The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  “Get strong!” urges Wonder Woman. “Earn your own living—join the WAACs or WAVES and fight for your country!”20

  From “Battle for Womanhood,” Wonder Woman #5 (June–July 1943) (illustration credit 26.4)

  Etta Candy takes that advice to heart. In the summer of 1943, in the lead story in Comic Cavalcade, Etta Candy and the Holliday College girls put on WAAC uniforms and become special army intelligence agents. “Aux-iliary Etta Candy reporting for duty,” Etta says, saluting General Wonder Woman.21 “Women are gaining power in the man’s world!” Wonder Woman reports to Hippolyte at the end of 1943. Hippolyte, pleased, shows Wonder Woman what lies ahead: Etta Candy will discover the secret to eternal life, for which she will be awarded an honorary degree and become professor of public health at Wonder Woman College, and a woman will be president of the United States. This, though, will lead to a battle of the sexes (the battle of the sexes that Marston described in 1937, when he held a press conference and predicted the rule of women). Unable to bear rule by women, a cranky professor named Professor Manly founds a new political party, the Man’s World Party, in the year 3000.

  “The men of this country are fed up with woman’s oppression!” Senator Hemann warns the president in a meeting at the White House. “The Man’s World Party demands male rights!”22

  “Thousands of men are joining Professor Manly’s new political party,” a future Steve Trevor tells a future Diana. “They’re going to elect a man president—he’ll put more strength into government!”

  The Man’s World Party nominates Steve Trevor as its candidate. Diana runs as his opponent. Trevor wins, only to find out that Professor Manly has rigged the election. Trevor is then kidnapped and has to be rescued by Wonder Woman, after which Diana Prince becomes president.23

  From “America’s Wonder Women of Tomorrow,” Wonder Woman #7 (Winter 1943) (illustration credit 26.5)

  Marston wanted the kids who read his comics to imagine a woman as president of the United States. In this, he was considerably ahead of public opinion. In 1937, when Gallup asked Americans, “Would you vote for a woman for president?” only 33 percent of Americans said yes.24 Marston’s promotion of Wonder Woman as a form of feminist literature led to a small but strident conservative political reaction from writers wanting to put Wonder Woman back in a woman’s place. “A Wife for Superman” was the title of an editorial that appeared in the Hartford Courant, in response to the press release in which Marston had revealed that he was the creator of Wonder Woman. “No less a figure than the discoverer of the famous lie detector, Dr. William Moulton Marston of Harvard, has emerged from the nebulous regions where psychologists are supposed to hang their hats, to create a new comic-book character,” the editors remarked. What, they wondered, would Wonder Woman do with her days? “She would be, of course, the type to attack the day with vigor, stir up a hearty breakfast, breeze the children into their school regalia, slick up the house and herself be off downtown to pursue her man-size job.” And “at the end of the day she would have lost little if any of her pep. After the dishes were done she would be ready to accompany her husband to a movie or lecture, where she would scintillate with ideas and conversation all the evening.” Sure, “a man with her for a wife would be lucky. The only question is, could he stand the pace?”25

  From “The Amazon Bride,” Comic Cavalcade #8 (Fall 1944), here and on the next page (illustration credit 26.6)

  Marston had an answer for that. In “The Amazon Bride,” a story in Comic Cavalcade in the fall of 1944, Wonder Woman loses her Amazonian strength. Steve Trevor, sensing her weakness, persuades her to marry him.

  “I seem to be weak!” she cries after Steve defends her from a villain.

  “Beautiful, you’re only a woman, after all,” he answers, lifting her off her feet. “You need a man to protect you!”

  “No,” she protests. “Aphrodite forbids us Amazons to let any man dominate us. We are our own masters.” Suddenly, she weakens. “But I confess—I love to have you boss me!”

  “You do? Why—I’d always wanted you to say that! Darling, marry me!”

  Back at the office, she begs him to let her serve him in other ways. “Steve, dear,” she says, “now that we’re going to be married, won’t you please let me be your secretary?”

  “Well—maybe,” Trevor answers, leaning back in his chair, puffing at his pipe. “Sit down at that machine and let’s see how fast you can type. Every woman’s place is in the home and girls should not try to do the work of men. They should be busy keeping house for their husbands!”

  He gets a marriage license. “I’m ready to be your docile little wife!” she cries, bowing before him.

  Fortunately, all of this turns out to have been a bad dream, from which Wonder Woman at last awakes.26 And then she goes back to work, making the world safe for equality.

  (illustration credit 26.7)

  SUFFERING SAPPHO!

  “NOTED PSYCHOLOGIST REVEALED as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman,’ ” Marston had headed his press release in the summer of 1942. Olive Byrne arranged to place a puff piece in Family Circle. In the August 14, 1942, issue of the magazine, “Olive Richard,” worried about the war, tells about how she’d come across an issue of Wonder Woman and vaguely recalled hearing that the Amazonian princess had been created by her favorite psychologist.

  “ ‘Well,’ I thought. ‘If Marston is whipping up comics stories while Rome burns, there must be a reason.’ ”

  Curious to find out more, she travels to his house in Rye.

  “The Doctor hadn’t changed a bit,” she reports. “He was reading a comics magazine, which sport he relinquished with a chuckle and rose gallantly to his feet, a maneuver of major magnitude for this psychologic Nero Wolfe.”

  “Hello, hello, my Wonder Woman!” he calls out to her.

  “What’s the idea of calling me Wonder Woman?” she wants to know. (It gave them a great deal of pleasure, their game of hide-and-seek.)

  He explains to her that her bracelets were the inspiration for Wonder Woman’s bracelets. He hands her a copy of Wonder Woman. She is dazzled.

  “I opened the book to read, ‘This amazing girl, stronger than Hercules, more beautiful than Aphrodite,’ and so on, and I remembered that my sons had argued as to whether she could lick the whole Japanese army all at once or whether she’d have to take them a few thousand at a time. The Doctor beamed when I told him this and said, ‘That’s right, the kids love her.’ ” (Her sons, his boys, their children.)

  “Boys, young and old, satisfy their wish thoughts by reading comics,” he tells her. “If they go crazy over Wonder Woman, it means they’re longing for a beautiful, exciting girl who’s stronger than they are.”

  From “America’s Guardian Angel,” Sensation Comics #12 (December 1942) (illustration credit 27.1)

  Wonder Woman, Marston tells her, is a New Woman. “The one outstanding benefit to humanity from the first World War was the great increase in the strength of women—physical, economic, mental,” he says. “Women definitely emerged from a false, haremlike protection and began taking over men’s work. Greatly to their own surprise they discovered that they were potentially as strong as men—in some ways stronger.” No harem master, he.

  Lou Rogers, in Why Should Women Vote?, 1915, a collection of suffrage cartoons (illustration credit 27.2)

  Says Olive, “I feel like Wonder Woman already.”1

  The strength of women was one theme of Wonder Woman. The bondage of women was another. (For Family Circle, Olive Byrne once wrote an account of Marston’s advice about happiness in marriage. It’s called “Fit to Be Tied?”)2 Not a comic book in which Wonder Woman appeared, and hardly a page, lacked a scene of bondage. In episode after episode, Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered, and manacled. She’s locked in an electric cage. She’s winched into a straitjacket, from head to toe. Her eyes and mouth are taped shut. She’s roped and then coffined in a glass box and dropped into the ocean. She’s
locked in a bank vault. She’s tied to railroad tracks. She’s pinned to a wall. Once, so that she can be both entirely bound and movable, her fettered feet are welded to roller skates. “Great girdle of Aphrodite!” she cries. “Am I tired of being tied up!”3

  From “The Disappearance of Tama,” Sensation Comics #33 (September 1944) (illustration credit 27.3)

  And it isn’t only Wonder Woman. Every woman in the Wonder Woman comic books is bound. Diana Prince is chained to a kitchen stove. The girls of Paradise Island are blindfolded. So are the gay girls of Holliday College. Shackles are welded onto their wrists. They are tied to chairs. Underground, they are enslaved in lairs. Aboveground, they’re hog-tied and dragged. They crawl across floors, leashed like dogs. They always escape. But first, they’re tied up. And while it’s true that much of this same iconography holds a prominent place in feminist and suffrage cartoons and protests from the 1910s—in which women are chained and roped and gagged, as an allegorical representation of their lack of rights and liberties—there’s more to it than that.

  In his original scripts, Marston described scenes of bondage in careful, intimate detail, with utmost precision, so that Peter would draw them exactly to his specifications: “The Amazon captives are marching along driven by the Greeks,” he wrote in one early script. “The women wear massive chains on ankles and wrists and between, also their necks are chained together for marching. The Greek slave driver swings a whip. Another Greek pricks a prisoner with his spear. The women are bowed with blows, etc.”4 In the first story in Wonder Woman #2, Wonder Woman travels “to a ravaged country where Mars’s men are collecting prisoners.” She, too, is taken prisoner. In the script, Marston paid especial, almost loving attention to the work of describing Wonder Woman’s bondage, giving Peter detailed instructions for the panel in which Wonder Woman is taken prisoner:

  Closeup, full length figure of WW. Do some careful chaining here—Mars’s men are experts! Put a metal collar on WW with a chain running off from the panel, as though she were chained in the line of prisoners. Have her hands clasped together at her breast with double bands on her wrists, her Amazon bracelets and another set. Between these runs a short chain, about the length of a handcuff chain—this is what compels her to clasp her hands together. Then put another, heavier, larger chain between her wrist bands which hangs in a long loop to just above her knees. At her ankles show a pair of arms and hands, coming from out of the panel, clasping about her ankles. This whole panel will lose its point and spoil the story unless these chains are drawn exactly as described here.

  This panel and the two that follow are from “The God of War,” Wonder Woman #2 (Fall 1942) (illustration credit 27.4)

  (illustration credit 27.5)

  Later in the story, Wonder Woman is forced to do battle with another female prisoner during a tournament of slaves. In the script, Marston’s painstaking attention to detail continues, with great insistence, as if he had encountered some resistance on this subject before: “Only here both girls have their hands tied behind them, don’t forget.” After defeating the female prisoner, Wonder Woman is hitched to a post: “Show WW chained by one ankle to a stout post. The ankle chain is long but very massive.” Then, still chained to the post, she is attacked by one of Mars’s warriors. Marston describes, for Peter, how to depict her beating: “Closeup of WW still lying face down. The paddle is just hitting her buttocks. The Martian does not show in this panel, only the spanker. Show the descent of the paddle with action lines and stars, etc.” (Peter obliged, omitting only the stars.) After the beating, Wonder Woman defeats the Martian warrior, only to be imprisoned yet again. “Show WW in chains as at beginning of sequence. A chain runs from her metal collar to a ring bolt in the wall, which is all steel.” Straining to overhear a conversation in the next room, through the amplification of “bone conduction,” she takes her chain in her teeth: “Closeup of WW’s head shoulders. She holds her neck chain between her teeth. The chain runs taut between her teeth and the wall, where it is locked to a steel ring bolt.”

  Near the end of the story, Wonder Woman is given her own slave. “Be sure to whip her every day!” Mars tells her. The girl hands Wonder Woman a whip. Wonder Woman says, “Don’t be absurd—I wouldn’t whip you! Tell me your story!” The girl explains, “Women on Mars have no rights.” Wonder Woman frees her. “Curse you Wonder Woman!” Mars cries. Quite how this story embraces women’s rights is difficult to figure.5 It’s feminism as fetish.

  (illustration credit 27.6)

  “Marston’s idea of feminine supremacy was the ability to submit to male domination,” Mayer said.6 He tried, without much success, to rein Marston in. Predictably, the bondage soon led to trouble with the editorial advisory board and, in particular, with Josette Frank, who’d worked with Holloway at Child Study in 1925 and who was now staff adviser to the Children’s Book Committee of the Child Study Association of America.

  At a time when plenty of librarians and schoolteachers were alarmed by comic books, Frank’s Children’s Book Committee generally gave favorable reports of the hundred or so comic books it reviewed every year, suggesting that, as “easy reading,” comic books served as a bridge, carrying young readers to more sophisticated literature.7 Sidonie Gruenberg, the director of the Child Study Association, rather liked comic books; she thought critics like Sterling North were cranks, and ill-informed.8 Frank felt more or less the same way, except that she could not abide Wonder Woman. In February 1943, she sent Gaines a letter.

  “As you know, I have never been enthusiastic about this feature,” she reminded him. “I know also that your circulation features prove that a lot of other people are enthusiastic. Nevertheless, this feature does lay you open to considerable criticism from any such group as ours, partly on the basis of the woman’s costume (or lack of it), and partly on the basis of sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc. I wish you would consider these criticisms very seriously.”9

  Gaines forwarded the letter to Marston.

  “For heavens sake,” Marston wrote Gaines. “Don’t let a person of her standing (or lack of it so far as such matters go) who is an avowed enemy of the Wonder Woman strip, of me and also of you in so far as she predicted this strip would flop and you rubbed it into her that it hadn’t, rock the boat!” Frank, he said, was a lightweight. “For every criticism she makes,” he promised Gaines, “I will get you half a dozen from real authorities, parents, teachers, educators, psychologists of national standing . . . , big-shot journalists like Pitkin, etc. who consider Wonder Woman a remarkably wholesome and constructive story strip, good for kids in every way.”

  Dorothy Roubicek had objected to Wonder Woman’s binding, too. Bah, said Marston. “The secret of woman’s allure,” he told Gaines, is that “women enjoy submission—being bound.”10

  (For the record, Marston’s son Byrne is really pretty certain that when Marston talked about the importance of bondage, he meant it only metaphorically. “I never saw anything like that in our house,” Byrne Marston told me when I asked. “He didn’t tie the ladies up to the bedpost. He’d never have gotten away with it.”)11

  Marston was irritated. As he saw it, he understood, as an “internationally famous psychologist,” that the secret of a woman’s allure is that she enjoys submission and bondage. Hadn’t he already explained that to Gaines? So what if women like Josette Frank and Dorothy Roubicek didn’t understand that? Why did he have to answer to them? What did they know?

  “Of course I wouldn’t expect Miss Roubicek to understand all this,” Marston went on. “After all I have devoted my entire life to working out psychologist principles. Miss R. has been in comics only 6 months or so, hasn’t she? And never in psychology.”

  As for the charge of sadism: “Binding or chaining the fair heroine, in comics strips, or the hero like Flash Gordon et al, is not sadism because these characters do not suffer or even feel embarrassed.” Wonder Woman teaches the enjoyment of submission to loving authority: “This, my dear friend, is the
one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound—enjoy submission to kind authority, wise authority, not merely tolerate such submission. Wars will only cease when humans enjoy being bound.”12

  Dorothy Roubicek, sketch, 1943 (illustration credit 27.7)

  Gaines was troubled. He asked Roubicek what she thought; no doubt he’d hired her so that he could ask a woman on staff what she thought. Roubicek said she thought it would be a good idea to keep Wonder Woman away from Paradise Island, where much of the kinkiest stuff tended to happen. She thought Wonder Woman ought to be more like Superman and, in just the way that Superman can’t go back to the planet Krypton, Wonder Woman ought not to be able to go back to Paradise Island.

  “I believe it would be to our eventual advantage to play up WW as a female SUPERMAN and give her the same type of escapade to play around with,” Roubicek told Gaines. She could fight thugs and Nazis, not ancient Greek gods. Roubicek also suggested that some of Josette Frank’s concerns might be alleviated if Wonder Woman would wear a skirt. She warned Gaines, “There has been a tendency in the past to play up WW as a rather sexy creature, and I think this should be avoided at all times—she should rather be shown as the All-American girl type. Her costume may be one of the reasons why she creates this impression, and attached is a sketch of the type of clothes I would suggest—feminine and yet not objectionable—as those short, tight panties she wears might be.” Roubicek had sketched a possible outfit; it looks almost exactly like the skirt Wonder Woman wore in her first appearance, in All-Star Comics. Gaines sent it to Marston, with a note reading, “Doc: She did this without even knowing how close she came to the original costume!”13 Wonder Woman kept her mini-shorts.