(originally published
November 3, 2014)
Jill Lepore is one of those people who can expertly, yet
completely organically, engage an audience. Her off-the-cuff speaking style and
sheer exuberance is charming. Her lectures are fraught with details that
sometimes flow at high speed, and reactions from the audience are frequent and
often accompanied by gasps and bursts of laughter. The crowd gathered last week
at the Radcliffe Institute for her presentation on her latest work, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.
Harvard man William Moulton Marsten is the inventor of the
lie detector. So is there a connection between his pursuit of finding the truth
and Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth? Indeed. There are many links to Marsten’s
life and the heroine who joined the Justice League in the early 1940s. Strongly
influenced by the aims of the suffragette movement in the early twentieth
century, Dr. Marsten created the character of Wonder Woman with specific goals
in mind. She was to “set a standard among children and young people of strong,
free, courageous womanhood; and to combat the idea that women are inferior to
men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics,
occupations, and professions monopolized by men” because “the only hope for
civilization is the greater freedom, development, and equality of women in all
fields of human activity,” according to the press release from 1940. An expert
in psychology, he sought to create psychological propaganda for the new type of
woman.
Harvard peppers his story. Called “Holliday College,” Wonder
Woman storms the gates time and again in the early years of the comic. Many
sources were used to produce Wonder Woman’s backstory. Some inspiration is
partially derived from the works of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, a prolific writer and advocate for women’s rights. When
viewing art that inspired the comic, a strong correlation is drawn to artist
Lou Rogers, who drew many illustrations for the cause of women’s right to vote.
In Wonder Woman’s early adventures, being bound in chains was a frequent plot
device. Seeing portrayals of her bursting from the chains with broken links
flying out attached to words like “prejudice, prudery, and man’s superiority”
had a dramatic effect, one which has unfortunately been lost over the decades
with the death of Dr. Marsten and his replacement making Wonder Woman a much
more docile figure.
Parallels to the suffragette movement are seen throughout
the comics. White horses became a symbol of the movement, particularly when
Inez Milholland led a procession in 1913, tiara and all. What followed were
frequent images of Wonder Woman riding a white horse, championing a range of
causes for the 1940s audience. She was an activist for a progressive era, and
she also fought corruption—and many of the issues she spoke out against reflect
many of the issues we see today—corporate monopolies, unfair systems, and so
on.
Researching Dr. Marsten’s was a delicate business for
Lepore, due to his unconventional lifestyle. The family protected many of the
details over the years. After graduation with his bachelor’s from Harvard, he
married sweetheart Elizabeth Holloway. As a professor at Tufts University, he
fell in love with Olive Byrne, and the three became involved in a polyamorous
relationship that cost him his career in academia. He later served as an
advisor for Universal Pictures, helping them gauge the level of fear a
movie-going audience could take with their outpouring of horror films that seem
to campy to us today. The threesome had 4 children in total, two by each woman,
and Elizabeth and Olive continued to live together for more than four decades
after Marsten’s death in 1947.
With the introduction of Olive in his life, the feminist
influence grew even stronger. Her mother and aunt, Ethel Byrne and Margaret
Sanger, co-founded the birth control rights movement. When Ethel went on a
hunger strike (for talking about birth control broke obscenity laws), a deal
was made with Margaret so Ethel could be released. This early effort to raise
the issue of birth control eventually became Planned Parenthood.
As World War II raged, the Justice League fought the Axis
powers and became a central theme to many comics. Once the war was over, a
multitude of comics foundered and went out of business. Some later were
reinvented in later decades as the comic world grew. But Wonder Woman was
always there, though her ascent was a bit bumpy at first. When she first joined
the League, she was a mere secretary, signing the letters of membership for
kids who signed up. But once she gained momentum, she was a force to be
reckoned with, and had no time for marriage.
Wonder Woman’s story took a dramatic decline after Dr.
Marsten’s death. When Elizabeth and Olive offered to continue to the story,
they were told on no uncertain terms by DC Comics that ladies couldn’t be
involved in comics. The job was handed to new writers, who watered down her
activist persona and made her much softer, and all doe-eyed over Steve Trevor,
the pilot she helps when he crashed on Paradise Island in the first portion of
the story. A revamping in the 1960s made her style groovier, but it was clear
she had lost her way as a feminist powerhouse. Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten
much better.
Jill Lepore commented on recent Wonder Woman comics, and
how, much like a lot of entertainment these days, is glorified violence and
little substance in terms of character. Despite the overwhelming slew of movies
based on comics, with several on Batman and Superman, sadly, they’ve been slow
to put Wonder Woman on the docket. And as awesome blogs such as The Mary Sue
and i09 show point out, our heroine is even left off the toy shelf sometimes,
as can be seen in this Target
display, where she’s not to be found at all among the members of the
Justice League. While I haven’t read The
Secret History of Wonder Woman yet, the title occupies a top slot in my
list of books to dig into soon. Knowing Lepore’s brilliance in research, this
will prove to be a fascinating read.
Leaving the lecture, I wondered what Dr. Marsten would have
thought if he had known that the heated discussions of his day are ongoing, and
even sliding backward. Wonder Woman’s legacy should be more than a tantalizing
outfit or besotted gazing at Steve Trevor. She stood for something of immense
value—the belief that little girls could grow up and achieve anything. Today’s
political discourse about women is horrifying. Amplifying women’s roles in
entertainment and culture is a key step in changing that, and it’s time to put
Wonder Woman on that white horse again and march her down Main Street, USA, and
indeed, across the world, to make for a better future.
