The Secret History of Wonder Woman

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The Secret History of Wonder Woman Page 31

by Jill Lepore


  26. “Harvard Split on Suffrage,” New York Times, November 30, 1911. See also “Harvard and Mrs. Pankhurst,” Boston Daily Globe, December 5, 1911.

  27. “A Graduate’s View,” Harvard Crimson, December 4, 1911; “Villard Criticises Harvard,” New York Times, December 4, 1911; “Mrs. Pankhurst’s Lecture,” Harvard Crimson, December 6, 1911; “Students Fight to Hear Mrs. Pankhurst,” New York Tribune, December 7, 1911; and “Jeers for Mrs. Pankhurst,” New York Times, December 7, 1911.

  28. “Crowd to Hear Her,” Boston Daily Globe, December 7, 1911. And see “Growth of Woman Suffrage,” Harvard Crimson, December 7, 1911.

  29. WMM, Try Living, 3.

  30. Arthur McGiffert, AB 1913, student notes, 1911–1913, Philosophy A, undated, mid-year examination, p. 98.

  31. WMM, Try Living, 3. Writing in 1937, Marston was remarkably accurate in recollecting his grades at Harvard in 1911. He did indeed earn an A in the fall of 1911, in Philosophy A: The History of Ancient Philosophy, taught by George Palmer. He was one of a tiny handful of students to excel in this difficult course. The course average appears to have been a C−. Final Return of Grades in 1911–1912, Philosophy A (Professor George Herbert Palmer), Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Final Return Records, 1848–1997, Harvard University Archives, UAIII 15.28, box 85. According to the final returns, he got a B+ in History 1 (a B on the transcript).

  32. “Introducing Wonder Woman,” All-Star Comics, December 1941–January 1942. “Dr. Poison,” Sensation Comics, February 1942. The parenthetical is from Wonder Woman, newspaper strip, August 1944.

  2. THE AMAZONIAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

  1. EHM to the Mount Holyoke College Alumni Office, February 26, 1987, Mount Holyoke College Archives. EHM, “Tiddly Bits.”

  2. “Introducing Wonder Woman,” All-Star Comics #8 (December 1941–January 1942). And “Wonder Woman Comes to America,” Sensation Comics #1 (January 1942).

  3. “A Spy in the Office,” Sensation Comics #3 (March 1942).

  4. A copy of John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (New York: A. L. Burt, n.d.), inscribed “Sadie E. Holloway from her Mother, May 8, 1909,” is in the possession of MM. The quotation is from the chapter “Of Queens’ Gardens.” Much evidence suggests that EHM was born on May 8, 1893, although EHM sometimes reported that she had been born in February of that year.

  5. “Amazonian Declaration of Independence,” July 4, 1851, in a folder called MHC Student Life, General, Political Activities Through 1930s, Mount Holyoke College Archives. The declaration subsequently appeared in the Springfield Republican and in the Boston Evening Transcript, July 11, 1851. Among its complaints: “They will not allow us to vote for any of our civil rulers, even though we should submit to the humiliation of promising to vote for men, which most certainly our self-respect and inalienble ‘woman’s rights’ would not allow us to do, till we have had our turn in governing them, as long as they have tyrannized over us.” And see also Arthur C. Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 49–52.

  6. Cynthia Eller, Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

  7. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Matriarchate, or Mother-Age” (1891), reprinted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and Essays, ed. Ellen DuBois and Richard Candida Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 268.

  8. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 40–41, and Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 147. The fullest accounts of women’s education in this period are Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (1984; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) and Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women.

  9. Entry for EHM in The Llamarada 1916 (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College, Published Yearly by the Junior Class, 1916), 51. About field hockey: “I was no shining light,” she confessed. EHM, “Tiddly Bits.”

  10. Mary Woolley’s 1906 speech before the NWSA is reprinted as “Miss Woolley on Woman’s Ballot,” Political Equality Series, 2 (1909). A copy of the tract is in the Mount Holyoke College Archives. See also Anne Carey Edmonds, A Memory Book: Mount Holyoke College, 1837–1987 (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College, 1988), 97.

  11. Kathryn M. Conway, “Woman Suffrage and the History of Rhetoric at the Seven Sisters Colleges, 1865–1919,” in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 219.

  12. The April 1913 lecture is mentioned in the Lebourveau Papers, Mount Holyoke College Archives. Jeannette Bickford Bridges Papers, 1914–1986, Mount Holyoke College Archives, box 1, folder 2. “Equal Suffrage League Notes,” Mount Holyoke 23 (May 1914): 606–8. See the documents, including the league’s constitution, in the Mount Holyoke College Records, National College Equal Suffrage League, 1912–1919, box 26, folder 3. The college’s catalog for 1914–15 lists a total of 768 students. Support for suffrage grew during Holloway’s time in South Hadley. Earlier, it had been more limited. In 1909, the Debating Society held a debate on the question of woman suffrage; when, at the end, the vote was taken for or against, it was a tie that had to be broken by the incoming president, who voted in the affirmative. Helen W. King to her mother, April 18, 1909: “At debating Society last evening we had debate informal on Woman Suffrage, and then took vote as to those who favored it and who did not and it came out a tie until the president voted which gave it to the affirmative.” Helen W. King Papers, Mount Holyoke College Archives, box 1, folder 2.

  13. Jeannette Marks, Life and Letters of Mary Emma Woolley (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1955), 79.

  14. Inez Haynes Gillmore, “Confessions of an Alien,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1912, 170.

  15. Quoted in Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 14, 48. As Cott explains, “By the early twentieth century it was a commonplace that the New Woman stood for self-development as contrasted to self-sacrifice or submergence in the family” (p. 39). And see Evans, Born for Liberty, 161–62.

  16. EHM to JE, November 16, 1983, in the possession of JE.

  17. EHM to JE, January 11, 1972, in the possession of JE.

  18. EHM, “Tiddly Bits.”

  19. “The College Girl and Politics,” New York Evening Post, November 16, 1912.

  20. Although her thirty-fifth Mount Holyoke reunion report says she majored in both Greek and psychology, I cannot tell, from her transcript, whether Greek was a major or a minor; she certainly took a lot of courses in Greek. Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, Transcript, Office of the Registrar, Mount Holyoke College, as filed with EHM’s graduate student records at Radcliffe. “Mount Holyoke College required a course in either chemistry or physics,” she remembered. “I knew if I chose chemistry I’d blow the place up so I chose physics—which my roommate said I passed in spite of the laws of learning and because I liked the professor’s dog.” EHM, “Tiddly Bits.”

  21. Sappho, Memoir, Text, Selected Readings and a Literal Translation by H. T. Wharton (London, 1885). Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); on Wharton, see 52–73. And see Terry Castle, “Always the Bridesmaid,” London Review of Books, September 30, 1999. For a biographical study of a romance that began on a college campus in this era, see Lois W. Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (New York: Knopf, 2003). Mead and Benedict met in an anthropology course at Barnard in 1922.

  22. Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 13–18, 32–33, 52–54, and Anna Mary Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 41, 56, 65–66, 134, 154. See also Marks, Life and Letters of Mary Emma Woolley.

  23. Wells, Miss Mar
ks and Miss Woolley, 145.

  24. Mount Holyoke College: The Seventy-fifth Anniversary (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College, 1913), 176, 195–96. “Mount Holyoke College: The Festival Procession, October 8, 1912: A Record.” Scrapbook, with photographs. The ceremonies were held on October 8 and 9, 1912.

  25. EHM, “Tiddly Bits.”

  26. Sappho, If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Knopf, 2002), Fragment 31.

  27. EHM to Robert Kanigher, February 4, 1948, DC Comics Archives, New York.

  28. EHM, “Tiddly Bits.”

  29. EHM to Gloria Steinem, book inscription, Steinem Papers, Smith College. Holloway also sometimes signed letters “Aphrodite with you.” E.g., EHM to Jerry and Jean Bails, April 28, 1969, in the possession of Jean Bails.

  3. DR. PSYCHO

  1. WMM, “The Search for the Holy Ghost,” c. 1914–15, in the possession of BHRM. BHRM, “Memories of an Unusual Father,” 3, 11–12. Writing a parody of “The Raven,” like joining the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, was another way in which Marston’s experience of Harvard followed John Reed’s. “The Chicken,” Reed’s parody of “The Raven,” written while he was at Harvard, is in the John Reed Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1091: 1280.

  2. William James, “The Hidden Self,” Scribner’s Magazine, March 1890, 361–73.

  3. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Holt, 1890), 2:452.

  4. Dr. Psycho makes his first appearance in “Battle for Womanhood,” Wonder Woman #5, June–July 1943.

  5. On James and Münsterberg, see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 186–89, and on Münsterberg, see 196–214. And see Matthew Hale Jr., Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

  6. William James to Hugo Münsterberg, February 21, 1892, in Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: D. Appleton, 1922), 33.

  7. Jutta Spillmann and Lothar Spillmann, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 325–26.

  8. Münsterberg insisted that the building be shared with philosophy (rather than, as others suggested, with biology or physics). Spillmann and Spillmann, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” 327.

  9. Hugo Münsterberg, “The Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall,” Harvard Psychological Studies 2 (1906): 34–39.

  10. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 54–55.

  11. Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer, 160, 212–14. As Helen Horowitz has pointed out, “The creators of Radcliffe College were masters of indirection. They devised a means to offer women a Harvard education at no expense to the university and without introjecting the unwanted women into male college life” (Alma Mater, 97–98).

  12. Gertrude Stein, “In a Psychological Laboratory,” December 19, 1894, Gertrude Stein Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale, box 10, folder 238, and quoted in Coventry Edwards-Pitt, “Sonnets of the Psyche: Gertrude Stein, the Harvard Psychological Lab, and Literary Modernism,” senior thesis, History of Science Department, Harvard University, 1998, p. 98.

  13. Münsterberg quoted in Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 63.

  14. Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 1913.

  15. Hugo Münsterberg, The Americans, trans. Edward Bissel (1904; repr., Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1914), 586–87, 572–75; and see, generally, chapter 22: “Self-Assertion of Women.”

  16. “It is the aim of experimental psychology, as it is of every other science, to be exact,” Langfeld told his students. Langfeld coauthored a textbook based on the course: Herbert Sidney Langfeld and Floyd Henry Allport, An Elementary Laboratory Course in Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), vii.

  17. In the second semester of freshman year, Marston had taken Philosophy B with Royce and gotten a B− (according to the final returns but recorded on the transcript as a B). The course average, though, appears to have been a D. Final Return of Grades in 1911–1912, Philosophy B (Professor Josiah Royce), Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Final Return Records, 1848–1997, Harvard University Archives, UAIII 15.28, box 85. But, actually, Royce could not have taught Philosophy B in the spring of 1912 because he had a stroke on February 1, 1912. (See Josiah Royce to Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge, March 15, 1912, in Josiah Royce, The Letters of Josiah Royce, edited and with an introduction by John Clendenning [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970], 563.) Although he is listed as the instructor, someone else taught it. Marston did study with Royce during his junior year, though: in 1913–14, he took two semesters of Philosophy 9: Metaphysics with Royce and received A’s both terms.

  18. Kuklick, Rise of American Philosophy, 242.

  19. What Royce said in class is actually known: in 1915–16, a student in Philosophy 9, Royce’s year-long course in metaphysics, took stenographic notes, and they have recently been published. Josiah Royce, Metaphysics: His Philosophy 9 Course of 1915–1916, as Stenographically Recorded by Ralph W. Brown and Complemented by Notes from Bryon F. Underwood, ed. William Ernest Hocking (Buffalo: State University of New York, 1998), 59. Royce’s lectures on the social theory of truth run from pp. 59 through 90.

  20. On the courses offered by the Department of Philosophy and Psychology, see the university catalog. As for when Marston began his research, he noted in his doctoral dissertation: “This thesis reports researches by the writer upon the problem of psycho-physiological symptoms of deception, which we began in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in 1913 under Professors Munsterberg and Langfeld, and which have been carried on practically without interruption to date.” WMM, “Systolic Blood Pressure and Reaction Time Symptoms of Deception and Constituent Mental States,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1921, Harvard University Archives. The research Marston conducted in his junior year earned him honorable mention from the Bowdoin Prize Committee: “5 Bowdoin Prizes Awarded,” Harvard Crimson, May 20, 1914. Marston later published that research: WMM, “Reaction-Time Symptoms of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology (1920): 72–87; he described this study as reporting on experiments “performed in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory during the Academic Year 1913–1914. At that time the writer of the present article, at the suggestion and under the direction of Professor Hugo Munsterberg, began experiment upon what was then planned to be a series of psycho-physiological problems in the field of legal testimony” (p. 72).

  21. On the popularization of science in this period, see Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science Our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  22. As Münsterberg remarked, “It has been said, and probably with truth, that more newspaper columns have been printed about the Haywood-Orchard trial than about any jury trial in the history of the United States.” From Hugo Münsterberg, “Experiments with Harry Orchard,” 1907, p. 2, Hugo Münsterberg Papers, Boston Public Library, folder 2450. “Machines That Tell When Witnesses Lie,” San Francisco Sunday Call, 1907.

  23. The best account of Münsterberg’s role in the Orchard case is in Tal Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 232–35; this quotation is from p. 232. See also Michael Pettit, “The Testifying Subject: Reliability in Marketing, Science, and the Law at the End of the Age of Barnum,” in Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community, ed. Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2009), 51–78.

  24. Clarence Darrow, “Darrow’s Speech in the Haywood Case,” Wayland’s Monthly, October 1907, 6, 31, 24.

  25. I suspect it was Wigmore who convinced Münsterberg to suppress the original essay, “Experiments with Harry Orchard.” On August 20, 1907, Münsterberg wrote to Wigmore from Clifton,
“On account of the acquittal of Haywood I have withdrawn my whole Orchard article which was already printed in many thousand copies. (This confidential.) I have substituted a harmless article in the September McClure and have in the October McClure a paper ‘The First Degree’ which introduces some experiments on Orchard.” Hugo Münsterberg to JHW, August 20, 1907, Wigmore Papers, Northwestern University Archives, box 92, folder 16.

  26. “The progress of experimental psychology makes it an absurd incongruity that the state should devote its fullest energy to the clearing up of all the physical happenings,” Münsterberg wrote, “but should never ask the psychologist to determine the values of the factor which becomes most influential—the mind of the witness.” Quoted in Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature, 234. On Münsterberg fearing a lawsuit, see 233.

  27. JHW, A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1904–05). The Treatise is widely considered “the most complete and exhaustive treatise on a single branch of our law that has ever been written,” according to a review quoted in William L. Twining, Theories of Evidence: Bentham and Wigmore (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 111. Wigmore, who as a student had been one of the founders of the Harvard Law Review, was a man of such exhaustive energy and erudition that Louis Brandeis, not one to blanch at a stack of books, had been known to call on him for research assistance (see Wigmore’s recollections as quoted in William R. Roalfe, John Henry Wigmore: Scholar and Reformer [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977], 15). Wigmore was also capable of great ferocity. In 1927, after Felix Frankfurter criticized the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, Wigmore raged at him in an article that Brandeis called “sad & unpleasant,” which indeed it was. (As Frankfurter liked to tell it, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, then Harvard’s president, cried out, on reading Wigmore on Frankfurter, “Wigmore is a fool! Wigmore is a fool!”) Louis D. Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter, Washington, DC, April 27, 1927, in Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy, 5 vols. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), 5:283, and Felix Frankfurter, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (New York: Reynal, 1960), 215, 217.

 

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