by Jill Lepore
Wonder Woman cherishes her independence. She can’t marry, according to Amazonian law, but she doesn’t want to, either, despite Steve Trevor’s repeated proposals. “Blistering blazes!” Trevor cries. “Why will that beautiful gal always invite trouble? If she’d only married me, she’d be home cooking my dinner right now!”11 But Wonder Woman is very glad not to be home cooking dinner. She has other work to do. She is also careful about letting men have any kind of power over her. She knows that if she lets a man weld chains to her bracelets, she’ll lose all her strength. When that happens, she succumbs to despair. “These bracelets—they’re an Amazon’s greatest strength and weakness! What a fool I was to let a man weld chains upon them! It just makes a girl realize how she has to watch herself in this man’s world.”12 On the other hand, she needs her bracelets. The danger, illustrated in a story called “The Unbound Amazon,” is that without her bracelets, Wonder Woman is wildly, terrifyingly violent. When the villainous Mavis removes her bracelets, Wonder Woman goes on a rampage. “I’m completely uncontrolled! I’m free to destroy like a man!”13
During the war, the villains in Wonder Woman were often German, like the fiends who cry, “Vonder Voman—bullets dond’t hurt her!” They were also often Japanese. The racism of Wonder Woman is the racism pervasive in comic books from the 1940s. Blacks and Mexicans speak in dialect. “Dis suitcase show am heaby!” complains one Pullman porter. “Si, si! Old mine, muy pronto!” cries Pancho, a Mexican. In spite of Marston’s own writings condemning prejudice, including anti-Semitism, his comic books often featured greedy, hooked-nosed villains, like the blind Mole Men, who build a secret prison beneath Paradise Island where they use Amazons as slaves.14
From “Grown-Down Land,” Sensation Comics #31 (July 1944) (illustration credit 25.6)
But 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 a woman’s right to work, to run for political office, and to lead. When Wonder Woman discovers the lost world of the Incas, she tells the chief’s daughter that she should gain the throne: “It’s time those lost Incas were ruled by a woman!”15
In May 1942, FDR created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. One hundred and fifty thousand women joined the army, filling noncombat jobs and freeing men for combat. “The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps appears to be the final realization of woman’s dream of complete equality of men,” Margaret Sanger wrote. But she thought it was a mixed success. “The government, however, authors this honor with a string attached.” Sanger was outraged that the government refused to provide contraceptives for WAACs and adopted a policy of dismissing any woman who got pregnant. Still, she thought that was useful, because it was so illuminating. “This new women’s Army is a great thing,” Sanger declared, “a real test of the woman’s movement. Never before has the fight for woman’s equality narrowed down to the real issue, sex.”16
From “The Girl with the Gun,” Sensation Comics #20 (August 1943) (illustration credit 25.7)
At the time, Sanger was dismayed at the direction in which the Birth Control Federation of America was headed. In 1942, and over Sanger’s strenuous objection, the organization changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, on the grounds that the phrase “birth control” was simply too radical. “We will get no further because of the title; I assure you of that,” Sanger warned. “Our progress up to date has been because the Birth Control movement was built on a strong foundation of truth, justice, right, and good common sense.” During the Second World War, the leaders of Planned Parenthood argued that limiting family size was part of winning the war. Sanger, though, believed the best argument for contraception had to do with women’s rights. “One democratic right which greater numbers of women are enjoying during this war and which was denied to most during the last,” Sanger wrote in 1942, “is to decide for themselves whether they shall have babies or not.”17
During the war, Sanger struggled to get that message across. The men who ran Planned Parenthood in the 1940s didn’t want to hear about women’s rights. But Marston, explaining why he had created Wonder Woman, carried forth Sanger’s feminism: “The only hope for civilization,” he said, “is the greater freedom, development and equality of women.”18
THE WONDER WOMEN OF HISTORY
ASIDE FROM SUPERMAN AND BATMAN, none of DC’s superheroes was anywhere near as popular as Wonder Woman. She was the lead feature in Sensation Comics; she appeared regularly in All-Star Comics; and in Comic Cavalcade, a quarterly, she was, far and away, the star: she was on every cover, and hers was, in every issue, the lead story. In July 1942, she became the first female superhero to have her own comic book. “The reaction to my new feature, ‘WONDER WOMAN,’ in ‘Sensation Comics,’ has been so good,” Gaines wrote to Lauretta Bender, “that I am publishing a ‘WONDER WOMAN QUARTERLY’ containing all episodes of that character, just like ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman.’ ”1
It was a good time for Amazons. By Jupiter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s longest-running musical comedy, opened on Broadway in June 1942. Based on a farce called The Warrior’s Husband, it’s the story of Greek warriors sent to steal Diana’s sacred girdle; Ray Bolger plays Hippolyte’s hapless husband. “We’re here to fight the Amazons!” the men sing. “They’re only women but we hear / they wield a mighty wicked spear!” Marston took Holloway to see it. He thought it was very funny.2 It also didn’t hurt sales of his comics.
With the launch of Wonder Woman, Marston decided that the time had come to make a splash, by revealing a secret. He drafted a press release titled “Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman’ ”:
With the announcement yesterday that the popular comics heroine, “Wonder Woman,” will now rate a whole magazine to herself beginning July 22, M. C. Gaines, publisher of All-American Comics at 480 Lexington Avenue, also revealed officially for the first time that the author of “Wonder Woman” is Dr. William Moulton Marston, internationally famous psychologist and inventor of the widely-publicized “Lie Detector” test.
In the press release, Marston explained that Wonder Woman was meant as an allegory: “Like her male prototype, ‘Superman,’ ‘Wonder Woman’ is gifted with tremendous physical strength—but unlike Superman she can be injured.” Marston went on, “ ‘Wonder Woman’ has bracelets welded on her wrists; with these she can repulse bullets. But if she lets any man weld chains on these bracelets, she loses her power. This, says Dr. Marston, is what happens to all women when they submit to a man’s domination.” Wonder Woman was a form of feminist propaganda, Marston insisted: “ ‘Wonder Woman’ was conceived by Dr. Marston to set up 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.”3 She wasn’t meant to be a superwoman; she was meant to be an everywoman.
The first issue of Wonder Woman dwelled on her origins. “I think I got EVERYTHING in but the cat’s tail,” Marston wrote to Mayer, sending him the first script.4 Also introduced in the first issue of Wonder Woman was a regular four-page centerfold feature called “Wonder Women of History”: feminist biography.5
It started when Gaines met twenty-nine-year-old Alice Marble, the top women’s tennis player in the world. Marble had won the U.S. Open women’s singles in 1936, 1938, 1939, and 1940; the women’s doubles every year from 1937 through 1940; and mixed doubles in 1936, 1938, 1939, and 1940. Then she retired from competition. Introduced to Gaines at a cocktail party where everyone was talking about the crazy popularity of Superman and Wonder Woman, Marble asked a question.
“Why don’t you do real-life wonder women, the women who have made history?”
“Such as?”
“Clara Barton, Dolley Madison, Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Alice Marble, in Wonder Woman #1 (July 1942) (illustration credit 26.1
)
Gaines asked Marble to do some research and write some scripts. Then he gave her a desk, and a title: associate editor. He put her photograph in the first issue of Wonder Woman. He also paid her a great deal of money. She later said she’d earned fifty thousand dollars writing the “Wonder Women of History.”6
Each installment of Marble’s “Wonder Women of History” profiled a different woman. One point of the series was to celebrate the lives of heroic women and explain the importance of women’s history. Another was to promote Wonder Woman. In July 1942, Gaines sent to prominent women all over the country packages containing the first issue of Wonder Woman; Marston’s press release; a self-addressed, stamped envelope; and a letter, under Marble’s signature, seeking nominations for subjects to profile. “As you have probably found in your own experience,” Marble wrote, “even in this emancipated world, women still have many problems and have not yet reached their fullest growth and development. ‘WONDER WOMAN’ marks the first time that daring, strength and ingenuity have been featured as womanly qualities. This cannot help but have its lasting effect upon the minds of those who are now boys and girls.”
The first Wonder Woman of History was Florence Nightingale, Marble explained, and Clara Barton was up next. But as for who else to include, Marble said, that was up to the women of America: “I am conducting a nationwide poll of leading women in business and in public and professional life, to ascertain what famous women of ancient and modern times should be included.”7
By its third issue, Wonder Woman was selling more than a half million copies.8 How many responses Marble received to her nationwide poll is not known, but the women whose biographies appeared in the pages of Wonder Woman in the 1940s were scientists, writers, politicians, social workers, doctors, nurses, athletes, and adventurers: Sojourner Truth, Abigail Adams, Madame Curie, Evangeline Booth, Lillian D. Wald, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Susan B. Anthony, Joan of Arc, Jane Addams, Julia Ward Howe, Helen Keller, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Blackwell, Sarah Bernhardt, Amelia Earhart, Maria Mitchell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Dolley Madison, Sacagawea, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothea Dix, Nellie Bly, Jenny Lind, and Fanny Burney. It was Hecht’s True Comics—comic books as history books—but, here, women’s history. Gaines had the feature separately stapled as a stand-alone four-page comic book and distributed hundreds of thousands of copies to public schools.9 Magazine advertisements for Wonder Woman featured its celebration of women’s history: one ad pictured a pigtailed girl lying on the floor, reading Wonder Woman and dreaming of what she might become when she grows up; busts of twelve Wonder Women of History are arrayed around the border of the ad, representing the newly expanded range of her imagination.10
Who wrote “Wonder Women of History” is hard to say. Although Marble was listed on Wonder Woman’s masthead as “associate editor,” she couldn’t have written the “Wonder Women of History” for long.11 She married an army captain in 1942, just before he was sent to the front. In 1944, when she was five months pregnant, she was struck by a drunk driver and lost the baby. Soon afterward, she received word that her husband had been killed in a plane crash over Germany; she tried to kill herself. In 1945, she left the country, to serve as a U.S. spy in Switzerland.12 Alice Marble helped launch the “Wonder Women of History,” and she let Gaines use her name and her likeness, but much more she could not have done.
Marston had at least some hand in it. He chose which biography appeared in which issue. “Will switch from Joan d’Arc to Mme. Kai-shek for WW6,” he told Gaines in 1943.13 He might also have chosen which women to profile. And he might even have written at least some of their biographies. Marston, who, as a freshman at Harvard, had found history dreadfully boring, had grown fascinated by women’s history. He explained his change of heart in a Wonder Woman story called “The Ordeal of Queen Boadicea.”
“Who cares about those old gezaboes that lived 1900 years ago?” a high school boy named Bif asks Diana Prince. “And especially women—they’re all sissies!”
“Women seem sissies because you don’t know their true strength,” she answers. And then she turns into Wonder Woman, takes him on a trip into the past, and convinces him that history is fascinating.14
There’s a good chance that “Wonder Women of History” was written by Dorothy Roubicek, DC’s first woman editor.15 She was born in 1913, in the Bronx, to Czech and Russian immigrants. She grew up on Long Island. She married a man named Irving Taub right after graduating from high school. They moved to Florida, where she gave birth to a son when she was twenty-three. Later, she returned to New York with her baby but without her husband and moved in with her parents. She found work as a stenographer before Mayer hired her as an editor in 1942, when she was twenty-nine. She went by “Miss Roubicek”; even during the war, it was difficult for married women to get work. She worked closely with Gaines and especially with Mayer, including on Superman. She began working on Wonder Woman when Wonder Woman joined the Justice Society. Roubicek is generally credited with coming up with the idea for kryptonite in 1943. As the story has it, Roubicek thought Superman ought to be more vulnerable. She might have gotten that idea from her work on Wonder Woman, which involved conferring, often and at length, with Lauretta Bender.16
From “The Ordeal of Queen Boadicea,” Sensation Comics #60 (December 1946) (illustration credit 26.2)
Whoever wrote it, “Wonder Women of History” was entirely consistent with Marston’s hope, in creating Wonder Woman, “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.”17 The biographies cast Wonder Woman as the latest in a line of women fighting for women’s equality. The Wonder Woman of History in the June–July 1943 issue of Wonder Woman is Susan B. Anthony. One panel pictures her holding a key, about to unlock the shackles of a woman bound in chains. The caption reads, “America has three great emancipators. George Washington welded four million colonists into a United States of America. Lincoln freed four million Negroes from slavery. And Susan B. Anthony struck the shackles of legal, social, and economic bondage from millions of American women. Brave, daring, generous, sincere, this Wonder Woman led her sex to victory and became ‘The Liberator of Womankind.’ ” Anthony’s four-page biography explains how the women’s rights movement grew out of women’s work as abolitionists. Anthony is shown speaking at Seneca Falls in 1848, in front of a banner reading, “WOMEN’S RIGHTS”; she is declaring, “Negroes must be freed but still another form of slavery remains. The old idea prevails that woman is owned and possessed by man! Most wrongs and conflicts of modern society grow out of this false relationship between man and woman!”18
The suffrage campaign, from 1848 to 1920, is often thought of as the “first wave” of the women’s movement, and women’s liberation, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the “second wave.” In between, the thinking goes, the waters were still.19 But there was plenty of feminist agitation in the 1940s in the pages of Wonder Woman.
The issue of Wonder Woman that contained a biography of Susan B. Anthony, calling her “the Liberator of Womankind,” contained, too, a Wonder Woman story titled “Battle for Womanhood.” It opens with Mars, the god of war, angry that so many American women are helping with the war effort. Both the story and the drawings borrow heavily from suffragists’ use of the god of war as a stock character in cartoons from the 1910s, in which Mars appears regularly, shackling women to the misery of war. In the First World War, suffragists suggested that war was keeping women in a state of slavery. In the Second World War, Marston suggested that women’s contributions to the war effort were helping emancipate them, much to Mars’s dismay.
“There are eight million America women in war activities—by 1944 there will be eighteen million!” reports one of Mars’s female slaves, dragging a ball and chain.
“If women gain power in war they’ll escape man’s domination completely!” Mars thunders. “They will achieve a horrible independence! . . . Women a
re the natural spoils of war! They must remain at home, helpless slaves for the victor! If women become warriors like the Amazons, they’ll grow stronger than men and put an end to war!”
He commands the Duke of Deception to put a stop to it. The duke enlists the aid of Dr. Psycho, who, by means of tools he’s developed in his psychological laboratory, conjures a trick in which George Washington rises from the dead and addresses a spellbound audience.
From “Wonder Women of History: Susan B. Anthony,” Wonder Woman #5 (June–July 1943) (illustration credit 26.2)
“I have a message for you—a warning!” Washington says. “Women will lose the war for America! Women should not be permitted to have the responsibilities they now have! Women must not make shells, torpedoes, airplane parts—they must not be trusted with war secrets or serve in the armed forces. Women will betray their country through weakness if not treachery!”
Wonder Woman, watching in the wings, cries out, “He’s working for the Axis!” To defeat Dr. Psycho, she breaks into his laboratory, dropping in through a skylight. Captured, she’s trapped. Dr. Psycho locks her in a cage chained to a wall. Eventually, she’s rescued by Etta Candy, after which she frees Psycho’s wife, Marva, whom he has blindfolded and chained to a bed.
“Submitting to a cruel husband’s domination has ruined my life!” an emancipated Marva cries. “But what can a weak girl do?”