Dwight Garner is fascinated by Jill Lepore’s complex, well-researched history of the comic-book icon:
On the one hand, the story it relates has more uplift than Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane or her eagle-encrusted red bustier. It’s a yea-saying tale about how this comic book character, created in 1941, remade American feminism and had her roots in the ideas and activism of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
On the other hand, The Secret History of Wonder Woman is fundamentally a biography of Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947). He was a Harvard graduate, a feminist and a psychologist who invented the lie detector test. He was also a huckster, a polyamorist (one and sometimes two other women lived with him and his wife), a serial liar, and a bondage super-enthusiast.
Etelka Lehoczky shares the juicy details:
It turns out that decades of rumors were true: The red-white-and-blue heroine, conceived during World War II, had a decidedly bohemian progenitor. For one thing, it was no accident that Wonder Woman got chained up in every episode. Creator William Moulton Marston actually fought to depict her that way. He also led a highly unusual lifestyle, living with and fathering children by two women at once. And the sex parties? Yep. In the mid-1920s he, his wife and two of his lovers participated in a “cult of female sexual power” organized by his aunt.
Meanwhile, Sarah Kerr considers the icon’s cultural significance:
The superheroine, Lepore argues, has all along been a kind of “missing link” in American feminism – an imperfect but undeniable bridge between vastly distinct generations. Hiding in her kitschy story lines and scant costume were allusions to and visual tropes from old struggles for women’s freedom, and an occasional framing of battles like the right to a living wage and basic equality that have yet to be decisively won.
Wonder Woman stories showed women shackled in endless yards of ropes and chains – a constant theme in art from decades earlier demanding the right to vote. The traditional allegory of an island of Amazon princesses appears in feminist science fiction early in the twentieth century; the rhetoric of a nurturing, morally evolved strongwoman opposed to the war god Mars goes back even further. At the same time, the early comics often included a special insert, edited by a young female tennis champion and highlighting women heroes. Those chosen ranged from white suffragettes to Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, professional and sports pioneers, and a founder of the NAACP. It’s unlikely that any platform for American girls’ role models was as popular as this one until three decades later.
The Dish 