by Jill Lepore
“We have good news on the Father discussion,” she wrote to Byrne Marston and his wife, Audrey, in 1963. “While Dots and Betty were here I got Betty to tell me the entire story. She said she would if Donn & Byrne would lay off Dots & not ask her any more questions about their father. She said that Dots would never never tell the truth and said if they tried to make her tell that she would take morphine that she has tucked away. And that would be the end of that.”
Byrne and Donn’s father was William Moulton Marston, Holloway said. Keeping the boys’ father’s identity a secret had been Olive Byrne’s idea; Holloway and Marston had opposed it but felt the decision was hers. Living as a threesome had been Marston’s idea, Holloway said, insisting “that W.M.M. was 100 years ahead of himself” and “that some day everyone will be living like this.” Holloway went on for a while in that vein, about how in the future everyone would live the way the Marstons had lived at Cherry Orchard, in one of the stranger corners of America between the wars. At the bottom of the letter, there’s a postscript: “Her thinking (E.H.M.’s) is so way out on the subject of W.M.M. that it is almost impossible to record.”26
Much about any life is impossible to record. Every marriage, each love, is ineffable. And the ways of mothers and fathers remain, to every child, mysterious.
They had been immensely happy together, Holloway said. “W.M.M. really loved Dots & she loved him,” Margaret Sanger Marston reported. “And Betty loved him too.” Their passion had never weakened. “The affair went on until his death,” according to Holloway, “with love making for all.” Margaret Sanger Marston was relieved. “At last the truth is out!!”27
Holloway had one request: no one was ever to speak of it again.
EPILOGUE
GREAT HERA! I’M BACK!
Ms. magazine, July 1972 (illustration credit post.1)
“I’M ELIZABETH MARSTON and I know all about Wonder Woman,” she said when she charged into the offices of Ms. magazine in New York in the spring of 1972. She was nearly eighty years old, pale as paper, thin as bone, and hard as flint. In Virginia, where she was living with Olive Byrne, who was sixty-eight, she’d gotten a letter from an editor at Ms., telling her that the magazine was planning to run a cover story about Wonder Woman in its first regular issue. Holloway, as unstoppable as ever, flew to New York. She pored over the text; she peered at the art. She met the magazine’s staff. “All were on the young side, very much in earnest,” she reported to Marjorie Wilkes Huntley. “I told them I was 100% with them in what they are trying to do and to ‘charge ahead!’ ” Huntley, thrilled, rushed to send in a money order for a subscription, signing herself, at the age of eighty-two, “Marjorie Wilkes Huntley (Ms.).”1
Ms. was meant to be an organ for a revived feminist movement. Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was published in 1963. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966. In 1969, Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone started the Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Firestone’s manifesto, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, was published the next year, along with Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful. A revolution was being waged, too, in the world of magazines. In March 1970, forty-six women working at Newsweek sued the magazine for discrimination. At the Ladies’ Home Journal, more than a hundred women staged an eleven-hour sit-in, demanding day care, the hiring of female senior editorial staff, and a special issue of the magazine to be called the Women’s Liberated Journal. Firestone, standing on the editor’s desk, tore up copies of the Ladies’ Home Journal in front of him.2
Wonder Woman was part of that revolution. In July 1970, the Women’s Liberation Basement Press, in Berkeley, California, launched an underground comic book called It Aint Me Babe. The cover of its first issue featured Wonder Woman marching in a rally protesting stock comic-book plots. Inside, Supergirl tells Superman to get lost, Veronica ditches Archie for Betty, Petunia Pig tells Porky Pig to cook his own dinner, and when Iggy tells Lulu “No girls allowed!” she has only one thing to say: “Fuck this shit!”3
From “Breaking Out,” It Aint Me Babe, July 1970 (illustration credit post.2)
A nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality was held on August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. A young writer named Joanne Edgar helped organize the work stoppage at Facts on File. Patricia Carbine went on strike at Look. A year later, they were both at Ms., Edgar as an editor, Carbine as publisher.4 Ms. was meant to be a “women’s magazine”—like one of the Seven Sisters, like Family Circle—but also a critique of them: a women’s magazine, liberated. It was also an offshoot of the National Women’s Political Caucus, founded in July 1971 by a group of women that included Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress. A preview issue of the magazine went on sale in December 1971; it sold out in eight days. An up-and-coming conglomerate agreed to invest a million dollars in the magazine while owning only 25 percent of its stock. “Warner Communications has helped create the first large national magazine controlled by its staff,” Steinem said.5
By the beginning of 1972, when the editors of Ms. were planning the magazine’s first regular issue, the women’s movement seemed on the verge of lasting, breathtaking success. In January, Chisholm announced that she was running for president, seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination. In March, the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced to Congress in 1923, passed the Senate. In June, Richard Nixon signed into law Title IX, ensuring that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Nineteen seventy-two was a legislative watershed. “We put sex discrimination provisions into everything,” Abzug said. “There was no opposition. Who’d be against equal rights for women?”6
When the July 1972 issue of Ms. appeared on newsstands in June, Chisholm was still in the race. She didn’t concede the nomination to George McGovern until the Democratic National Convention, held in Miami the second week of July. Even as delegates made their way to Florida, they saw, in airports, on the cover of Ms., the drawing Holloway saw when she visited the magazine’s offices: a giant Wonder Woman striding across a city beneath a banner reading, “WONDER WOMAN FOR PRESIDENT.” (Holloway didn’t like it: it was “done by a man who had no feeling for what he was doing,” she wrote to Huntley.)7 In running Wonder Woman for president, Ms.’s editors were attempting to stake out political terrain: theirs would be a magazine of politics. They also wanted to bridge the distance between the feminism of the 1910s and the feminism of the 1970s with the Wonder Woman of the 1940s, the feminism of their childhood.8
“Looking back now at these Wonder Woman stories from the ′40s,” Steinem said, “I am amazed by the strength of their feminist message.” Steinem, born in Ohio in 1934, had loved the original Wonder Woman as a girl. She’d also had something to do with comics as a grown-up. In the 1960s, while working for Harvey Kurtzman, who’d helped William Gaines create Mad, she’d gotten to know Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk, who’d returned to DC Comics to edit a line of romance comics.9 For the July 1972 issue of Ms., Steinem was supposed to write both the cover story about Wonder Woman and a feature story about women voters. She handed the cover story over to Joanne Edgar. Edgar, born in Baton Rouge in 1943, grew up reading comics, too. The kids on her street, mostly boys, used to stack their comic books up and down the sidewalk, for trading. For one Superman, Edgar could get three issues of Wonder Woman.10
“Wonder Woman had feminist beginnings, but like many of us, she went into a decline in the ‘fifties,’ ” Edgar explained in her cover story.
Marston died in 1947, but Wonder Woman lived on. The new writers didn’t understand her spirit, however, and she lost some of her original feminist orientation. Her superhuman strength remained, but her violence increased. Rather than provin
g her superiority over men, she became more and more submissive.
Edgar, like Steinem, was troubled that, beginning in 1968—during what is known as the “Diana Prince Era,” when she wasn’t even called Wonder Woman anymore—Wonder Woman had lost both her costume and her superpowers. But, according to Edgar, with a renewed women’s rights movement, all this was about to change. In 1971, DC Comics named Roubicek Woolfolk as Wonder Woman’s new editor, and Edgar reported that she planned to bring back Marston’s Wonder Woman: “Ms. Woolfolk also plans to decrease violence in the plots and return our heroine to the feminism of her birth. And maybe to politics, too?”11
The founders of Ms. placed great faith in Wonder Woman’s ability to launch the magazine. The July 1972 issue featured not only “WONDER WOMAN FOR PRESIDENT” on the cover and Edgar’s article inside but also a four-page pullout, a reproduction of “Introducing Wonder Woman” from the December 1941–January 1942 issue of All-Star Comics. Steinem, Edgar, and Carbine also decided to publish a stand-alone anthology of Wonder Woman comics from the 1940s as a way to build publicity and gain subscribers for Ms. Steinem picked out which of Marston’s original stories to include, steering clear of the bondage theme as best she could.12 Wonder Woman: A “Ms.” Book, appeared in the summer of 1972 as a Ms. publication, distributed by Warner. “The Ms. cover story on Wonder Woman in July, 1972, brought so many requests for these vintage and out-of-print stories, that they have been collected in one irresistible book,” the magazine’s editors claimed. (This was disingenuous; the book had been typeset even before the first issue of the magazine was printed.) Profits went to the magazine; order forms encouraged fans of Wonder Woman to subscribe to Ms.13
“Lovely and Wise Heroine Summoned to Help the Feminist Cause,” the New York Times announced. The Los Angeles Times declared Wonder Woman “The Movement’s Fantasy Figure.” In November 1972, during the week of the presidential election, wire-service stories about the return of Wonder Woman were published all over the country.14 By May 1973, Ms. and Warner were wondering, together, whether they might manufacture and market a Wonder Woman doll.15 In July 1973, a women’s health collective in Los Angeles featured Wonder Woman wielding a speculum on the cover of a newsletter dedicated to teaching women how to conduct their own vaginal exams.16
In 1973, the year Wonder Woman was named a “symbol of feminist revolt,” the Supreme Court issued a ruling legalizing abortion. But the aftermath of Roe v. Wade didn’t bolster the feminist movement; instead, it narrowed it. If 1972 was a legislative watershed, 1973 marked the beginning of a drought. Some gains were lost; others proved illusory. Even the idea that DC Comics was hiring Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk to edit a new Wonder Woman comic book and “return our heroine to the feminism of her birth” turned out to be wrong.
From a 1973 feminist newsletter (illustration credit post.3)
Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk did edit one issue of Wonder Woman in 1971, and another early in 1972; those issues are no different from any published during the Diana Prince Era.17 About that time, Steinem, visiting DC Comics to pick out old Wonder Woman stories to reprint in the Wonder Woman Ms. book, saw some of the Diana Prince Era issues and said, “What’s happened to Wonder Woman? You’ve taken away all her super-powers. Don’t you realize how important this is to the young women of America?”18 Roubicek Woolfolk sided with Steinem—she wanted Wonder Woman to get her superpowers back—for which she was fired, right about when the July 1972 issue of Ms. appeared on newsstands.
“I’ve just heard that you’re no longer with National Publications and I wanted to say that I think it’s a damn shame,” Glamour staff writer Flora Davis wrote to Roubicek Woolfolk on June 23. Davis had been writing an article about Wonder Woman. Glamour killed it. “I enjoyed working with you on the Wonder Woman article,” Davis told Roubicek Woolfolk. “I had hoped it would be a piece about how comics were quietly—and at long last—becoming healthy reading for kids, especially for girls. It’s disappointing to have to retract that. Whatever you do now, I wish you luck in your new career. You are one of the most articulate WOMEN’S-lib spokespeople I’ve ever met.”19
In July, out of work, Roubicek Woolfolk wrote to Steinem to tell her that she’d gone on a public speaking tour, talking about “women’s liberation and the role of comics,” and in every city she visited, Ms. was a sellout: “I got the feeling the lively Wonder Woman cover didn’t hurt sales a bit.”20
Roubicek Woolfolk had no hand in it, but in December 1972, DC Comics published a “Special! Women’s Lib Issue” of Wonder Woman, edited by Dennis O’Neil and written by a science-fiction writer named Samuel R. Delany. It was meant to be the first installment of a six-part storyline; in each installment, Diana Prince was supposed to battle a male chauvinist.21 In the first story (a recycling of a story from the 1940s), Diana defeats a department store owner who is underpaying women workers. “Another villain was a college advisor who really felt a woman’s place was in the home,” Delany later explained. “It worked up to a gang of male thugs trying to squash an abortion clinic staffed by women surgeons.” The abortion clinic story was killed. Only the first of Delany’s six “women’s lib” stories was ever published.22
From Samuel R. Delany, “The Grandee Caper,” Wonder Woman #203 (December 1972), the special “women’s lib” issue (illustration credit post.4)
The comic-book industry found it nearly impossible to respond to the women’s movement. In 1972 and 1973, Marvel Comics, keen to hitch its wagon to the women’s movement, produced three “women’s comics”—Night Nurse, Shanna the She-Devil, and The Cat; all failed after fewer than half a dozen issues.23 DC Comics abandoned Delany’s Diana Prince stories. Instead, in early 1973, Wonder Woman returned, in costume and with all her superpowers restored, in DC’s “New Adventures of the Original Wonder Woman,” written and edited by Robert Kanigher, who, to say the least, wasn’t known for his sympathy with the women’s movement. (“Bob Kanigher was a very wild chauvinist,” his assistant later said.)24 The first thing Kanigher did, in “New Adventures,” was to have a barely fictionalized Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk murdered. A panel pictures her dead at her desk, slumped over a typewriter. The caption reads: “The sniper’s first bullet fells Dottie Cottonman, woman’s magazine, editor.”25
From Robert Kanigher, “The Second Life of the Original Wonder Woman,” Wonder Woman #204 (February 1973) (illustration credit post.5)
“Who’d be against equal rights for women?” Bella Abzug asked in 1972. A lot of people. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the women’s movement stalled. Wages never reached parity; social and economic gains were rolled back; political and legal victories seemingly within sight were never achieved.26 Then, too, feminists were divided, radicals attacking liberals and liberals attacking radicals in a phenomenon so widespread it even had a name: “trashing.”27 As early as 1970, the founder of the New Feminist Theater warned, in a letter of resignation from the Congress to Unite Women, that feminist “rage, masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism,” was becoming “frighteningly vicious anti-intellectual fascism.”28
In that battle Wonder Woman wasn’t caught in the crossfire; Wonder Woman was the ammunition. In 1967, William Dozier, who’d launched a Batman TV series on ABC in 1966, filmed a screen test for a super-campy Wonder Woman series called Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?; the show was never produced.29 But Ms.’s revival of Wonder Woman made ABC take another look. In March 1974, Cathy Lee Crosby starred in an ABC-TV Wonder Woman movie. It had little to do with the 1940s Wonder Woman; it was set in the 1970s, and it was a flop.30 But the next year, ABC launched The New Original Wonder Woman. Set in the 1940s, it was based very closely on Marston’s comics, as was its theme song:
Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman!
All the world is waiting for you
And the power you possess.
In your satin tights,
Fighting for your rights,
And the old red, white, and blue.
Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman!
> Now the world is ready for you,
And the wonders you can do:
Make a hawk a dove,
Stop a war with love,
Make a liar tell the truth.
Wonder Woman!
Get us out from under, Wonder Woman!
All our hopes are pinned upon you!312
The New Original Wonder Woman ran for four years. To radical feminists, it looked like a sellout of everything the feminist movement stood for. In 1968, the Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement had protested the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, chucking high heels and issues of Playboy into a Freedom Trash Can and crowning, as Miss America, a sheep. The star of The New Original Wonder Woman was Lynda Carter, a beauty pageant winner who’d represented the United States in the Miss World contest in 1972. But the battle over Wonder Woman predated Carter’s debut as Wonder Woman. As early as July 1972, Betty Friedan distanced herself from Gloria Steinem by accusing her of telling women they had to be “superwomen.”32
In May 1975, six months before ABC aired its pilot starring Carter, the Redstockings held a press conference to announce the release of a sixteen-page report. It purported to prove (1) that Gloria Steinem was a CIA agent; (2) that Ms. was both a capitalist manifesto and part of a CIA strategy to destroy the women’s movement; and (3) that Wonder Woman was a symbol of the ruination of feminism.33 The report, printed as a broadside, was illustrated by a drawing of Wonder Woman with Steinem’s head.34 The Redstockings indicted Ms. for its relationship with Warner Communications, citing the terms of the original deal—in which Warner provided most of the funding but was not a majority stockholder—and asking, “What possible interest could this mammoth conglomerate have in women’s liberation that would lead them to agree to such unbusiness-like terms?” The Redstockings wanted to know: Why would Warner spend a million dollars to fund a feminist magazine, unless it was part of a secret plan to sabotage the feminist movement? Even the fact that Diana Prince is “an army intelligence officer” seemed to the Redstockings to be evidence that Steinem was a CIA puppet, a willing and knowing participant in a conspiracy to destroy the women’s liberation movement. Furthermore: “Wonder Woman also reflects the anti-people attitude of the ‘liberal feminists’ and the matriarchists who look to mythical and supernatural heroines and ‘models’ while ignoring or denigrating the achievements and struggles of down-to-earth women. It leads to the ‘liberated woman,’ individualist line that denies the need for a movement, and implies that when women don’t make it, it’s their own fault.”35