The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Justice Society readers’ poll. From Sensation Comics #5 (May 1942) (illustration credit 24.1)

  In March 1942, Gaines’s staff tabulated the results of the votes cast, sorting them by age and sex: Wonder Woman was the first choice of every group.11 Gaines wanted to include Wonder Woman in the Justice Society; he got exactly the result he wanted. On the ballot, Wonder Woman’s face is nearly double the size of the faces of the other contestants, and her face, and no other character’s, appears twice. Gaines had rigged the vote. He probably hadn’t needed to.

  For all of Wonder Woman’s success, Gaines was still worried about the National Organization for Decent Literature’s “Publications Disapproved for Youth.” He’d hired Marston, a psychologist, in order to steer clear of censorship, only to encounter more of it after hiring Marston as a writer. He needed another expert.

  Lauretta Bender, with her husband, Paul Schilder, and their two sons, about 1939 (illustration credit 24.2)

  In the winter of 1942, he arranged to have copies of his exchange with Bishop Noll sent to Lauretta Bender, MD.12 Bender, forty-five, was a senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, where she was director of the children’s ward. She was also an associate professor of psychiatry at NYU’s medical school. She was an expert on emotionally disturbed and aggressive children; she specialized on children under the age of twelve, and she was especially interested in whether they could be either distressed or helped by reading. She herself hadn’t learned to read until fourth or fifth grade; she was profoundly dyslexic, a disability that, she later said, accounted for her interest in studying what children get out of what they read. Delivering the valedictorian address at her high school graduation in Los Angeles in 1916, she spoke about the importance of educating girls: “We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.” When she decided she wanted to go to college, her mother denounced her, telling her, “A woman’s place is in the home,” but Bender ignored her and went to Stanford, and then to the University of Chicago, for a graduate degree in pathology. She earned her MD in Iowa in 1926. During a year at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins, she met Paul Schilder, a Viennese psychoanalyst and colleague of Freud’s. In the spring of 1930, Schilder left Baltimore to become director of clinical psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York; Bender joined him there that fall. Four years later she was named director of the hospital’s children’s ward, and, two years after that, in 1936, she and Schilder married.13

  Between 1930 and 1940, Bender observed the cases of some seven thou-sand children brought to Bellevue. In 1936, Bender and two colleagues published a study involving eighty-three children admitted to Bellevue for behavioral problems; the psychiatrists had shown the children scenes of aggression in Flash Gordon and other comic strips and asked them questions like “Is it right to hit somebody who insults you?”14

  In 1940, Schilder, fifty-four, was killed by a car on his way home from visiting Bender and their eight-day-old daughter in the hospital. Bender, left with three children—Michael, three; Peter, two; and the baby, Jane—soon became painfully interested in studying how children cope with the traumatic loss of a parent.15 Watching her own young children, she observed that there were stories they simply could not bear. “The oldest boy cannot tolerate anything in the way of a story, even of Peter Rabbit, who, if you recall your Peter Rabbit, went into a garden where his father got into an accident at the hands of a hoe of a farmer and had been put in a rabbit pie. I had to take him screaming out of the puppet show on that picture.” Her second son, though, had found comfort in comic books, especially those containing stories of children losing parents. Bender explained, “I think for him it is an effort to find a solution of the mystery of life and death and how it can happen that a child’s father can leave him even before the child knows the father.” Her daughter, who never had any chance to know her father, began writing her own comic books as soon as she was old enough to write. She wrote one murder story, Bender said, “in which the bloody head of the person who had been attacked would lie on the lap of the beloved person, whoever it was, and an effort would be made to soothe it.” This worried Jane’s teacher, but Bender thought it was just fine: “It is her way of solving her problem.”16

  Gaines knew none of this. But what he did know—probably from Marston—was that in 1941 Bender had written a very interesting journal article with Reginald Lourie, a medical resident under her supervision, called “The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children.” Bender and Lourie reported the results of a study they had conducted in the wake of the public debate that had begun in 1940, when Sterling North called comic books a national disgrace. As pediatric psychiatrists, they were, naturally, fascinated by comic books. “Anyone in contact with children of school age, and particularly those working closely with children, sooner or later becomes conscious of the extent to which the constant reading of comic books has invaded their thinking, daily activities, and play,” they explained. They wanted to know whether comic books affected children’s behavior. “Do they lead to anxiety?” they asked. “Do they lead to aggression?”

  Bender and Lourie addressed these questions by recounting four cases of children brought to Bellevue Hospital for behavioral problems. All had suffered massive childhood trauma. Tessie, age twelve, had witnessed her father, a convicted murderer, kill himself. Her mother was dying of cancer. She had decided to call herself Shiera, after a comic-book girl who is always rescued, at the last minute, by the Flash. Bender and Lourie decided that reading comics was a form of self-therapy: “This overwhelmed child was attempting to find, via the comic books, a method of clarifying her confusing personal problems,” they wrote. “By identifying herself with the heroine who is always rescued from perilous situations, she temporarily achieved an escape from her own difficulties.” Kenneth, age eleven, had spent most of his life in foster homes. He had also been raped. He believed he was going to die. He was frantic unless medicated, or unless he was “wearing a Superman cape.” He felt safe in it—he could fly away if he wanted to—and “he felt that the cape protected him from an assault in the rear.” Bender and Laurie, who wrote with marked compassion, approved of comic books with considerable enthusiasm. “Comic books can probably be best understood if they are looked upon as an expression of the folklore of this age,” they explained. They offered children a way to play, a kind of fantasy, entirely normal—a way, even, to solve problems. Sure, there was mayhem everywhere—murder, bondage, shootings. But it was resolved. “Aggression is dealt with in most of the stories,” they observed, “but its purpose as carried out by the hero is to prevent hostile and noxious aggression by others.” They concluded, “The comics may be said to offer the same type of mental catharsis to its readers that Aristotle claimed was an attribute of the drama.” They were troubled, though, that “male heroes predominate.”17 Weren’t women ever strong?

  Gaines had one way to respond to the comic-book controversy—reaching out to Bender; Marston had another. It was probably at Marston’s urging that Family Circle reported on Bender and Lourie’s study in April 1942, with a reassuring tagline: “Heroes capable of any wonderwork—born of fantasy but related to reality—are but today’s counterparts of what you yourself thrilled to as a child.”18

  Meanwhile, Marston did his best to rein in his excesses. “Enclosed find a wonderful script by the best writer in the business,” he wrote to Mayer in June 1942. “If you send roses in token of your appreciation, make them large white ones indicating the purity of this script, the nice clean socking, blood, war and killing which you and our Catholic friends regard as nice, clean entertainment for youngsters and especially the absence of all electric chairs and needles, even knitting needles, being excluded from this extraordinarily virtuous script.”19

  Tidied up or not, Wonder Woman sold like crazy. No one, aside from Superman and Batman, even came close. Gaines didn’t need any more convincing. Just to be sure, though, he conducted one more poll
. He included a one-page questionnaire in All-Star Comics #11. It included the question “Should WONDER WOMAN be allowed, even though a woman, to become a member of the Justice Society?” Gaines, reporting the returns to Bender, remarked, “It is surprising to note (or is it?) that there is very little antipathy to the encroachment of a female into what was a strictly masculine domain.” Of the first 1,801 questionnaires returned, 1,265 boys and 333 girls said “Yes”; 197 boys and just 6 girls said “No.”20

  Wonder Woman joined the Justice Society in the August–September 1942 issue of All-Star Comics. It was not quite the triumph it might have been. She was named the society’s secretary.

  THE MILK SWINDLE

  MAKING WONDER WOMAN the Justice Society’s secretary wasn’t Marston’s idea; it was Gardner Fox’s idea. Wonder Woman’s adventures as a member of the Justice Society were written not by Marston but by Fox, who’d worked on Batman, created Hawkman, and had helped launch the Flash and the Sandman. Like Marston’s Wonder Woman stories, Fox’s were edited by Sheldon Mayer and published by Charlie Gaines. But Fox’s Wonder Woman is useless and helpless. She hardly ever leaves Justice Society headquarters. In the summer of 1942, when all the male superheroes head off to war, Wonder Woman stays behind to answer the mail. “Good luck, boys,” she calls out to them. “I wish I could be going with you!”1

  From Gardner Fox, “The Black Dragon Menace,” All-Star Comics #12 (August–September 1942) (illustration credit 25.1)

  In December 1942, when the men are about to leave on a mission to feed war-ravaged Europe, Wonder Woman stays at headquarters, explaining, “I have to remain behind but I’ll be with you in spirit!” Two months later, no one but Wonder Woman turns up for a Justice Society meeting; the men are too busy. Bored, Wonder Woman decides to round up “all the girlfriends of the Justice Society members,” to go looking for the boys. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime for us girls!” But in the end, they don’t rescue anyone; instead, they get trapped and need rescuing themselves.2

  On the rare occasion that any real action takes place at Justice Society headquarters, Fox gets rid of Wonder Woman before anything interesting happens. “Gentlemen!” she cries out at the beginning of a story from the summer of 1943. “The minutes of all past Justice Society meetings have been stolen!”

  “Are you sure you didn’t take the record book home to type up the latest minutes?” asks Hawkman.

  “Absolutely!” Wonder Woman bursts out. “But just to be on the safe side I’ll go home and check on it.”

  And then she heads out the door and is gone for the rest of the episode. The story runs for fifty pages; Fox dispenses with Wonder Woman in two panels.3

  Marston was furious. In April 1942, he complained to Mayer, and when Fox submitted his next script, Marston insisted on rewriting it. “I ask you to note the universal truth in my script re war and women taming men so they like peace and love better than fighting,” Marston wrote to Mayer, handing in his own script, in which Wonder Woman rides a rocket through space.4

  Fox’s Wonder Woman was a secretary in a swimsuit. Marston’s Wonder Woman was a Progressive Era feminist, charged with fighting evil, intolerance, destruction, injustice, suffering, and even sorrow, on behalf of democracy, freedom, justice, and equal rights for women. In 1942, when Fox’s Wonder Woman was typing up the minutes to meetings of the Justice Society, Marston’s Wonder Woman was organizing boycotts, strikes, and political rallies.

  In a story published in Sensation Comics in July 1942, Wonder Woman discovers that the International Milk Company has been charging outrageous prices for milk, leading to undernourished American children. The story came straight out of a Hearst newspaper that Harry G. Peter had worked for in the 1910s. In 1919, and again in 1926, Hearst had used his papers to attack the politician Al Smith as “one of the milk crooks” for conspiring with “the milk trust” to raise the price of milk, a form of profiteering that was killing American babies.5 “It can’t be legal to deprive poor children of milk!” Diana Prince cries when she confronts Alphonso De Gyppo, president of the International Milk Company, in 1942. Kidnapped by Al De Gyppo’s henchman, Diana is left to drown in a giant tank of milk. (“What a waste of good baby-food!” she thinks.) After she escapes, she changes into her Wonder Woman costume and organizes a “gigantic demonstration against the milk racket.” Thousands of poor mothers and their children march through the streets, led by Wonder Woman and the girls from Holliday College, who carry a banner that reads, “THE INTERNATIONAL MILK COMPANY IS STARVING AMERICA’S CHILDREN!!” In composing a panel in which Wonder Woman, riding a white horse, leads the charge, Peter borrowed from a famous series of photographs of a suffrage parade held in Washington in 1913; Inez Milholland Boissevain led the procession, wearing a golden tiara and riding a white horse.

  Inez Milholland Boissevain, leading a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., March 3, 1913 (illustration credit 25.2)

  Marston updated the Progressive Era story about the milk trust by making it part of a secret German plot (itself an echo of the story from the 1910s) led by Baroness Paula von Gunther, a Nazi agent. “I have spent seven million dollars to take milk from the mouths of American children!” the baroness tells Wonder Woman after she’s chained her to a train stock car filled with ten thousand gallons of milk. “Your rising generation will be weakened and dwarfed! Germany, in twenty years, will conquer your milk-starved youths and will rule America!” Wonder Woman frees herself from the chains that bind her, stops the milk-tank car from running off the tracks (“This will save thousands of gallons of good milk for American children!”), and captures the baroness. The price of milk drops.6

  Wonder Woman leads a political rally. From “The Milk Swindle,” Sensation Comics #7 (July 1942) (illustration credit 25.3)

  Wonder Woman’s next adventure was inspired by Progressive Era labor activism, too, including a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. (Margaret Sanger had been involved in that strike and, likely, so had Ethel Byrne. Sanger went to Washington to testify before Congress about the damage done by the textile industry to the lives of women and children. Sanger had also helped organize restaurant and hotel workers in New York and silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey.)7 In Sensation Comics #8 (August 1942), Wonder Woman finds out that women working at Bullfinch’s Department Stores, owned by the fabulously wealthy Gloria Bullfinch, are being underpaid. “We Bullfinch girls only make eleven dollars a week,” Diana’s friend Molly complains. Fifty girls have been fired for insubordination. The rest have gone on strike. At the picket line in front of the store, they carry signs reading, “OUR TOIL MAKES GLORIA GLAMOROUS,” “BULLFINCH STORES UNFAIR TO GIRLS,” and “WE STARVE WHILE GLORIA BULLFINCH DINES AT THE 400 CLUB!” The strikers are fired. Wonder Woman visits Gloria Bullfinch at her mansion and ties her up with her magic lasso. Using the hypnotic powers of the lasso, Wonder Woman tells Gloria Bullfinch that she is really a girl named Ruth Smith and instructs her to go get a job at Bullfinch’s Department Stores. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman discovers that the fiend behind the store’s exploitation of its workers is Gloria Bullfinch’s fiancé, Prince Guigi Del Slimo. Gloria, after working in her own department store as Ruth Smith, is awakened to Del Slimo’s perfidy, and slugs him, shouting, “I only wish I could punch like Wonder Woman!” Then she takes over management of the store and issues an announcement: “Girls, starting now your salaries are doubled!”8

  The Lawrence textile strike of 1912 (illustration credit 25.4)

  Next, in a Sensation Comics story from September 1942, Wonder Woman tackles heartless husbands. The real Diana Prince—Wonder Woman’s look-alike—returns to Washington, married to a man named Dan White and newly a mother. Her husband is a jealous brute. He is also out of work. In one panel, Diana White, wearing an apron, is cooking in the kitchen while the baby gurgles in a bassinet in the living room. When she tells her husband she’d like to go back to work, he storms across the room threateningly.

  “Please let me go to
work, Dan!”

  “No! My wife doesn’t have to work.”

  “But Dan, we’re down to our last dollar and the baby must have food.”

  Then she leaves the apartment, dressed in her army nurse’s uniform, to look for work. She goes to see Diana Prince, asking for her identity back—and her job. Wonder Woman, after obliging, visits the Whites’ apartment, only to be mistaken by Dan White for his wife.

  “Well? Did you get a job? If you did, I’ll—”

  “My, but you’re tough! No, I haven’t any job now, but—”

  “You won’t get any job—I’ll fix that! You’ll stay right in this room from now on.”

  “What are you going to do—keep me locked up?”

  And then he chains her to the stove, telling her, “I’m going to chain you like this every time I go out!”

  Diana Prince helps striking department store workers. From “Department Store Perfidy,” Sensation Comics #8 (August 1942) (illustration credit 25.5)

  Much melodrama ensues, including the kidnapping of Diana White by Nazi agents who have also plotted to destroy Dan White’s career. In the end, Wonder Woman rescues everyone, and the marriage is saved. Diana Prince, who’s gotten her job back, tells Diana White, “But I envy you yours, as wife and mother.”9

  Wonder Woman had not one secret identity, in this episode, but two. She was Diana Prince, working woman, and also Diana White, her look-alike, wife and mother: Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, both. Marston went on record, more than once, advocating employment for women. “The truest kindness to any woman,” he wrote in Tomorrow magazine in 1942, “is to provide her with an opportunity for self-expression in some constructive field: to work, not at home with cook-stove and scrubbing brush, but outside, independently, in the world of men and affairs.”10