Wonder Woman through the years: An index of feminism?

Although perhaps the most well-known female superhero, Wonder Woman's origins have remained unclear since her creation. The character has been a part of American cultural history since 1941, when a man named William Moulton Marston wrote the first comic, published under the pseudonym Charles Moulton. Tufts alumna Jill Lepore’s (LA '87) new book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” published Oct. 28, attempts to fill in the blanks in Marston’s story, the character’s origins and even the history of American feminism.

In an interview with the Daily, Lepore argued that Wonder Woman serves as an index for twentieth century feminism. The author rebutted the theory of feminist historical “waves” -- that is, the idea that feminism culminated in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, and then declined in the mid-twentieth century until its resurgence with the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Wonder Woman -- which [was] really important in the 1940s -- is both inspired by the suffragists and feminists and birth control activists of the 1910s and the inspiration for the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s … There’s not waves at all, it’s just this generational connection,” Lepore said. "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" looks into the history of the superhero’s creator to understand how Wonder Woman was shaped by early twentieth century feminism, which then explains her impact on the generation of women that read Wonder Woman comics as children.

The Life and Times of William Moulton Marston

Marston himself was a highly eccentric character. He was a psychologist who helped invent a process of lie detecting, which involved taking the blood pressure of a patient and monitoring their responses. He also wrote films, novels and nonfiction books. Beyond his varied career path was his controversial personal life. Marston married his childhood sweetheart, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway -- known after her marriage as Elizabeth Holloway Marston -- but carried on an extended relationship with a woman named Olive Byrne, who also lived in the Marston family house. A third woman, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, was also in the relationship, but she stayed with the family only occasionally.

Interestingly, Olive Byrne was the niece of Margaret Sanger, a famed birth control advocate and the co-founder of Planned Parenthood along with Byrne’s mother, Ethel Byrne. When Byrne was a child in the 1910s, her mother and aunt were leading the crusade for women’s political and reproductive rights. In 1917, Ethel Byrne was even arrested for her efforts and went on a hunger strike.

The Marston-Bynres family, however, also had history on the Hill. Olive Byrne attended Jackson College, the women’s college of Tufts University, during the mid-1920s. She wrote for the Tufts Weeklyand was a member of the sorority Alpha Omicron Pi. It was here that she met Marston, who was an assistant professor of philosophy during her senior year. When Byrne left Tufts in 1926, Marston did as well, and it was at this time that the three started living together. Both Holloway and Byrne had influenced and assisted in Marston’s psychological work, helping him with his experiments. When they began their unconventional living arrangement, it was agreed that Holloway would work and Byrne would raise the children.

Elizabeth Holloway Marston had two children by Marston, Moulton and Olive Ann. Olive Byrne also had two children, Byrne and Donn, who were adopted by Marston but were not told as children that he was their biological father.

“So much of what was going on in that family was kept secret from the children, and there were also a lot of lies within the family. No one really quite knew … what the arrangements really were,” Lepore said of the Marston family life. Despite the unusual arrangements, according to Lepore the family lived happily in the 1930s and 1940s in Rye, New York. Marston used the women surrounding him as inspiration for the character he would later famously create.

Enter: Wonder Woman

Marston began Wonder Woman in 1941 and would use the character in his work until his death in 1947. According to Lepore, his character was supposed to be an antidote to the violent excesses of the Superman and Batman characters, which had been created a few years earlier.

Yet, while Wonder Woman was purportedly to be the powerful feminine response to masculine comics, her stories under Marston’s control are quite controversial. For instance, Wonder Woman loses her powers when she is bound by men, and in the early comics she is chained and tied this way with distressing frequency.

Critics have argued that Marston’s fascination with bondage in the Wonder Woman comics demonstrated fetishization rather than feminism. According to Lepore, Marston’s interest in binding women was partially influenced by his time at Tufts, where he observed sorority sisters hitting each other with paddles.

“[Martson had] this real commitment as a psychologist to the importance of submission,” Lepore said, attributing his interest to his studies at Tufts. However, Lepore also suggested that Marston’s focus in the Wonder Woman comics was not on submission but on freedom.

“The iconography of enslavement and emancipation was part of Marston’s mental worldview as a person who had grown up during the suffrage crusades of the 1910s, where women marched in chains to demonstrate their enslavement,” Lepore said. She also went on to note that Harry G. Peter, who was the artist for Wonder Woman while Marston was the writer, previously worked with Lou Rogers, a famed feminist cartoonist who often showed women in chains to highlight their oppression. Wonder Woman’s scenes of bondage were not without precedent or even grounding, but Lepore did admit to finding its frequency dispiriting.

“The moral question is … was [Marston] just borrowing those ideas about feminism and women’s power for his own personal pleasure and convenience, or did he really have this deep commitment to political equality and women’s economic equality?” Lepore said, wondering aloud about his motives behind the creation of Wonder Woman. “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” attempts not only to resolve this problem, but to also show how Wonder Woman affected the feminist movements that came after her creation.

Wonder Woman became a symbol of the radical feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, and her image even graced the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1972. Even though the character’s plotlines had become increasingly domestic since Marston’s death, the early messages of Wonder Woman had impacted the women fighting for equality decades later.

“The women who were marching in those protests and who were going on strike and who were running for office -- they’d grown up with Wonder Woman,” Lepore said.

The childhood idol had become a symbol of something greater, a powerful woman who could be enslaved but who could also fight to free herself.

The Book

“The Secret History of Wonder Woman” not only provides an inside look into Marston’s life, but is also an account of feminism in the twentieth century. Lepore argued that in order to comprehend Wonder Woman and her origins, the reader needed to understand Marston’s feminist influences, and -- in turn -- the impact of the character on American popular culture.

“Tons of people are interested in Wonder Woman," Lepore said. "They’re not necessarily interested in the history of women’s struggle for equality, but the book offers that because you can’t understand Wonder Woman without it.”

While other civil rights movements have embedded powerful iconic images in our national memory, the fight for women’s equality is one that is less prolific in the American cultural mindset.

“People don’t actually know about Ethel Byrne and her hunger strike … or when … Olive Byrne invited Margaret Sanger to come speak at Tufts’ Liberal Club, and the Tufts administration banned Sanger from campus, so she spoke in a church in Somerville,” Lepore said, mentioning a forgotten part of Tufts history and of American feminism. “Wonder Woman seems to come out of nowhere and is this total creature of the 1940s, because we’ve really forgotten just what it was like.”

Although the American populace has entered a new century, it is clear that Wonder Woman will continue to be a large feature in popular culture in the coming years. Warner Bros. Studios recently announced the production of a Wonder Woman movie directed by Michelle MacLaren and starring Israeli actress Gal Godot, to be released in 2017. The feminist implications of a female-driven superhero movie may be similar to the effects of the first Wonder Woman comics on the women’s liberation movement. Wonder Woman will continue to be an index for American feminism across all types of media and cultural history.