The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Page 28
Steinem rebutted each of these charges.36 “It’s really crazy, isn’t it?” Edgar wrote to the head of Warner, enclosing the Redstockings’ statement.37 But this rift, like so many others, proved impossible to close.38 And, while the Redstockings’ conspiracy theory really was crazy, they did have a point about Wonder Woman. Who needs consciousness-raising and equal pay when you’re an Amazon with an invisible plane?
The Redstockings’ attack on Ms., 1975, with Steinem as Wonder Woman (illustration credit post.6)
One tragedy of feminism in the twentieth century was the way its history seemed to be forever disappearing. In 1969, Shulamith Firestone and a group of young feminists visited eighty-four-year-old Alice Paul in Washington, D.C. Paul had founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916, had gone on a hunger strike in 1917, and had drafted the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. She brought her visitors into her parlor, where the walls were covered with oil portraits of suffragists. When she asked them to identify the women in those portraits, they couldn’t name a single one.39
In the late 1970s and 1980s, between feminists trashing one another, the reduction of a struggle for equality to the defense of abortion, and the rise of the New Right, the women’s movement floundered. The “woman’s dilemma” described in 1926—“Can a Woman Run a Home and a Job, Too?”—was hardly any closer to a solution, a half century later.40 The constitutional amendment introduced by Alice Paul in 1923 was never ratified; by 1982, the fight for the ERA had been abandoned.
Meanwhile, a generation of women historians dedicated themselves to never again forgetting the names of the women whose portraits hung on the walls of Alice Paul’s parlor. Women’s history exploded: brilliant, passionate scholars studied everything from the shape of women’s lives to the history of their political struggles. In 1970, Anne Firor Scott published a reader, Women in American Life. The first edition of Notable American Women, a biographical dictionary, appeared in 1971. So did Gerda Lerner’s landmark textbook, The Woman in American History. Nancy Cott’s documentary history, Root of Bitterness, was published in 1972. Linda Gordon’s history of the birth control movement, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, came out in 1976. Elizabeth Pleck and Nancy Cott published A Heritage of Her Own, a six-hundred-page history of American women, in 1979.
David Levine caricature of Margaret Sanger, 1978 (illustration credit post.7)
This scholarship shed little light on Wonder Woman. Her debt to Greenwich Village bohemianism, socialism, free love, androgyny, sex radicalism, and feminism; Holloway and Marston’s relationship to suffrage; their family arrangements; Jack Byrne and Fiction House; Wonder Woman’s ties to Olive Byrne, Ethel Byrne, and Margaret Sanger—this history hadn’t been forgotten; it had been deliberately and carefully hidden. In 1978, the artist David Levine drew a caricature of Margaret Sanger dressed as Wonder Woman, leaping into the air from a giant diaphragm. He was trying to tie one era’s feminism to another’s. He had no idea that Sanger was an inspiration for Wonder Woman. How could he? The story of Wonder Woman’s origins wasn’t a neglected history, waiting to be written. It was a family secret, locked in a closet.
Sometimes, a secret or two slipped out through the keyhole. In the 1970s, Holloway boasted about how well she had known Sanger. “I spent a lot of time with M.S. both at her home and mine,” she told Joanne Edgar. “Had the good fortune to know well in their later years Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger,” she wrote to the Mount Holyoke Alumni Office in 1975, declaring them to be “two who didn’t need any Women’s Lib.” But she never explained quite how she’d come to know them, because that would have required explaining about Olive Byrne. She did sometimes mention her “companion of many years,” but she never called Olive Byrne by name or explained that she was Sanger’s niece.41 In 1974, when a Berkeley PhD student writing a dissertation about Wonder Woman asked Holloway about Wonder Woman’s bracelets, Holloway wrote to her, “A student of Dr. Marston’s wore on each wrist heavy, broad silver bracelets, one African and the other Mexican. They attracted his attention as symbols of love binding so that he adopted them for the Wonder Woman strip.”42 The bracelets were, of course, Olive Byrne’s. And while it’s true that Olive Byrne was once “a student of Dr. Marston’s,” she had at that point been living with Holloway for forty-eight years.
Olive Byrne, interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s by historians and biographers studying Margaret Sanger—interviewed often for hours at a time—never mentioned Marston or Wonder Woman.43 That made it impossible for anyone outside the family to tie Sanger and Wonder Woman together. And when reporters or scholars asked Holloway about Wonder Woman, she told them to write to Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, to steer them away from Olive Byrne. “No one knows more about the production of Wonder Woman than Marjorie W. Huntley,” she would say. “She is the person you should refer people to if there are any questions.”44
In her nineties, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley moved to a nursing home in Massachusetts. She put up a poster on the wall of her room; it read, “When God made man She was only joking.” In 1982, Huntley was interviewed by a reporter for a local newspaper. Drinking Guinness and rocking in a chair, she said that she had once worked for the man who created Wonder Woman; she didn’t mention Elizabeth Holloway or Olive Byrne. Huntley died in 1986, one day after her ninety-seventh birthday. She’d left instructions. She wanted no ceremony at her cremation except for the reading of a poem: “Oh, my soul is not a timid spirit.”45
For a long time, no one paid much attention to the fact that the creator of Wonder Woman was also the inventor of the lie detector test. This is partly because Marston had published his comics under a pseudonym, “Charles Moulton,” but mainly it’s because the people interested in the history of comic books are not the same as the people interested in the history of the polygraph. (And very few people in either group are also interested in the history of feminism.) By the 1980s, lie detector tests were being administered on two million Americans every year. The Reagan administration attempted to stop security leaks by ordering random testing: during his presidency, more than two hundred thousand government employees were required to take lie detector tests. Before the passage of the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988, which limited the practice, one-quarter of all U.S. companies tested their employees. The use of the polygraph exploded after 9/11, when it became a feature of the interrogation of suspected terrorists and of tests given to American citizens applying for security clearance, in spite of a report released by the National Academy of Science in 2003 demonstrating that the polygraph does not work.46
No one ever gave Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Wilkes Huntley a lie detector test, and they never broke their silence. The veil of secrecy kept by the family over Wonder Woman’s past proved impossible to lift. Joanne Edgar, writing a magazine piece about the history of Wonder Woman on a deadline in 1972, and even Karen Walowit, writing a doctoral dissertation in 1974, were hardly any better off than that newspaper editor, in a Wonder Woman comic strip from 1944, who, looking for “the exclusive story of Wonder Woman,” finds the hunt so maddening that he has a nervous breakdown and ends up in a hospital. The secret history of Wonder Woman stayed secret.
That secrecy led to a distortion not only of Wonder Woman but also of the course of women’s history and the struggle for equal rights. Wonder Woman didn’t begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank. The fight for women’s rights hasn’t come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women’s liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women’s rights has been a river, wending.
Olive Byrne died in 1990, at the age of eighty-six. She and Holloway had been living together in an apartment in Tampa, near Olive’s son Byrne. While Olive was in the hospital, dying, Holloway fell and broke her hip; she
was admitted to the same hospital. They were kept in separate rooms. They’d lived together for sixty-four years. When Holloway, in her hospital bed, was told that Olive had died, she sang a poem by Tennyson: “Sunset and the evening star, / And one clear call for me! / And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea.”47
Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne in 1985 (illustration credit post.8)
Byrne Marston scattered his mother’s ashes in the Pamet River in Truro. No newspaper ran an obituary.48
Elizabeth Holloway Marston died at her son Pete’s house in 1993, with Wharton’s Sappho resting on her nightstand.49 An obituary ran in the New York Times. It was headed, “Elizabeth H. Marston, Inspiration for Wonder Woman, 100.”50 This was, at best, a half-truth.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, photographs, and recollections of the family of William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne. I am tremendously grateful to Byrne Marston and to Pete Marston for sharing these materials and memories with me on my visits to their homes. Byrne also answered countless e-mails and fact-checking queries with incredible patience and candor and generosity. Many thanks as well to Audrey Marston, Olive Ann Marston Lamott, Margaret Sanger Marston Lampe, Sue Grupposo, Christie Marston, and Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly, for answering my many questions about events that happened decades ago. Thanks to everyone else I interviewed, including Allan Asherman, Joe Brancatelli, Patricia Carbine, Donna Woolfolk Cross, Flora Davis, Joanne Edgar, Paul Levitz, and Jeff Rovin. Particular thanks to Joanne Edgar for sending me photocopies of her collection of letters from Elizabeth Holloway Marston.
From “The Invisible Invader,” Comic Cavalcade #3 (Summer 1943) (illustration credit post.9)
Special thanks to Steve Korte, at DC Comics, for sharing with me both a treasure of materials and his unrivaled knowledge of the history of comics. Dean Mullaney, at the Library of American Comics, pointed me to sources relating to Wonder Woman’s newspaper syndication. Thanks as well to Roy Thomas and Jean Bails for comics leads.
My abiding gratitude to the astonishingly talented research and reference staffs at the universities, archives, and libraries listed below, and especially to Susan McElrath at the American University Archives, Barbara Meloni at Harvard University Archives, Melissa Kent and Lesley Schoenfeld at the Harvard Law School Library, Fred Burchsted and Gregory Eow at Harvard’s Widener Library, Linnea Anderson at the University of Minnesota’s Social Welfare History Archives, Patricia Albright and Leslie Fields at the Mount Holyoke College Archives, Margaret Kiechefer and Chamisa Redmond at the Library of Congress, Janice Goldblum at the National Academy of Sciences Archives, Ellen Shea and Kathryn Jacob at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, Maida Goodwin at Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection, Kirsten van der Veen, Lilla Vekerdy, and Erin Rushing at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and Susanne Belovari and Tim Walsh at the Tufts University archives. Many thanks as well to Esther Katz and Peter Engelman of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, for helping me to navigate through that collection.
Celestine Warren helped me track down Lauretta Bender. Simon Leek proofread my comics citations during his school vacations. And, at the finish line, the amazing Amy Weiss-Meyer checked my facts and footnotes with peerless dedication.
I presented earlier versions of parts of this book to the Legal Theory Workshop at Yale Law School, as the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lectures in American Civilization and Government at the New York Public Library, and to a class of Harvard undergraduates. My thanks to those audiences for their suggestions. For invaluble comments and advice, thanks to Henry Finder, Jane Kamensky, Louis Menand, and Nancy Cott, to whom this book is dedicated.
Heartfelt thanks to my editor, Dan Frank, and to everyone else at Knopf who helped turn my pages into a book: Betsy Sallee, Chip Kidd, Maggie Hinders, Ellen Feldman, and Bonnie Thompson. Anke Steineke parted the waters. And Tina Bennett is, as ever, a superhero.
Thanks to Adrianna Alty, Elise Broach, Lisa Lovett, Liz McNerney, Latif Nasser, Leah Price, Rachel Seidman, Ramie Targoff, Sue Vargo, and Denise Webb for listening to my madcap stories about Wonder Woman. And thanks to my husband and to our three sons, for filling our house with comic books and action figures and, most of all, with ordinary, everyday feats of daring and love.
PRIVATELY HELD MANUSCRIPTS
Byrne, Olive
Correspondence. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Diaries, 1931–48. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
“Ethel Higgins Byrne, 1883–1955,” profile. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
“John Frederick Byrne, 1880–1913,” profile. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
“Mary Olive Byrne,” memoir. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
“Mary Olive Byrne,” profile. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Kelly, Joye Hummel Murchison
Correspondence. In the possession of Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly.
Diary and Record Book, 1946–47. In the possession of Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly.
Wonder Woman scripts, typewritten. In the possession of Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly.
Marston, Byrne
Correspondence. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
“Memories of an Unusual Father,” unpublished memoir. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
“Summary of Marston Genealogy.” In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Marston, Elizabeth Holloway
“Tiddly Bits: Tales of a Manx Cat,” unpublished memoir. In the possession of Pete Marston.
Correspondence. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Correspondence. In the possession of Joanne Edgar.
Marston, William Moulton
Diaries, 1931–48. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Clippings. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Correspondence. In the possession of Byrne Marston.
Poetry. In the possession of Pete Marston.
Scrapbook. In the possession of Pete Marston.
Pitkin, Walter B.
Correspondence. In the possession of John Pitkin.
MANUSCRIPTS HELD IN DEPOSITORIES
American University Archives
Catalogs and announcements, 1921–23
Richard V. Mattingly, Student Record
Lester Wood, Student Record
William Moulton Marston, Faculty/Staff Personnel Records
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, Ohio State University
Wonder Woman files
Boston Public Library
Hugo Münsterberg Papers
Brooklyn College Library
Lauretta Bender Papers
Cambridge Historical Commission
Boston Elevated Railway Company Scrapbook
Cambridge Property Records
Columbia University Archives
Central Files, 1895–1971, Office of the President
Department of Psychology, Historical Subject Files
Olive Byrne Richard, Graduate School Transcript, Registrar’s Office
William Moulton Marston, Appointment Record
DC Comics
Clippings file
Interviews conducted by Steve Korte
Gardner Fox, Wonder Woman scripts
Elizabeth Holloway Marston, correspondence
William Moulton Marston, correspondence
William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman scripts
Wonder Woman files
Harvard Law School Library Historical Collections
Student Permanent Record Cards, 1893–1972
Harvard University Archives
Arthur McGiffert, student notes, 1911–13
Clippings file, William Moulton Marston, Quinquennial File
Department of Psychology, Records
Edward Garrigues Boring Papers
Faculty of Arts and Sciences, final return records, 1848–1997
Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage records
Harvard Psychological Laboratory records
Leonard T. Troland, Application for Admission to the Graduate School
William Moulton Marston Undergraduate File
William Moulton Marston, Graduate Record Card
William Moulton Marston, Harvard Appointments Bureau Records
Houghton Library, Harvard University