by Jill Lepore
Mary Woolley wasn’t only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. “Feminism is not a prejudice,” she said. “It is a principle.”13
The word “feminism,” hardly ever used before 1910, was everywhere by 1913. It meant advocacy of women’s rights and freedoms and a vision of equality markedly different from that embraced by the “woman movement” of the nineteenth century, which, nostalgic for a prehistoric, matriarchal “mother-age,” had been founded less on a principle of equality than on a set of ideas about women’s moral superiority. “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained. Feminists rejected the idea of women as reformers whose moral authority came from their differentness from men—women were supposedly, by nature, more tender and loving and chaste and pure—and advocated instead women’s full and equal participation in politics, work, and the arts, on the grounds that women were in every way equal to men.
Holloway (first row, left), on the staff of the Mount Holyoke, 1915 (illustration credit 2.5)
Suffrage was a single political goal. Feminism’s demand for equality was broader, both more radical and more difficult. “I hang in a void midway between two spheres—the man’s sphere and the woman’s sphere,” Inez Haynes Gillmore wrote in “Confessions of an Alien” in Harper’s Bazaar in 1912. “The duties and pleasures of the average woman bore and irritate. The duties and pleasures of the average man interest and allure.”14 Could a life be lived in between? Women involved in the nineteenth-century woman’s movement had often subscribed to the belief that women had no interest in sex—no lust, no hunger, no passion. Feminists disagreed. They wanted to separate sex from reproduction, so that sex, for women, could be, as it was for men, about pleasure, not sacrifice. In 1914, Greenwich Village feminist Margaret Sanger founded a magazine called the Woman Rebel. The “basis of Feminism,” Sanger said, had to be a woman’s control over her own body, “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.”15
From Margaret Sanger, The Woman Rebel, 1914 (illustration credit 2.6)
New Women like Sadie Holloway held every expectation of political equality with men. They expected to control their fertility, to forge relationships of equality with the men they married, if they chose to marry, and to rise to the top of their professions, whether or not they also chose to have children. Quite how all this could be accomplished was less clear; apparently, equality with men required servants; much of early feminism was a fantasy of the wealthy, equality for the few. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, said, “No woman can amount to anything who does her own dusting.” To that, Holloway said, “Oh yes she can, if she gets up early enough in the morning.”16 Holloway always wanted everything.
Marston and Holloway in 1914 (illustration credit 2.7)
Holloway loved Marston, but at Mount Holyoke, she didn’t much mind being apart from him. “We did our biggest fighting at around 14 so that by the time we hit college we were going pretty well as a team,” she said.17 To visit her, Marston took a train from Cambridge. Holloway liked to meet him at the station—a streetcar ran from South Hadley to campus—but Mount Holyoke girls weren’t allowed to ride with a man without a chaperone. “A stupid rule,” Holloway called it. She complained to the dean. Then she rode with Marston anyway.18
During Holloway’s sophomore year, Woodrow Wilson, a professor of history who’d once taught at Bryn Mawr, ran for president. Wilson ran as a Democrat against William Howard Taft, the Republican incumbent; Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on a third-party ticket; and Eugene Debs, the Socialist. College girls all over the country followed the election avidly. The Mount Holyoke Equal Suffrage League sponsored a mock presidential debate, a torchlight parade, stump speeches, a mass political meeting, and a mock election. “The question of suffrage for women was, of course, well to the front in almost all the speeches,” the New York Evening Post reported, in a story titled “The College Girl and Politics.”19 The Amazons were declaring independence.
At Mount Holyoke, Holloway studied English, history, math, and physics, but she loved Greek best.20 She loved the language and the stories, and she loved, especially, the women. Her favorite book was Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, edited and translated by Henry Thornton Wharton and first published in 1885. Sappho had lived on the Greek island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea, around 600 b.c. Wharton’s was the first complete English translation of her poetry, which survives only in fragments. Wharton’s Sappho was part of a Victorian Sappho revival, a Sapphic obsession that found especially ardent expression at women’s colleges. The use of the word “lesbian”—literally a resident of Sappho’s island of Lesbos—to mean a woman attracted to other women dates to this era, though it wasn’t yet part of the vernacular. Sappho of Lesbos had become the symbol of female love.21
Sappho held a special place at Mount Holyoke. When Mary Woolley accepted the presidency of the college, she arranged for Jeannette Marks, a literary scholar who was also a suffragist, to be offered a position in the English Department. They had met when Woolley was teaching at Wellesley and Marks was a freshman; they lived together for fifty-five years.22 In 1912, when Holloway was a sophomore, Mount Holyoke celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary. Students staged an original play called The Thirteenth Amendment, a musical comedy about a world without men: a feminist utopia.23 In a parade led by Woolley, students from the Department of Greek marched dressed as Helen of Troy, Penelope, Electra, Antigone, Sophocles, and Sappho.24
Holloway read Sappho in the original Greek. “The prose I really didn’t give a hoot about,” she said, “but the poetry was something else again.”25 From fragment 31:
no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass.26
It set her shuddering.
Later, much later, Sadie Holloway, a whip-smart tomboy from the Isle of Man, wrote a memo to DC Comics explaining what exclamations Wonder Woman, an Amazon from an island of women, ought and ought not to use. Avoid: “Vulcan’s Hammer!” Preferred: “Suffering Sappho!”27
“I still have a Wharton’s Sappho and still read it,” Holloway wrote when she was in her eighties.28 She once inscribed a book, “Xpuδoφáh Φεpáπalvav Aφpoδiraς”: “Aphrodite’s handmaid, bright as gold.” She signed it, simply, “Sappho.”29
DR. PSYCHO
AT HARVARD, William Moulton Marston wore owl’s-eye spectacles, a tweed suit, and a coonskin coat. The coat had pockets specially sized to hide a fifth of whiskey. He liked rye best. He drank and he smoked; he swooned and he staggered. He wrote a parody of Poe’s “The Raven”: “Desperately, I wished the morrow; foolishly I sought to borrow / From the beer, relief from sorrow.” In it, an undergraduate is visited by the ghost of the philosopher Josiah Royce—“Flowing hair but slightly matted”—who, “Wandering round in endless circles,” cries out that skepticism endures “Evermore!”1
Wonder Woman changing into Diana Prince. From “The Purloined Pressure Coordinator,” Comic Cavalcade #4 (Fall 1943) (illustration credit 3.1)
The last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle fell for philosophy just when philosophy was falling for psychology. In an essay called “The Hidden Self,” published in 1890, four years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, William James explained that a man has both a public self, the sum of his performances, and a private self, the sum of his passions.2 Every Jekyll has his Hyde. James was writing decades before either comic books or superheroes were invented, but his line of argument is no small part of why comic-book superheroes have secret identities: Superman his Clark Kent, Batman his Bruce Wayne, and Wonder Woman her Diana Prince. The distance between philosophy and pop is, really, remarkably small.
Passing through the gates of Holliday College. Wonder Woman, newspaper strip, September 9, 1944 (illustration credit 3.2)
Psychol
ogy began as a branch of philosophy. James, a philosopher who had trained as a physician, taught the first course in experimental psychology ever offered in the United States. He believed that the science of the mind lies within the study of philosophy because, as he argued in The Principles of Psychology, the passions that constitute the hidden self are manifestations of physical sensations: “Whatever moods, affections, and passions I have, are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes we ordinarily call their expression or consequence.”3 The study of psychology, therefore, required experimentation, which is why James became convinced that Harvard had to have a “psychological laboratory,” a place where Mr. Hyde could be found by Dr. Seek.
Wonder Woman disguises herself to attend a lecture at Holliday College. Wonder Woman, newspaper strip, September 14, 1944 (illustration credit 3.3)
Marston had a hidden self, too. He kept it as well stowed as the flask of rye he tucked into the pocket of his coonskin coat—until, later in his life, he spilled his secrets all over the pages of his comic books.
Dr. Psycho in his psychological laboratory. From “Battle for Womanhood,” Wonder Woman #5 (June–July 1943) (illustration credit 3.4)
Harvard not only didn’t allow women to speak on campus, it also didn’t admit women as students. But Wonder Woman can’t keep away. She’s like Emmeline Pankhurst, swooping in and stirring everyone up. Much of the action in Wonder Woman comics takes place at “Holliday College”: the name’s a mash-up of “Holloway” and “Holyoke.” Once, disguised in a varsity sweater with an H on it—an unmissable allusion to a Harvard varsity sweater—Wonder Woman attends a lecture at Holliday College given by Dr. Hypno. Holliday College is full of sinister professors with names like “Professor Manly” whose chief villainy is their opposition to feminism. Wonder Woman’s arch-nemesis is Dr. Psycho, an evil professor of psychology whose plan is “to change the independent status of modern American women back to the days of the sultans and slave markets, clanking chains and abject captivity.” He is shriveled and lecherous. He is brilliant and dastardly. Plotting to himself, he snickers, “Women shall suffer while I laugh—Ha! Ho! Ha!” When Wonder Woman first meets Dr. Psycho, in an episode called “Battle for Womanhood,” he locks her in an iron cage in the basement of his “psycho laboratory.” 4
The Harvard Psychological Laboratory (illustration credit 3.5)
William James didn’t much like experimental work. But he wanted Harvard to have a state-of-the-art psychological laboratory. To build it, he invited to the department a German psychologist named Hugo Münsterberg.5 “The situation is this,” James wrote to Münsterberg in 1892. “We are the best university in America, and we must lead in psychology. I, at the age of 50, disliking laboratory work naturally, and accustomed to teach philosophy at large, altho I could, tant bien que mal, make the laboratory run, yet am certainly not the kind of stuff to make a first-rate director thereof.”6
In 1897, after several visits, Münsterberg accepted a permanent appointment at Harvard; James, with no small relief, changed his own title from “professor of psychology” to “professor of philosophy.” The next year, Münsterberg was elected president of the American Psychological Association.7 Soon, he began planning the construction of a psychological laboratory in the Philosophy Department’s new home, a four-story brick building on Harvard Yard, to be called Emerson Hall.8 It opened in 1905. Birds and monkeys were kept in iron cages six feet by four, rabbits and guinea pigs in pens twice as small, and mice in tiny hutches.9
Hugo Münsterberg (illustration credit 3.6)
Münsterberg earned extra money by teaching at the “Harvard Annex,” a makeshift campus for women students that opened in 1879. The annex didn’t have its own faculty; annex students took all their courses with Harvard professors, although they were banned from earning Harvard degrees.10 George Herbert Palmer, who championed female education as ardently as he championed woman suffrage, taught at the annex from the start. He also insisted, to no avail, that annex students ought to be allowed to attend his Harvard lectures, alongside Harvard men. Palmer’s wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, had tried to convince Harvard president Charles Eliot to admit women to Harvard. Eliot had said no but promised her that the annex could become part of Harvard—and that annex students could be awarded Harvard degrees—if she could raise $250,000 for an endowment. She raised that money, only to be told by Eliot that he had changed his mind. In 1894, the annex, instead of becoming part of Harvard, was incorporated as Radcliffe College.11
Münsterberg’s research concerned perception, emotion, reaction, and sensation. He liked to experiment on his students, especially on his female students. “One is indeed all things to all men in a laboratory,” Gertrude Stein wrote after, as a Radcliffe student, she found herself in Münsterberg’s laboratory in 1894, “with a complicated apparatus strapped across her heart to register her breathing, her finger imprisoned in a steel machine and her arm thrust immovably in a big glass tube.”12 He was trying to find Stein’s mind.
Despite teaching at Radcliffe, Münsterberg was notorious for his opposition to both female education and woman suffrage. He believed in neither the intellectual nor the political equality of women. “To be sure, there are several American women whose scientific work is admirable,” he allowed, “but they are still rare exceptions. The tendency to learn rather than to produce pervades all the great masses of women.” The only reason to educate women, he thought, was to make them more interesting wives: “The woman should not strive for intellectual cultivation to do away with marriage but to ennoble it.”13 Women, in his view, had little capacity for reason. There was no question, for instance, of women serving on juries. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Professor Hugo Munsterberg says that women are not fit for jury duty because they are unwilling to listen to argument and cannot be brought to change their opinion on any subject.”14 Münsterberg also believed that, if ever women were to succeed in gaining the right to vote, their enfranchisement would be a “dead letter for the overwhelming majority of women,” since “the average woman does not wish to go into politics.” Decent, moral women had too much to do at home to cast a ballot, he thought, and any women who would show up at the polls would be easily corrupted, with the result that “the political machines would win new and disgusting strength from the feebleness of these women to resist political pressure.” Not to mention the danger that “politics might bring about differences between husband and wife.” In short, “the self-assertion of women in political matters is hardly a practical question.”15
William James died in 1910, the year before Marston arrived at Harvard. George Santayana retired during Marston’s freshman year. After acing Philosophy A, Marston enrolled in Ethics with Palmer, Metaphysics with Royce, and Experimental Psychology with a lean young lecturer named Herbert Langfeld.16 He earned one A after another, at a time when A’s were altogether rare.17 In 1912, when Marston was a sophomore, Harvard’s Department of Philosophy was renamed the Department of Philosophy and Psychology.18 That year, Marston began studying with Münsterberg, who found Marston so impressive that he hired him to assist him in teaching at Radcliffe, strapping girls to machines.
It was an age of experiment, and of philosophy, applied. The historian Charles Homer Haskins insisted that knowledge is always partial. Royce, the philosopher, had a different notion. “The idea of truth is essentially a social idea,” Royce told his students. “When you assert that a proposition is true, you are actually making an appeal to somebody.”19 From Münsterberg, Marston learned another path to truth. The experimental psychologist needn’t dive for his evidence in a dustbin; he could create his own evidence, in a laboratory.
The experiments Münsterberg and Marston conducted together in the Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall and on their students at Radcliffe were designed to detect deception. They wanted to tell truth from lies. Marston began conducting a series of “reaction-time” experiments: he wanted to know whether people who are lying
hesitate when they speak.20 Haskins defined the historical method as the discrimination between the trustworthy and untrustworthy; Münsterberg wanted to predict trustworthiness. To understand how the mind works—to discover the physical manifestation of truth and deceit—would be to know whose evidence was to be trusted, not by making a subjective judgment, the way the historian applied to a mass of evidence the intellectual skills of criticism and interpretation, but through observations made and tests developed. Truthfulness—truth itself—was to be established not through discrimination but through observation.
Münsterberg had begun this research before Marston moved to Cambridge. Following work being done in Europe, he had devised a series of tests to measure what he believed to be indicators of deceit: the heat of the skin, the rate of the heartbeat, the speed of speech. In 1907, he’d tried to put his theory into practice when he accepted an assignment from McClure’s Magazine to go to Idaho to report on the trial of Harry Orchard.21