works full time to support the household, and one works full time caring for the children, while Marston pursues his interests. Is he a hypocrite? Or is this household somehow consistent with the values Marston claimed to espouse?
I finished the book feeling empathy for Marston's children, and hoping they've had rewarding lives - perhaps out of respect for the living (and more specifically, her sources), Lepore doesn't share much about the children's lives after they reached adulthood and married.
July 10, 2016
If you're considering reading this book because you are primarily interested in the history of the Wonder Woman comic book, you might be disappointed. I didn't think I wanted to read it for the exact opposite reason: I wasn't much interested in that. However, after hearing a few radio interviews with the author, I realized there was much more to the story than the title suggests.
In fact, it's a intensely readable social and cultural history of 19th and 20th century feminism, which helped shape the comic book, its creator William Marston and the two incredibly fascinating women Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne who shared his life. For decades until Marston's death in 1947, these three lived and worked together and he fathered children with both. Byrne was the feminist pioneer Margaret Sanger's niece, and the awesome history of suffragism and feminism was their daily lived reality.
Marston himself was a fascinating, controversial character: then and, for most readers, still today. He certainly was brilliant: the inventor of the lie detector test, a trained psychologist and lawyer, one of the first Hollywood screenwriters. He also was a bit of a loser in other ways, and his feminism didn't always manifest itself in the most progressive of domestic behaviors. The unconventional relationship between the three seemed to be a net positive for all concerned, although some readers will doubtlessly disagree.
He was pretty down on his luck when he stumbled into the Wonder Woman gig and finally became rich and successful. Holloway and Byrne were quite integrally involved in the creative endeavor, and not only as muses. And the way that all of the intellectual themes of Marston, Holloway and Byrne's lives shaped the first female superhero comic book character: this is what Jill Lepore has woven together so beautifully. Significant chunks of the book read like a novel, and I mean that as a huge compliment. The final section concerns how Wonder Woman helped shaped post World War II feminism.
It wasn't a perfect book. Probably 10 or 15% of it could have been omitted; like with most biographies and popular histories, there was just too much stuffed in. But what a wonderful, absorbing read!
In fact, it's a intensely readable social and cultural history of 19th and 20th century feminism, which helped shape the comic book, its creator William Marston and the two incredibly fascinating women Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne who shared his life. For decades until Marston's death in 1947, these three lived and worked together and he fathered children with both. Byrne was the feminist pioneer Margaret Sanger's niece, and the awesome history of suffragism and feminism was their daily lived reality.
Marston himself was a fascinating, controversial character: then and, for most readers, still today. He certainly was brilliant: the inventor of the lie detector test, a trained psychologist and lawyer, one of the first Hollywood screenwriters. He also was a bit of a loser in other ways, and his feminism didn't always manifest itself in the most progressive of domestic behaviors. The unconventional relationship between the three seemed to be a net positive for all concerned, although some readers will doubtlessly disagree.
He was pretty down on his luck when he stumbled into the Wonder Woman gig and finally became rich and successful. Holloway and Byrne were quite integrally involved in the creative endeavor, and not only as muses. And the way that all of the intellectual themes of Marston, Holloway and Byrne's lives shaped the first female superhero comic book character: this is what Jill Lepore has woven together so beautifully. Significant chunks of the book read like a novel, and I mean that as a huge compliment. The final section concerns how Wonder Woman helped shaped post World War II feminism.
It wasn't a perfect book. Probably 10 or 15% of it could have been omitted; like with most biographies and popular histories, there was just too much stuffed in. But what a wonderful, absorbing read!
July 11, 2015
This is more a feminist/woman's lib history, than it is a book about Wonder Woman, and that is completely fine with me! Planned Parenthood, The Lie Detector Test, Feminism, Bondage, and Polygamy all play a part in this well written, heavily researched book. I went into it with very low opinions of Wonder Woman, and finished it feeling nostalgic for a comic I have never even read (is that even possible?). My only complaint was that there were so many characters it was hard to follow who was who, and how everyone related.
August 15, 2017
This is a pick for the content of the book and not the audiobook. The audiobook is narrated by the author - not a good choice in this case. That being said, you do get some fascinating background on the creator of this comic character as well as important history on the early women's rights movements as they related to access to birth control. The creator of WW also developed the lie detector and there's some good background on that as well.
February 26, 2018
The title of this book would leave you to believe that this is a historical look at Wonder Woman, the superheroine and it is in part, but not the main part and not until the last third of the book. This book is a biography of Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston. It is about the people and events of his life and the events of the world around him that inspired the comic book icon. Marston grew up in the age of women's suffrage, the early feminist movement, and the fight for birth control. He was a lawyer, a psychologist, and the inventor of the lie detector test (before the polygraph). He was once an esteemed faculty member at many colleges, including Harvard. He carried out tests on lie detection during his tenure as a student and professor. Eventually, he was labeled a bit of a kook and had trouble keeping a job. He married a suffragette, named Elizabeth Holloway who really became the family breadwinner. They also had a very secret life behind closed doors that was kept for their entire lives. After marrying Holloway, Marston met Olive Byrne, the niece of birth control activist Margaret Sanger. It was Sanger who helped build what is today Planned Parenthood. Marston took Olive Byrne in as his mistress (and his wife's), having quite a three-some type marriage. They also included another woman as part of their family, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, however, she appeared to be just a companion and not a sexual partner of anyone's.
Now how does Wonder Woman fit into all of this? Marston also wrote plays, to earn money during his college years. He used those connections to help get him into the movie business when his career as a college professor floundered. Universal Studios, during the 1930s, was looking for a psychologist to help them make editing decisions based on how certain movie scene elicit emotions from the audience. Using his super duper lie detection test, Universal hired Marston as an advisor and he went to work on experiments with audiences.
Yes, I'm getting to Wonder Woman. Those movie connections also led him to the work of comics and superheroes. Inspired by all (and I mean ALL) of the women in his life, Marston set out to create a female superhero to rival Superman and Batman. Pulling theme ideas from the suffrage and feminist movements that his ladies were involved in, Wonder Woman became the epitome of a strong, independent superhero that is not tied down or pushed into submission by a man. Wonder Woman's roots come from the Amazonia Island of Pleasure where women ruled and men were not allowed.
The first 2/3rds of the book are really the biography of Marston and his family, with a history lesson in suffrage and the early feminist movement. Interspersed in these chapters is some foreshadowing of Wonder Woman comic strip themes, with pictures of the comic panels showing how some of the real-life events of the Marstons show up in future editions of Wonder Woman. The last third of the book details the actual history of the comic strip itself, from inception through the popular series with Lynda Carter.
Don't miss reading the Afterwards. All those secrets that were kept behind closed doors at the Marston house are revealed. All those years, the secret of the family trio was not even revealed to the children of Marston by both of his loves. They all lived as one family, but everyone, including the children, believed Olive to be a dear friend or former housekeeper and each child was told a different story.
This was an exhaustive but very interesting look at so many different subjects that surprisingly are all interrelated. Lepore does an excellent job of weaving it all together. I wasn't so sure about this at the beginning because the Wonder Woman references were sparse, but it is those tidbits that kept me engaged until the full secret of the strange tryst began to be unveiled. It is an obscure but fascinating look at the beginning of the feminist movement. Anyone who remotely considers themselves a feminist or is interested in the history of women's suffrage needs to read this one.
Now how does Wonder Woman fit into all of this? Marston also wrote plays, to earn money during his college years. He used those connections to help get him into the movie business when his career as a college professor floundered. Universal Studios, during the 1930s, was looking for a psychologist to help them make editing decisions based on how certain movie scene elicit emotions from the audience. Using his super duper lie detection test, Universal hired Marston as an advisor and he went to work on experiments with audiences.
Yes, I'm getting to Wonder Woman. Those movie connections also led him to the work of comics and superheroes. Inspired by all (and I mean ALL) of the women in his life, Marston set out to create a female superhero to rival Superman and Batman. Pulling theme ideas from the suffrage and feminist movements that his ladies were involved in, Wonder Woman became the epitome of a strong, independent superhero that is not tied down or pushed into submission by a man. Wonder Woman's roots come from the Amazonia Island of Pleasure where women ruled and men were not allowed.
The first 2/3rds of the book are really the biography of Marston and his family, with a history lesson in suffrage and the early feminist movement. Interspersed in these chapters is some foreshadowing of Wonder Woman comic strip themes, with pictures of the comic panels showing how some of the real-life events of the Marstons show up in future editions of Wonder Woman. The last third of the book details the actual history of the comic strip itself, from inception through the popular series with Lynda Carter.
Don't miss reading the Afterwards. All those secrets that were kept behind closed doors at the Marston house are revealed. All those years, the secret of the family trio was not even revealed to the children of Marston by both of his loves. They all lived as one family, but everyone, including the children, believed Olive to be a dear friend or former housekeeper and each child was told a different story.
This was an exhaustive but very interesting look at so many different subjects that surprisingly are all interrelated. Lepore does an excellent job of weaving it all together. I wasn't so sure about this at the beginning because the Wonder Woman references were sparse, but it is those tidbits that kept me engaged until the full secret of the strange tryst began to be unveiled. It is an obscure but fascinating look at the beginning of the feminist movement. Anyone who remotely considers themselves a feminist or is interested in the history of women's suffrage needs to read this one.
December 9, 2014
It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I've held a lifelong fascination for the Amazing Amazon (like most gay men my age, it's traceable to the Lynda Carter TV show and the "Superfriends" cartoon); happily, I'm also a huge fan of Jill Lepore's work, not only in the New Yorker (do seek out and read her reported essay earlier this year on the tech world's misguided fascination for "disruption") but also her books as well. ("Book of Ages" is probably my favorite read of 2014.)
Now, the news about Wonder Woman creator's William Moulton Marston's colorful past (his peripatetic academic and professional career; his polyamorous marital arrangements; his early work on the lie-detector; his obsession with female bondage) is not exactly news. Lepore is not the first to discover or write about this. A fabulous illustrated history of Wonder Woman by Les Daniels in 2000 gets into Marston's life in some depth. (I leaned heavily on Daniels's work when I wrote a 2001 article for the Washington Post about Phil Jimenez's tenure as the artist/writer on the Wonder Woman comic book; that story is reprinted in my book "Off Ramp.")
Without a doubt, Lepore does go far more deeply into Marston's life (and the life of his wife and his companions and their children) than anyone else has, thanks to the access she got to the family archives. What she finds there is at times riveting and at other times less-than-riveting. What's great about "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" is how beautifully Lepore weaves the earliest iteration of the comic book heroine with the ideals and notions of her creator. I think some readers might find that it just takes much too long to get to the early 1940s and the "Wonder Woman" parts of it all.
My only criticism of the book is that it ends rather abruptly. I would have liked to read more about what happened to Wonder Woman in the 60 years and counting since Marston's death. Lepore takes us up through the Ms. magazine and women's-lib years and, only glancingly, to the 1970s TV show, but she seems disinterested in how the Wonder Woman character has been and is still received, marketed, managed, imagined and interpreted. A lot has happened to Wonder Woman in the last 30 or so years -- the George Perez years, etc. I'd also like to know more about the ownership of the character; is there still a deal between the Marston estate and DC Comics? Does it expire at some point in this century?
It's rare to read a book that is so thorough and yet still doesn't seem like enough. That's probably because I know too much about the subject, or, at least, I think I do.
Now, the news about Wonder Woman creator's William Moulton Marston's colorful past (his peripatetic academic and professional career; his polyamorous marital arrangements; his early work on the lie-detector; his obsession with female bondage) is not exactly news. Lepore is not the first to discover or write about this. A fabulous illustrated history of Wonder Woman by Les Daniels in 2000 gets into Marston's life in some depth. (I leaned heavily on Daniels's work when I wrote a 2001 article for the Washington Post about Phil Jimenez's tenure as the artist/writer on the Wonder Woman comic book; that story is reprinted in my book "Off Ramp.")
Without a doubt, Lepore does go far more deeply into Marston's life (and the life of his wife and his companions and their children) than anyone else has, thanks to the access she got to the family archives. What she finds there is at times riveting and at other times less-than-riveting. What's great about "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" is how beautifully Lepore weaves the earliest iteration of the comic book heroine with the ideals and notions of her creator. I think some readers might find that it just takes much too long to get to the early 1940s and the "Wonder Woman" parts of it all.
My only criticism of the book is that it ends rather abruptly. I would have liked to read more about what happened to Wonder Woman in the 60 years and counting since Marston's death. Lepore takes us up through the Ms. magazine and women's-lib years and, only glancingly, to the 1970s TV show, but she seems disinterested in how the Wonder Woman character has been and is still received, marketed, managed, imagined and interpreted. A lot has happened to Wonder Woman in the last 30 or so years -- the George Perez years, etc. I'd also like to know more about the ownership of the character; is there still a deal between the Marston estate and DC Comics? Does it expire at some point in this century?
It's rare to read a book that is so thorough and yet still doesn't seem like enough. That's probably because I know too much about the subject, or, at least, I think I do.
September 1, 2015
I'm not sure if I would have enjoyed this book more or less had I read it, but the audio book was poorly read by... Mathew author. And that, unfortunately, detracted from the story.
This is an exploration more about the man who created Wonder Woman than anything else. The tales of him, his wives and their own influential female roles and relatives is all intriguing, yet... It was hard to get through this book. And I do blame the author-as-reader blunder for that.
Pick it up if you want to know about the creator of Wonder Woman as much (or perhaps even more) as Wonder Wiman herself. Also, I'd recommend reading it in your own voice.
This is an exploration more about the man who created Wonder Woman than anything else. The tales of him, his wives and their own influential female roles and relatives is all intriguing, yet... It was hard to get through this book. And I do blame the author-as-reader blunder for that.
Pick it up if you want to know about the creator of Wonder Woman as much (or perhaps even more) as Wonder Wiman herself. Also, I'd recommend reading it in your own voice.
November 4, 2016
Fascinating. So much history here that I was unfamiliar with. And I enjoyed feeling a bit frustrated with Marston's ideas. It really challenged me to the no about the various relationships between men and women. One detail that continues to bug me days after finishing the book, though, is how did he pull off his bigamy? I don't recall any real explanation of how he managed to marry his second wife, in an official sense. I get the fabrications they concocted to explain the living arrangement to the children and the "public." Was it a fake marriage? Did I miss a detail? I don't know why this bugs me, but it does.
Read
August 22, 2017The story of shrink William Moulton Marston, equal parts ahead-of-his-time thinker and monstrous fraud, and how his complicated private life led to his creation of the first great female superhero*. Even leaving aside the pre-publication percolation through the comics Internet of some of Lepore’s findings, it’s not as wholly untold a story as the blurb makes out. That Marston lived with his wife and girlfriend, who stayed together after his death, was already generally known; ditto his fascination with bondage and idiosyncratic feminism, and his invention of the real-world lie detector. But Lepore has dug into court records, official archives, and the various records retained by Marston’s descendants – which don’t even necessarily agree from sibling to sibling – to put even more meat on those bones than you’d find on the enormous Marston himself. And it’s not always the most edifying story. Before coming up with Diana, Marston had already tried scheme after scheme to get his ideas out there and make a buck – everything from screenplays for DW Griffith through to the sort of quack pseudoscience press release the papers still love today (using the detector to compare the passion levels of blondes and brunettes watching a film, &c). And as that example suggests, he was not an entirely un-creepy individual. He was great at talking the talk about how a more equal future – or even one where women dominated – would be better for everyone, but home life wasn’t a million miles away from the sort of patriarchal harem set-up you’d find in a cult, with wife Elizabeth Holloway going out to work, girlfriend Olive Byrne minding the children, and Marston working on the latest expression of his theories, or loudly passing judgment from on high regarding family quarrels. It turns out, too, that there was often a third woman resident – Marjorie Wilkes Huntley – though she remains rather a shadowy presence. Indeed, there is a sense in which exactly how the relationship worked sexually, as against domestically, remains somewhat opaque. I’d always previously been under the impression that Olive, Elizabeth and Marston were a true three-way, but from this I got the impression that they were more of a V, with no direct sexual relationship between the two women. And yet, that’s not something which is ever stated outright, or really even directly discussed, which seems oddly coy when set against the rest of the book. Yes, it’s precisely the sort of thing which can be hard to know about historical figures, but given Lepore has unearthed records of a mystical sex cult in which they participated, you’d think at the very least her educated guess might be worth stating. Similarly, one of the kids insists that despite its recurring presence in Wonder Woman stories, there was no tying-up going on in the house – but the text doesn’t directly challenge that, despite Marston otherwise seeming to be pretty good at getting his way as regards relationships, and despite the fact that this is surely the sort of thing even a free-thinker would tend to keep away from the kids anyway.
Still, while there are odd omissions, there’s also a wealth of interesting stuff here. Like how Marston was the expert-or-is-he? witness disputed in Frye, still a key US legal precedent as regards the whole class of expert witnesses. Like how often Marston fiddled his scientific figures, or the way the whole family would seemingly lie without compunction to maintain their menage or promote each other’s careers – you can see how the habit of deceit starts if you’re living non-monogamously in early 20th century America, but it’s still ironic given the whole ‘lasso of truth’ angle. The real goldmine, though, is the way Lepore has put together the pieces regarding the family background of Olive Byrne. Turns out that the woman whose bracelets Wonder Woman still wears was a descendant of feminist royalty; her mother Ethel was the sister of birth control evangelist Margaret Sanger. And the more radical sister, at that: a century ago, she very nearly died for the cause as a hunger striker, and in the course of saving her life Margaret also edged her out of the movement. This then remains as a significant strand of the narrative – most poignantly after Marston’s death, when just as Wonder Woman has been defanged by his successors and the increasingly censorious climate around comics**, so Sanger's old Birth Control Federation subsided into Planned Parenthood, offering more counselling than prophylactics.
And it should be noted, given the title could be misconstrued, that this is more a book about the Marston household and Wonder Woman than it is a general history of the character. After Marston's death, we get a bit of a shoeing for Kanigher’s time in charge of the character, a brief mention of the Emma Peel-style secret agent era, and a glimpse of what might have been with Samuel Delany’s aborted run. There’s not a mention of George Perez or Grant Morrison returning to and updating the original template, the bleak Azzarello/Chiang take, any of the female creators who’ve worked on the character in recent years, or of the oft-suggested relationship with Superman finally becoming a matter of canon. The old TV show gets a mention, but the main interest in the character’s diffusion into wider popular culture comes with her appearance on the cover of Ms magazine, and the bizarre controversy which ensued when the Redstockings claimed that the magazine, Wonder Woman and Gloria Steinem were all part of a CIA plot to undermine the women’s movement – bizarre not least because wouldn’t that have been the FBI’s turf rather than the Agency’s? But Lepore is more interested in the way Marston-era villains such as the Duke of Deception or Doctor Psycho reflect both his theories and the people he knew. And while few of them have shown quite the longevity of Diana herself, or Superman and Batman foes of similar vintage, there’s often something horribly prescient about them which could work brilliantly in the right hands: I’m thinking especially here of Professor Manly, fighting for men's rights in the matriarchal future...
A new afterword closes out the paperback, addressing further evidence which has come to light since the first publication, but also sounding a certain note of frustration which it’s interesting to know that the author feels too – a sense that she’s not quite been able to put her finger on Marston. Did he realise how far he was from his own ideals? Impossible to know from this distance, of course. Quite possibly impossible to know even if you were his closest friend. But it’s not necessarily any failing for a history to leave the reader with more questions than answers.
*Yes, I know Miss Fury was first, and you could even make a case for Doctor Occult. No, they don’t count as ‘great’.
**That utter shit Frederic Wertham, weirdly, is introduced as first and foremost an anti-racist campaigner. His sexism and homophobia do then get a mention; the fact that he was at least as much of a fraud as Marston, and coming from a far nastier place, is barely even hinted at.
Still, while there are odd omissions, there’s also a wealth of interesting stuff here. Like how Marston was the expert-or-is-he? witness disputed in Frye, still a key US legal precedent as regards the whole class of expert witnesses. Like how often Marston fiddled his scientific figures, or the way the whole family would seemingly lie without compunction to maintain their menage or promote each other’s careers – you can see how the habit of deceit starts if you’re living non-monogamously in early 20th century America, but it’s still ironic given the whole ‘lasso of truth’ angle. The real goldmine, though, is the way Lepore has put together the pieces regarding the family background of Olive Byrne. Turns out that the woman whose bracelets Wonder Woman still wears was a descendant of feminist royalty; her mother Ethel was the sister of birth control evangelist Margaret Sanger. And the more radical sister, at that: a century ago, she very nearly died for the cause as a hunger striker, and in the course of saving her life Margaret also edged her out of the movement. This then remains as a significant strand of the narrative – most poignantly after Marston’s death, when just as Wonder Woman has been defanged by his successors and the increasingly censorious climate around comics**, so Sanger's old Birth Control Federation subsided into Planned Parenthood, offering more counselling than prophylactics.
And it should be noted, given the title could be misconstrued, that this is more a book about the Marston household and Wonder Woman than it is a general history of the character. After Marston's death, we get a bit of a shoeing for Kanigher’s time in charge of the character, a brief mention of the Emma Peel-style secret agent era, and a glimpse of what might have been with Samuel Delany’s aborted run. There’s not a mention of George Perez or Grant Morrison returning to and updating the original template, the bleak Azzarello/Chiang take, any of the female creators who’ve worked on the character in recent years, or of the oft-suggested relationship with Superman finally becoming a matter of canon. The old TV show gets a mention, but the main interest in the character’s diffusion into wider popular culture comes with her appearance on the cover of Ms magazine, and the bizarre controversy which ensued when the Redstockings claimed that the magazine, Wonder Woman and Gloria Steinem were all part of a CIA plot to undermine the women’s movement – bizarre not least because wouldn’t that have been the FBI’s turf rather than the Agency’s? But Lepore is more interested in the way Marston-era villains such as the Duke of Deception or Doctor Psycho reflect both his theories and the people he knew. And while few of them have shown quite the longevity of Diana herself, or Superman and Batman foes of similar vintage, there’s often something horribly prescient about them which could work brilliantly in the right hands: I’m thinking especially here of Professor Manly, fighting for men's rights in the matriarchal future...
A new afterword closes out the paperback, addressing further evidence which has come to light since the first publication, but also sounding a certain note of frustration which it’s interesting to know that the author feels too – a sense that she’s not quite been able to put her finger on Marston. Did he realise how far he was from his own ideals? Impossible to know from this distance, of course. Quite possibly impossible to know even if you were his closest friend. But it’s not necessarily any failing for a history to leave the reader with more questions than answers.
*Yes, I know Miss Fury was first, and you could even make a case for Doctor Occult. No, they don’t count as ‘great’.
**That utter shit Frederic Wertham, weirdly, is introduced as first and foremost an anti-racist campaigner. His sexism and homophobia do then get a mention; the fact that he was at least as much of a fraud as Marston, and coming from a far nastier place, is barely even hinted at.
July 17, 2015
Great Hera! what a tome. This book sat on my to-read shelf, forgotten, until a friend mentioned reading something about the wacky secret life of a Harvard alum who created Wonder Woman. Chip Kidd cover! Can this get any better? It can and did. The end papers are genius design - the first Harry Peter drawing of Wonder Woman and handwritten notes from both Peter and Marston. The difference between fiction and nonfiction: fiction has to be credible. The history of the comic Amazon is almost incredible. It begins with suffragettes, The Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage issuing an invitation to Mrs. Pankhurst to speak on campus in 1911, Harvard Prez Lowell going bonkers about "a mob of women trooping around the Yard," and a suicidal freshman, William Moulton Marston who tossed aside his vial of cyanide, thrilled with Emmeline Pankhurst and her shackles. And the champions for women's reproductive rights Margaret Sanger and Ethel Byrne, sisters in life and in the fight for birth control. Fast forward to Margaret Sanger's attempt to wipe her sister's legacy out - including having the unmitigated gall to ask Ethel Byrne to let Sanger claim the hunger strike in prison that Byrne barely survived as Sanger's own. Fast forward to the Marston Menage, living at Cherry Orchard, Rye, NY, carefully concealing their secret identities as a "love-binding" family with 2 (and occasionally 3, perhaps 4 women, 4 children, and one man. William Moulton Marston, B.A., Ph.D, LLB, creator of Wonder Woman. Whichever history you're wild about: suffragette, birth control, feminism, comics, universities (Harvard, Holyoke and the fictional Diana Prince alma mater, Holliday College) there's a tidbit in here for you. Center in Marston's life, past the binding bits, runs the lie detector, a fascinating story on its own. The man who did more lying than many of his study subjects was instrumental in its creation, and its subsequent banishment from the court system into the world of employers and Reagan's administration using it to get rid of whomever, despite the evidence that lie detectors don't work. And the lies Marston told! And Sadie Holloway, Olive Byrne (Holloway in later life claimed writings as hers that were probably Marston's, and vice versa) Byrne, posed as an interested reporter serially interviewing the famous Dr. Marston for the truth of subscribers' questions about the truth of a subject for Family Circle magazine; while living with Marston, thus lying her butt off. Including describing how difficult it was to track the busy man down. Just down the hall, OB! Rollicking is too tame a word. We learn that the supposed lull between first wave feminism of the late 1800s, early 1900s and the second wave in the late 60s, early 70s was not a lull at all. And the disappearance in the late 70s, 80s of women's liberation can be tracked with Wonder Woman written by men who hated her. Oh! The birth of psychology from the department of philosophy fits in these pages, too. My theory that psychology arose from the conflicted psyches of weak yang and ego gets a bump. Are comics bad for children? You can read what the agenda-ed wrote for publication and career advancement in the 1940s. Watch women get drummed out of those comic houses that employed them, and how DC comics didn't hire women editors, drawers, inkers, writers, and still doesn't. This is a stupendous book for fans of mash-up history, written by an historian who loves the subject in all its mushed together wonder. Who can resist a book with an Appeals Court citation: United States vs. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 1936? You don't want to miss this book. It's wildly good.
October 28, 2017
43. The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Audio) by Jill Lepore, read by the author
published: 2014
format: Overdrive audiobook, 9:05 (~250 pages)
acquired: Library
listened: Aug 17-24 & Oct 19-23
rating: 3½
Trying to review I’m tied-up between all the information that comes out of this book, the crazy interplay that kind of led to Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s flawed presentation.
The story of Wonder Woman involves lie detector tests, a complex and contradictory evolution of feminism, comic books, the birth control movement, polygamy, promotion and failure, WWII and, of course, fetish.
Wonder Woman is a wonderful World War II creation, and feminist hero created in window in time where the world was accepting and whose prime creator, Willam Marston, passed away, just before that window closed, when in the late 1940’s the revival of conservative American culture hammered in a major set-back to the feminist movement. His character, the Amazon Dianna Prince, became a secretary.
She is feminist as fetish, with everything that phrase implies. Lepore sums up the concept as “draw a woman who’s as powerful as Superman, as sexy as Miss Fury, as scantily clad as Sheena the jungle queen, and as patriotic as Captain America.” Gloria Steinem would rave about Marston’s Wonder Woman comics and the message they sent. She, Wonder Woman, was there to make a point that women were powerful, independent, and capable of everything we humans are capable of. She conquered her villains, regardless of the various ways she found herself tied-up or chained or otherwise challenged. Bondage is a theme...
She had a long road. Marston lived with his wife and another woman and fathered children with both. The other woman, Olive Bryne, was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the leader in birth control movement that was associated with suffragette movement, and is considered a founder of what became Planned Parenthood. Olive, who has a tough childhood, grew up in this environment and her bracelets became Wonder Woman’s. Marston was always a feminist, as was his legal wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston. Wonder Women includes aspects of all three of these women and others Marston associated with, and in a big way she is a suffragette. I think it’s safe to say that Wonder Woman as she was and is could have come out of no other era.
I’m droning on, but there is a lot more to this story, including the sterile Comic Code and it’s legal origins in the battle between psychologists who saw comics as harmless and helpful to children, and those who saw them as racist, corrupting young women and driving men to homosexuality (Batman and Robin), among other things. (They were, of course, actually racist - even if the authors and illustrators likely didn't even think about that.)
Lepore should have written a fun fascinating book. She did all the research and interviews and has all the information laid out. But she somehow failed to find the right narrative drive. The book is a tough dull read that wanders around, only occasionally bringing the reader in. And the readers are very willing, we want in. It’s a great story.
Lepore reads the book on audio herself. I prefer books this way and appreciate that she did this. But potential listeners should note that she has a tough screechy voice with limited range. So, listening takes some tolerance.
Recommended to those who are patient with the imperfect presentation of great information.
published: 2014
format: Overdrive audiobook, 9:05 (~250 pages)
acquired: Library
listened: Aug 17-24 & Oct 19-23
rating: 3½
Trying to review I’m tied-up between all the information that comes out of this book, the crazy interplay that kind of led to Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s flawed presentation.
The story of Wonder Woman involves lie detector tests, a complex and contradictory evolution of feminism, comic books, the birth control movement, polygamy, promotion and failure, WWII and, of course, fetish.
Wonder Woman is a wonderful World War II creation, and feminist hero created in window in time where the world was accepting and whose prime creator, Willam Marston, passed away, just before that window closed, when in the late 1940’s the revival of conservative American culture hammered in a major set-back to the feminist movement. His character, the Amazon Dianna Prince, became a secretary.
She is feminist as fetish, with everything that phrase implies. Lepore sums up the concept as “draw a woman who’s as powerful as Superman, as sexy as Miss Fury, as scantily clad as Sheena the jungle queen, and as patriotic as Captain America.” Gloria Steinem would rave about Marston’s Wonder Woman comics and the message they sent. She, Wonder Woman, was there to make a point that women were powerful, independent, and capable of everything we humans are capable of. She conquered her villains, regardless of the various ways she found herself tied-up or chained or otherwise challenged. Bondage is a theme...
She had a long road. Marston lived with his wife and another woman and fathered children with both. The other woman, Olive Bryne, was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the leader in birth control movement that was associated with suffragette movement, and is considered a founder of what became Planned Parenthood. Olive, who has a tough childhood, grew up in this environment and her bracelets became Wonder Woman’s. Marston was always a feminist, as was his legal wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston. Wonder Women includes aspects of all three of these women and others Marston associated with, and in a big way she is a suffragette. I think it’s safe to say that Wonder Woman as she was and is could have come out of no other era.
I’m droning on, but there is a lot more to this story, including the sterile Comic Code and it’s legal origins in the battle between psychologists who saw comics as harmless and helpful to children, and those who saw them as racist, corrupting young women and driving men to homosexuality (Batman and Robin), among other things. (They were, of course, actually racist - even if the authors and illustrators likely didn't even think about that.)
Lepore should have written a fun fascinating book. She did all the research and interviews and has all the information laid out. But she somehow failed to find the right narrative drive. The book is a tough dull read that wanders around, only occasionally bringing the reader in. And the readers are very willing, we want in. It’s a great story.
Lepore reads the book on audio herself. I prefer books this way and appreciate that she did this. But potential listeners should note that she has a tough screechy voice with limited range. So, listening takes some tolerance.
Recommended to those who are patient with the imperfect presentation of great information.
December 2, 2014
Jill Lepore does an excellent job of connecting the history of the struggle for women to control their own destiny in the USA with the creation of the female superhero Wonder Woman. Who knew?
One of the most intriguing elements to me is how two apparently brilliant and multi-talented women -- Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway Marston -- lived a life of bondage to a creep like William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.
The details of their lives fascinate. For a reader like me, who grew up before Title IX and before women could get equal rights to financial credit, reading again about these historical details really set me thinking about my past and the life that my grandmothers lived. What power even weak-willed, inferior men can hold over women much more capable of success than the men are!
My son and I often talk about the fact that even NOW in 2014, so many women vote against themselves, offering to men the right to decide whether they control their own destiny with decision-making about their own bodies. Karl Marx wrote that, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." I very much agree with that statement if we just precede the word religion with the word "Unquestioning." What Marx actually meant was that the purpose of religion is to "create illusory fantasies for the poor." I think that the political use of religion today intends to create illusory fantasies for women. Give men the power, and we'll all be okay.
The best books make us think and reflect in new ways. Since Lepore accomplishes this task, I rate her book BEST. I will read more of her books.
One of the most intriguing elements to me is how two apparently brilliant and multi-talented women -- Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway Marston -- lived a life of bondage to a creep like William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.
The details of their lives fascinate. For a reader like me, who grew up before Title IX and before women could get equal rights to financial credit, reading again about these historical details really set me thinking about my past and the life that my grandmothers lived. What power even weak-willed, inferior men can hold over women much more capable of success than the men are!
My son and I often talk about the fact that even NOW in 2014, so many women vote against themselves, offering to men the right to decide whether they control their own destiny with decision-making about their own bodies. Karl Marx wrote that, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." I very much agree with that statement if we just precede the word religion with the word "Unquestioning." What Marx actually meant was that the purpose of religion is to "create illusory fantasies for the poor." I think that the political use of religion today intends to create illusory fantasies for women. Give men the power, and we'll all be okay.
The best books make us think and reflect in new ways. Since Lepore accomplishes this task, I rate her book BEST. I will read more of her books.
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