The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Page 30
Wonder Women of History: Joan of Arc
The Secret Weapon
Demon of the Depths
#8 Spring 1944 Queen Clea’s Tournament of Death
The Girl with the Iron Mask
Wonder Women of History: Sister Elizabeth Kenny
The Captive Queen
#9 Summer 1944 Evolution Goes Haywire
Wonder Woman vs. Achilles
The Freed Captive
#10 Fall 1944 Spies from Saturn
Wonder Women of History: Juliette Low
The Sky Road
Wonder Woman’s Boots
#11 Winter 1944 The Slaves of the Evil Eye
The Unseen Menace
The Slave Smugglers
Wonder Women of History: Julia Ward Howe
#12 Spring 1945 The Winged Maidens of Venus (JHMK)
The Ordeal of Fire (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Helen Keller
The Conquest of Venus (JHMK)
#13 Summer 1945 The Icebound Maidens (JHMK)
The Mystery Maid (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Sojourner Truth
Slaves in the Electric Gardens (JHMK)
#14 Fall 1945 Captured by Leprechauns (JHMK)
The Gentleman Killer Strikes Again (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Abigail Adams
The Conquest of Shamrock Land (JHMK)
#15 Winter 1945 The First Battle of Neptunia (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Evangeline Booth
The Masters of the Water (JHMK)
In the Killer’s Cage (JHMK)
#16 Mar.–Apr. 1946 The Secret of the Dark Planet (JHMK)
The River of Liquid Fire (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Marie Curie
King Pluto’s Revenge (JHMK)
#17 May–June 1946 Wonder Woman and the Winds of Time (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Emma Willard
The Redskin’s Revenge (JHMK)
Subterranean Death (JHMK)
#18 July–Aug. 1946 The Return from the Dead (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Hannah Adams
The Drugged WAC (JHMK)
Ectoplasmic Death (JHMK)
#19 Sept.–Oct. 1946 Invisible Terror (JHMK)
Wonder Woman of History: Elizabeth Blackwell
The Witchdoctor’s Cauldon (JHMK)
In the Lair of the Death Ray Criminals (JHMK)
#20 Nov.–Dec. 1946 The Terrors of the Air (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Lucretia Mott
The Rage of Redbeard (JHMK)
The Pirates’ Galley Slave (JHMK)
#21 Jan.–Feb. 1947 The Mystery of Atom World (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Annie Oakley
The Tide of Atomic Fire (JHMK)
Ruler of the Atom World (JHMK)
#22 Mar.–Apr. 1947 The Color Thief
Wonder Women of History: Sarah Bernhardt
The Island of Evil
Jealousy Visits the Winged Women of Venus
#23 May 1947 Siege of the Savage War Maidens
Wonder Woman and the Coming of the Kangas
The Vanishing Mummy
#24 July–Aug. 1947 Tutine, the Tutor of Destruction
Wonder Women of History: Maria Mitchell
Challenge of the Mask
#25 Sept.–Oct. 1947 The Curse of Montezuma
Siege of the Rykornians (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Dolley Madison
Who’ll Adopt Teasy? (JHMK)
The Judgment of Goddess Vultura (JHMK)
#26 Nov.–Dec. 1947 Speed Maniacs from Mercury (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Carrie Chapman Catt
The Mistress of the Beasts (JHMK)
The Golden Women and the White Star (JHMK)
#27 Jan.–Feb. 1948 The Secret of the Kidnapped Dummy (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Sacagawea
The Legend of Rainbow and Stardust
The Mystical Power of Idea Forms
#28 Mar.–Apr. 1948 Villainy Incorporated
Trap of Crimson Flame (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In the Hands of the Merciless
#29 May–June 1948 Ice World’s Conquest (JHMK)
Tale of the Tigers
Wonder Women of History: Dorothea Lynde Dix
The Treasure Hunt (JHMK)
#30 July–Aug. 1948 The Secret of the Limestone Caves (JHMK)
Wonder Women of History: Nellie Bly
The Song of the Sirens (RK)
A Human Bomb (RK?)
COMIC CAVALCADE
Comic Cavalcade, like All-American Comics, was a compendium: “A Galaxy of America’s Greatest Comics.” It featured Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Scribbly, Mutt and Jeff, and more. Wonder Woman’s stories were always the first, and she was always featured on the cover. Only the first volume of Comic Cavalcade Archives has been published. It reproduces issues 1 through 3. Some Wonder Woman stories from Comic Cavalcade are included in The Wonder Woman Chronicles, but not all.
#1 Dec. 1942–Jan. 1943 Mystery of the House of the Seven Gables
#2 Spring 1943 Wanted by Hitler, Dead or Alive (FG)
#3 Summer 1943 The Invisible Invader
#4 Fall 1943 The Purloined Pressure Coordinator
#5 Winter 1943 Mystery of the Crimson Flame
#6 Spring 1944 The Mystery of Countess Mazuma
#7 Summer 1944 The Vulture’s Nest
Etta Candy and Her Holliday Girls
#8 Fall 1944 The Amazon Bride
#9 Winter 1944 The Subsea Pirates
#10 Spring 1945 The Great Blue Father
#11 Summer 1945 The Cheetah Returns (JHMK)
#12 Fall 1945 Rebellion on Paradise Island (JHMK)
#13 Winter 1945 The Underwater Follies (JHMK)
#14 Apr.–May 1946 The Severed Bracelets
#15 June–July 1946 Flaming Fury (JHMK)
#16 Aug.–Sept. 1946 The Battle of Desires
#17 Oct.–Nov. 1946 The Valkyries’ Prey
#18 Dec. 1946–Jan. 1947 The Menace of the Rebel Manlings (JHMK)
#19 Feb.–Mar. 1947 The Battle for Eternal Youth
#20 Apr.–May 1947 The Buddha Wishing Ring
#21 June–July 1947 The Siege of the Flying Mermaids
#22 Aug.–Sept. 1947 The Captives of Saturnette
#23 Oct.–Nov 1947 Siege of the Iron Giants (JHMK)
#24 Dec. 1947–Jan. 1948 Empress of the Sea-Brigands
#25 Feb.–Mar. 1948 Hatred of Badra
#26 Apr.–May 1948 Deception’s Daughter (RK)
#27 June–July 1948 Anti-Electric
#28 Aug.–Sept. 1948 The Sinister Countess Hatra
#29 Oct.–Nov. 1948 Machine of Schemes (JHMK)
[Unused Script: *The Cheetah’s Thought Prisoners]
THE BIG ALL-AMERICAN COMIC BOOK
1944 Denny the Demon Had Plans
This volume is a stand-alone, single-issue comic book, not part of a series. There are sixteen stories, including ones featuring Green Lantern, the Flash, and Hawkman. Wonder Woman’s story is the first.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES
ADM Annie Dalton (Moulton) Marston
BHRM Byrne Holloway Richard Marston
EHM (Sadie) Elizabeth Holloway Marston
JE Joanne Edgar
JHMK Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly
JHW John Henry Wigmore
LB Lauretta Bender
MCG Maxwell Charles Gaines
MM Moulton (“Pete”) Marston
MS Margaret Sanger
MSML Margaret Sanger Marston Lampe
MWH Marjorie Wilkes Huntley
OBR Olive Byrne “Richard”
WMM William Moulton Marston
WW Wonder Woman
A Note Regarding Abbreviating Women’s Names
In the notes I have used abbreviations for married women’s latest married names rather than for
any earlier names, regardless of how I refer to them in the text. For example, in the text, I call Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly by her maiden name, “Joye Hummel,” before 1947, when she married Dave Murchison. After her first husband’s death, she married Jack Kelly. In the notes I abbreviate her name as “JHMK” throughout. Similarly, in the text I refer to Donn Marston’s wife, during their marriage, as “Margaret Sanger Marston,” but because after his death she married a man named Lampe, I consistently use the abbreviation “MSML” in the notes. Olive Byrne never married, but she did use the name “Olive Richard” professionally, and she used the initials “OBR” in her own papers. Sadie Elizabeth Holloway Marston dropped the name “Sadie” after her marriage, and she used the initials “EHM” in her own papers. Their children most often refer to these two women either by these preferred initials, OBR and EHM, or by Marston’s pet names for them, Dotsie (or Dots) and Keetsie (or Keets). I therefore use the initials in the notes, and in the text I refer to OBR as “Olive” and to EHM as “Holloway”—an imperfect solution, but this seemed the best way to avoid confusion with other Marstons and Byrnes.
A Note Regarding DC Comics as an Abbreviation
The invention of “DC Comics” as a brand is inseparable from the creation of Wonder Woman. DC Comics, Inc., traces its origins to the founding, in 1934, of National Allied Publications. An affiliate, Detective Comics, Inc., was founded in 1937. Another affiliate, All-American Publications, was founded in 1938, by Maxwell Charles Gaines and Jack Liebowitz. Superman debuted in Action Comics in 1938; Batman debuted in Detective Comics in 1939. In 1940, attempting to fend off critics who charged that his best-selling comics were bad for children, Gaines hired William Moulton Marston as a consulting psychologist and also appointed him to a newly formed editorial advisory board. “ ‘Doc’ Marston has long been an advocate of the right type of comic magazines and is now a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of all ‘D.C. Superman’ Comics,” Gaines wrote in a memo. Also in 1940, DC decided to stamp comic books in which Superman and Batman appeared with a logo reading, “A DC Publication” and, later, “A Superman-DC Publication.” (“DC” was short for “Detective Comics.”) The logo was meant to serve as a stamp of quality. Meanwhile, Marston convinced Gaines that another way to fend off critics would be to create a female superhero. Gaines reluctantly agreed to give it a try. Marston submitted his first Wonder Woman script in February 1941. In October 1941, the publishers announced to readers, “The ‘DC’ at the top of our magazine covers is your guide to better magazines.” Wonder Woman made her debut that same month, in an issue of All-Star Comics with a cover date of December 1941–January 1942. Hiring Marston, introducing the logo as a stamp of approval, forming an editorial advisory board, and creating Wonder Woman were part of a single, simultaneous effort: to defend the comics against critics. In 1944, National Allied Publications and All-American Publications, along with other concerns, merged to become National Periodical Publications. In 1977, National Periodical Publications officially changed its name to DC Comics, Inc., the name it had been known by, informally, for decades. For the reader’s sake, I have elected to refer to the publisher of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman comics as “DC Comics” from the start, which is also how, beginning in 1940, the publisher of these comic books was popularly known.
All citations to Wonder Woman comic strips and comic books are to stories written by WMM, unless otherwise indicated.
1. IS HARVARD AFRAID OF MRS. PANKHURST?
1. Henry W. Moulton, Moulton Annals, ed. Claribel Moulton (Chicago: Edward A. Claypool, 1906), 13–14, 310, 324–27, 405–6; Sir Walter Scott, Tales of the Crusaders, ed. J. B. Ellis (1825; repr., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), vol. 3, The Talisman, chapter 6, pp. 56–58. Annie Moulton taught primary school in Amesbury in 1876; a certificate of appointment is in the possession of MM. WMM’s grandfather, Henry William Moulton, died in 1896. Moulton Castle was demolished by the property’s new owners in around 1900. WMM’s father, Frederick W. Marston, was the eldest son of Frederick A. Marston and Theresa Maria Cotton. He was born in Stratham, New Hampshire, on December 10, 1860. He died on January 23, 1923. “Summary of Marston Genealogy,” unpublished papers of BHRM.
2. Marston’s first prize was a book he won at the age of seven: Jacob Abbott, Rollo in Switzerland (New York: Mershon, 1898), inscribed “William Moulton Marston, June 30, 1899, Prize book,” in the possession of MM. WMM’s library is filled with books given to him by his aunts, including Jacob Abbott, Rollo’s Tour in Europe (New York: Burst, n.d.), inscribed “William Moulton Marston. From Aunt Claribel, May 9, 1896,” in the possession of MM.
3. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” unpublished typescript, 2002, in the possession of BHRM, 2.
4. WMM, Try Living (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1937), 2–3.
5. EHM, “Tiddly Bits: The Tale of a Manx Cat,” unpublished typescript, in the possession of MM.
6. WMM’s high school career can be followed in the 1910 and 1911 volumes of the Oracle, published by the Malden High School Literary Society and housed in the Malden Public Library, Malden, Massachusetts. The meeting of the literary society in which a paper titled “Woman Suffrage” was read was held on September 23, 1910.
7. WMM, Undergraduate Record File, Harvard University Archives, USIII 15.88.10.
8. WMM, Try Living, 2–3.
9. Ibid., 2. WMM tells this same story, with embellishments, in OBR, “To Be or Not,” Family Circle, January 21, 1938.
10. Harvard University, Harvard University Catalogue, 1911–1912 (Cambridge: Published by the University, 1911), 328, 401. During his freshman year, Marston lived at 185 Hancock Street (p. 94).
11. Charles Homer Haskins, “History: One of a Series of Lectures Given to the Freshman Class in Harvard College,” Historical Outlook 16 (1925): 195–97. For a similar contemporary effort, see Allen Johnson, The Historian and Historical Evidence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926, 1930).
12. WMM, Try Living, 3.
13. The chemical itself is not mentioned, but the men who find the body smell kernels—that is, nuts or almonds: “Right in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), 84.
14. A detailed physical description of Palmer, later in life, is in W. A. Macdonald, “George Herbert Palmer at 90,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 19, 1932. And see George Herbert Palmer, The Life of Alice Freeman Palmer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), and Ruth Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Bordin dismisses Alice Freeman Palmer’s commitment to suffrage as slight (p. 6), but the National Woman Suffrage Association counted on her support and printed, as a pamphlet, an essay of hers called “The Progress of Equal Suffrage.” NWSA, Handbook of the National Woman Suffrage Association (Washington, DC: Stormont and Jackson, 1893), 60, 84.
15. George Herbert Palmer, preface to The Odyssey of Homer (1884; rev. ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), v. This preface was written for the 1891 edition. Palmer hired James, but James considered Palmer a prig, and Jane Addams found Alice Freeman Palmer’s style of reform patrician. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 358, 312–15.
16. “What constitutes the teacher is the passion to make scholars,” Palmer thought, “and again and again it happens that the great scholar has no such passion whatever.” George Herbert Palmer, The Ideal Teacher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 9. George Herbert Palmer, The Autobiography o
f a Philosopher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 131–36; the quotation is from p. 133. And on Dewey and this principle, see Steven Fesmire, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). For more on Palmer, see recollections of his younger colleagues in George Herbert Palmer, 1842–1933: Memorial Addresses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935). WMM, Try Living, 3.
17. A complete set of notes for Palmer’s Philosophy A in the fall of 1911 was taken by a fellow student of WMM’s, a junior named Arthur McGiffert. Arthur McGiffert, AB 1913, student notes, 1911–1913, Harvard University Archives, HUC 8911.400. Passages quoted above come from the following lecture dates (page references are to the pages in McGiffert’s notebook): October 10, 1911, p. 7; October 14, 1911, p. 10; November 9, 1911, p. 33; December 19, 1911, pp. 67, 71.
18. “The Declaration of Sentiments,” 1848, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, A History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester, NY: Fowler and Wells, 1889), 1:70–71.
19. Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2002), 98.
20. G. K. Chesterton, “The Modern Martyr,” Illustrated London News, February 8, 1908.
21. John Reed, “The Harvard Renaissance,” unpublished manuscript, John Reed Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1091: 1139, pp. 57, 62–65; “Woman Suffrage Movement,” Harvard Crimson, November 2, 1911; “Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage,” Harvard Crimson, December 2, 1911; Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, records, Harvard University Archives, HUD 3514.5000. No membership list survives. And see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan, 2000), 229. On the prominence of the suffrage debate on college campuses during these years, see Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 111–12.
22. “Mrs. Kelley on ‘Suffrage,’ ” Harvard Crimson, November 1, 1911. On Kelley, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
23. “Woman Suffrage Movement,” Harvard Crimson, November 2, 1911.
24. Reed, “Harvard Renaissance,” 66.
25. “Is Harvard Afraid of Mrs. Pankhurst?” Detroit Free Press, December 1, 1911; “Harvard and the Suffragettes,” Atlanta Constitution, December 11, 1911; and Editorial, “Disorder at Harvard,” New York Times, December 5, 1911. See also “Harvard Boys Will Hear Mrs. Pankhurst,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, 1911; “Harvard Is Split over Mrs. Pankhurst,” Atlanta Constitution, December 1, 1911; and “Harvard Bars Suffragette,” New York Times, November 29, 1911. “Must our University assume towards this newer phase of the battle for political freedom the same blind, reactionary attitude to which it held—to its disgrace—throughout the struggle for the abolition of human slavery in America?” asked Harvard alum Oswald Garrison Villard in a letter sent to the Harvard Corporation. Villard was the son of Fanny Garrison Villard, a founder of the Woman’s Peace Party, and the grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He was also the editor of the New York Evening Post. “A Graduate’s View of the Discussion over Mrs. Pankhurst,” Harvard Crimson, December 4, 1911, and “Villard Criticises Harvard,” New York Times, December 4, 1911.