The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  In May 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. One hundred fifty thousand women joined the army, filling jobs that freed more men for combat. “The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps appears to be the final realization of woman’s dream of complete equality of men,” Margaret Sanger wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. In “Battle for Womanhood,” in 1943, just when American women’s participation in the war effort, both at home and abroad, was most crucial, Dr. Psycho, disguised as the ghost of George Washington, attempts to convince Americans that “women will betray their country through weakness.” (illustration credit ins.19)

  Meanwhile, also in “Battle for Womanhood,” Dr. Psycho ties up his wife, Marva, in his psychological laboratory, much as Hugo Münsterberg had strapped Radcliffe students to machines in Harvard’s Psychological Laboratory. Dr. Psycho ins28ists, “No woman can be trusted with freedom!” (illustration credit ins.20)

  As women’s involvement in the war increased, so did Wonder Woman’s. In “The Invisible Invader,” Comic Cavalcade #3 (Summer 1943), she bests the German military. Later, she’s promoted to “General Wonder Woman.” “Women are gaining power in the man’s world!” Wonder Woman reported to her mother, Hippolyte, at the end of 1943. (illustration credit ins.21)

  Every issue of Wonder Woman included a four-page centerfold feature called “Wonder Women of History”: a biography of an exceptional woman. The point of the series was to celebrate the lives of heroic women and explain the importance of women’s history. “Even in this emancipated world, women still have many problems and have not yet reached their fullest growth and development,” Wonder Woman’s associate editor, tennis legend Alice Marble, wrote in a letter sent to women all over the country. “ ‘WONDER WOMAN’ marks the first time that daring, strength and ingenuity have been featured as womanly qualities. This cannot help but have its lasting effect upon the minds of those who are now boys and girls.” A profile of Susan B. Anthony appeared in Wonder Woman #5 (June–July 1943), the same issue as “Battle for Womanhood.” (illustration credit ins.22)

  In Sensation Comics #20 (August 1943), Wonder Woman’s best friend, Etta Candy, and her sorority sisters from Holliday College have joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, following the advice Wonder Woman had given to Dr. Psycho’s imprisoned wife: “What can a weak girl do?” Marva had asked Wonder Woman. “Get strong!” Wonder Woman urged. “Earn your own living—join the WAACs or WAVES and fight for your country!” (illustration credit ins.23)

  Women like Dr. Psycho’s wife, Marva, who made the fatal mistake of submitting to a very bad man, were one kind of flawed woman. The Cheetah, who enjoyed making others suffer, was another kind. In “The Secret Submarine,” Sensation Comics #22 (October 1943), the Cheetah finds a new way to chain Wonder Woman up. (illustration credit ins.24)

  Marston met Olive Byrne at Tufts in 1925, when he was her psychology professor, and also the director of a student mental health clinic. Byrne’s Tufts sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi, appears in Wonder Woman as Etta Candy’s sorority, Beeta Lamba, and the mental health clinic appears as a “Fun Clinic.” Gay, who was rescued by Wonder Woman after trying to drown herself in Niagara Falls, gets a new lease on life when she joins34 Etta’s sorority, just as Olive Byrne did. At left, from “The Fun Foundation,” Sensation Comics #27 (March 1944). Olive Byrne moved in with Marston and his wife in the summer of 1926. (Marston gave his wife a choice: either he would leave her or Byrne could live with them.) Eventually, each woman had two children by Marston. Byrne and Marston marked their anniversary as November 21, 1928, which is when Byrne began wearing thick bracelets on her wrists—the same bracelets worn by Wonder Woman. (illustration credit ins.25)

  In 1944, Wonder Woman became a newspaper strip, syndicated by King Features. Out of the hundreds of comic books in circulation at the time, no other comic-book superhero, aside from Superman and Batman, had ever made the gigantic jump from comic books to newspaper syndication, with its vast daily circulation. Marston had so much work to do that he hired an assistant, a nineteen-year-old student of his named Joye Hummel. To celebrate the newspaper syndication, Gaines had his artists draw a panel in which Superman and Batman, rising out of the front page of a daily newspaper, call to Wonder Woman, who’s leaping onto the page, “Welcome Wonder Woman!” Another advertisement promoting the newspaper strip appeared in Sensation Comics #32 (August 1944). (illustration credit ins.26)

  In “The Amazon Bride,” Comic Cavalcade #8 (Fall 1944), Wonder Woman agrees to marry Steve—until she wakes up and realizes, to her relief, that it was only a nightmare. The psychiatrist Frederic Wertham found the feminism in Wonder Woman repulsive: “As to the ‘advanced femininity,’ what are the activities in comic books which women ‘indulge in on an equal footing with men’? They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent. Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones.” Wertham’s rival, the psychiatrist Lauretta Bender, an expert on childhood aggression, disagreed. Wonder Woman comic books display “a strikingly advanced concept of femininity and masculinity,” Bender wrote, admiring how the “women in these stories are placed on an equal footing with men and indulge in the same type of activities.” Wertham wanted comic books banned. Bender thought comic books helped children grow. (illustration credit ins.27)

  Even as pressure from critics increased, Marston kept binding Wonder Woman in chains38, as in “Girls Under the Sea,” Sensation Comics #35 (November 1944). Gaines asked Lauretta Bender to join his editorial advisory board. He sent her copies of the comics; then Roubicek interviewed her and reported to Gaines: “She does not believe that Wonder Woman tends to masochism or sadism. Furthermore, she believes that even if it did—you can teach neither perversion to children—one can only bring out what is inherent in the child. However, she did make this reservation—that if the women slaves wore chains (and enjoyed them) for no purpose whatsoever, there would be no point in chaining them.” (illustration credit ins.28)

  Wonder Woman’s prominence in Gaines’s line of comics is well illustrated by her central place on the cover of a stand-alone book called The Big All-American Comic Book, published in 1944. (illustration credit ins.30)

  In August 1944, Marston collapsed and spent a month in the hospital; he was diagnosed with polio. He never walked again. By 1945, Wonder Woman was reaching two and a half million readers every month, but Marston found keeping up with the writing difficult. With the war ending and Marston confined to his bed, his stories grew more domestic, and considerably less controversial. Wonder Woman appears as Miss Santa Claus on the cover of Sensation Comics #38 (February 1945). (illustration credit ins.29)

  “Wonder Woman was from the start a character founded in scholarship,” Marston liked to say, and here, in “The Conquest of Venus,” Wonder Woman #12 (Spring 1945), Wonder Woman, mid–costume change, reveals her inner scholar. Marston, at the time, was staking an academic claim for his comic-book character. In “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” published in 1944 in The American Scholar, the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Marston, cloaking himself in his most pompous academic prose, ins42isted that comic books are an especially elevated form of literature: “The picture-story fantasy cuts loose the hampering debris of art and artifice and touches the tender spots of universal human desires and aspirations, hidden customarily beneath long accumulated protective coverings of indirection and disguise.” He meant more or less what Bender meant when she said comic books were modern fairy tales. (illustration credit ins.31)

  Most superheroes did not survive peacetime. Wonder Woman was among the few who did. She remained a lead character in the Justice Society well after the end of the war, as here, in “The Day That Dropped Out of Time,” All-Star Comics #35 (June–July 1947), with art by Irwin Hasen. In print for more than seven decades, Wonder Woman is one of the longest-lasting superheroes ever. Only Superman and Batman have lasted as long. (illustration credit ins.33)

&
nbsp; Marston died in May 1947. Gaines died in a boating accident three months later. Also in 1947, Joye Hummel got married and resigned, and Sheldon Mayer, Wonder Woman’s editor, quit. Dorothy Roubicek and Alice Marble had left, too. But Wonder Woman carried on. Two years after the end of the war, it had become clear that Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman were really the only superheroes left standing—or, here, marching, on the cover of All-Star Comics #36 (August–September 1947), with art by Win Mortimer. (illustration credit ins.32)

  In 1948, Marston’s widow, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, urged DC Comics to hire her as Wonder Woman’s new editor. Instead, DC Comics appointed Robert Kanigher. Kanigher hated Marston’s creation and, in his treatment of Marston’s character the Duke of Deception, made clear his belief that women’s political equality was a mistake—one that could be easily undone. In Kanigher’s story “Deception’s Daughter,” Comic Cavalcade #26 (April–May 1948), the Duke and his daughter, Lya, conspire to reverse women’s political gains. (illustration credit ins.34)

  In 1947, Wonder Woman editor Dorothy Roubicek married the comic-book writer William Woolfolk, and together they created the Wonder Woman knockoff Moon Girl, shown stopping rockets on the cover of Moon Girl #3 (Spring 1948). “As a team they are equipped to turn out a quality product and a strong runner-up for Wonder Woman,” Holloway warned DC. “The one thing they don’t have is the Marston psychology of living which was injected into every page of WW.” Moon Girl didn’t last. (illustration credit ins.35)

  An unusually evocative cover from the Kanigher era depicts Wonder Woman bringing a woman trapped in Victorian clothing, and Victorian mores, into the modern world. Cover, Wonder Woman #38 (November–December 1949). (illustration credit ins.36)

  After the war, Wonder Woman followed the hundreds of thousands of American women who had worked during the war, only to be told, when peace came, not just that their labor was no longer needed but also that it threatened the stability of the nation, by undermining men. She was also no longer drawn by Harry G. Peter, who died in 1958. Typical of the Kanigher era is this cover from Sensation Comics #94 (November–December 1949). Wonder Woman grew weaker every year. In the 1950s, she became a babysitter, a fashion model, and a movie star. She wanted, desperately, to marry Steve. Kanigher also abandoned the “Wonder Women of History” pull-out; he replaced it with a series about weddings, called “Marriage a la Mode.” (illustration credit ins.37)

  Wonder Woman #178 (September–October 1968) marks the beginning of what’s known as the “Diana Prince Era,” during which, as Joanne Edgar explained in Ms. magazine in 1972, “she relinquished her superhuman Amazon powers along with her bracelets, her golden magic lasso, and her invisible plane. She became a human being. Diana Prince, clad now in boutique pant suits and tunics, acquired conventional emotions, vulnerability to men, the wisdom of an adviser (a man, of course, named I Ching), and the skills of karate, kung fu, and jiujitsu. In other words, she became a female James Bond, but without his sexual exploits.” (illustration credit ins.38)

  Wonder Woman was reimagined in many different ways during the women’s liberation movement. 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 parade with female comic characters, in protest of stock plots. In a story inside, Veronica ditches Archie for Betty, Petunia Pig tells Porky to fix his own dinner, and Supergirl tells Superman to get lost. (illustration credit ins.39)

  In December 1972, DC Comics published a “Special! Women’s Lib Issue,” Wonder Woman #203, written by a science-fiction writer named Samuel R. Delany and meant to be the first installment of a six-part storyline. In the first story, Diana Prince defeats a department store owner who is underpaying women workers. In each of the remaining five stories, she was to face another anti-feminist. “Another villain was a college advisor who really felt a woman’s place was in the home,” Delany later said. “It worked up to a gang of male thugs trying to squash an abortion clinic staffed by women surgeons. And Wonder Woman was going to do battle with each of these and triumph.” Only the first story was ever published. (illustration credit ins.40)

  In 1972, the founding editors of Ms. put Wonder Woman on the cover of the magazine’s first regular issue. They hoped 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. “Looking back now at these Wonder Woman stories from the ′40s,” Gloria Steinem said, “I am amazed by the strength of their feminist message.” For all her controversy and ambiguity, Wonder Woman is best understood as the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s equality, a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a full century later. (illustration credit ins.41)

  ALSO BY JILL LEPORE

  Book of Ages

  The Mansion of Happiness

  The Story of America

  The Whites of Their Eyes

  New York Burning

  A Is for American

  The Name of War