Jill Lepore is a bit of a wonder woman herself, certainly a wonder of a historian. She uncovers, unclothes, and satisfactorily binds with ropes and chains (the better to dispose of it) the myth that Wonder Woman was a feature of woman’s liberation rather than one of male dominance. Sadly, the scantily clad Wonder Woman was modeled on the real-life live-in girlfriend of the psychologist who created her, and who himself exhibited the dominant male model all too well.
Lepore not only gives us the background of William Moulton Marston, Harvard-trained psychologist and developer of the systolic blood-pressure polygraph, but also of his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, herself an almost-PhD (All But Dissertation) who studied psychology and law. Olive Richard Byrne is the younger woman, a former student of Marston’s, who shares their homes, their children, and their beds. Marston and his smart and admiring women lovers lived unconventional family lives in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in New England, with Marston fathering the children of at least two of the women in their large and ramshackle house to which they moved near the coast in Rye, New York.
Although Marston had lots of experience with strong women and claimed to like, admire, even love them, he (and the women themselves) never really progressed beyond the idea of equality between the sexes to the thing itself. Feminists in name only, I’d have to say, since one might argue that Marston was simply a failure as a wage-earner rather than a dependent louche. His wife Elizabeth earned wages for family upkeep, Olive took care of the children, and Marston…must have…hopefully…kept them happy sexually, though they probably could have done without him there, also.
Lepore probably knows more about W.M.M. (in my mind I call him Willie) than any single person alive and she was frank about his delusions. He began his comic Wonder Woman as an answer to male superheroes and debuted Wonder Woman in hot pants and a tiara in December 1941. Maybe he wasn’t such a talented guy, though his women were pretty admirable and talented. No wonder Wonder Woman. But there was not to be a straight line from 1920s feminism and the right to vote to Wonder Women and equality for women. Marston died in 1947, someone else took over the writing of the comic, and all advances made with a woman forging a new path during the war years were rolled back.
Somehow Wonder Woman never really made the leap from helping out to helping herself. Marston may have been enlightened for his time (god bless his little willie) but he would have been sacrificed at the altar of equality long before this at the hand of Amazons living today in America. Lepore does a good job of reminding us of our past, present, and future --if we don’t manage to prove her wrong. She would like that. Wonder Women Live!
I listened to the Random House Audio production of this title, read by Lepore herself. Lepore has an energetic style and a young-sounding squeaky voice: I appreciate having her add the emphases where she intended, as well as wringing the humor from her writing. I can’t say I found the history of the self-important Marston and his often bound-and-chained Wonder Woman as interesting as Lepore did, but she fortunately puts Marston’s self-promotion in the perspective of the times, and he and his ladies tried for something different with their educations and their lives.
Jill Lepore If you are looking for a quick book that primarily focuses on Wonder Woman (as the cover and title would expect you to encounter) and an analysis of her origin story, look elsewhere. I just read Ron Rege's alt comic form version of her origin story, Diana, which I suggest you check out if you have any interest in WW origins, but Lepore's book isn't about that, really; or, it IS about Wonder Woman's origins and abiding place in the history of feminism extending from the suffragette and early birth control period, through the sixties Women's Liberation movement and through today. As one might expect, Lepore shows you how the series has always reflected womens' and other cultural values. But it also gets stranger than just that.
Lepore is a Harvard American History professor and a prolific and best-selling historian; she's also a very good writer who creates a popular text that draws you into a serious historian's interests and approach. In other words, she isn't just interested in comics and feminism. She's interested in American history and how it came about and what it means for us today. We don't really read much about Wonder Woman per se for almost half of the book, which not surprisingly disappointed a few readers.
While we do get a section of full-color examples of important moments in the strip's history, and some good analysis of those panels, this book is really more of a biography of the Harvard-trained psychologist William Moulton Marston--the man that created Wonder Woman--and a sort of history of the unconventional family he created and the other women involved seemed to agree to. It's finally a sort of a sensational tell-all mystery that reveals aspects of the secrets of that family history behind Wonder Woman that were kept secret for decades. Lepore successfully makes this into a page turner, which was surprising for me from a Harvard academic. It's really, really good.
You can read better reviews laying out all the details, but I'll say a few things here that might spoil things for you if you still want to read the book and encounter these Big Reveals in the usual way, but I think a lot of you may have already heard of those reveals of the book from early splashy articles and interviews with Lepore from more than a year ago. I'll admit I read this book because of hearing about a couple of those racy aspects of this story.
Here's some interesting aspects of the story for me, in brief, and it's all too layered and complex to just summarize, but, here goes:
--Marston was a smart guy who is known for having invented the lie detector. He also was the originator of Wonder Woman, wrote a lot of the original strips and insisted on its being true to his original conception as it developed, and helped to shape the series' reputation of the series as basically feminist, of freeing women from the bonds, the chains, created by patriarchal society. His teacher at Harvard was a misogynist, mostly, but Marston went in a different direction, in part because of his association with his capable and smart student Olive Byrne, whose mother Ethel Byrne became famous for a hunger strike after having been jailed for birth control activism. Ethel's sister is better known to us in the history of women's rights: Margaret Sanger, and learning of her story helped to shape Marston's feminist directions. Olive brought her strong feminist views to her relationship with Marston. She also felt largely abandoned by her mother, Ethel, so that figures into her choices, too.
--Marston, Mr. Lie Detector, also was, as it turns out, a pretty amazing liar, throughout his life, and kept it up for decades, with his wife and other women, a deception that certainly had implications for Wonder Woman in surprising ways. Marston couldn't really keep an academic job, but he wrote screenplays, and wrote numerous articles defending both film and comics. A complex guy, as Lepore lays out his story. There's lots of good stuff about him suggesting he was extraordinary, seeing a future in which it would be a good thing for women/Amazons to rule the world, and then he's also this American male charlatan who may have in a fairly typical way also used women for his own ends.
--Marston was married to Sadie Holloway, who also got her PhD in psychology and was in many ways smarter than him, but without the biz pizzazz, the huckster aspect. She worked all of her life to support him and her children, AND the other women Marston insisted live with them (and the two children he fathered with one of those other women).
--Here's the quasi-sensational secret stuff: Marston and Holloway were part of an open sex relationships exploration with a group that documented the process, early in the twentieth century. Lepore got her hands on this juicy stuff and knew it would figure in as we considered Wonder Woman's particular brand of feminism. In this context, Marston invited (insisted on Holloway's accepting?) his talented student Olive Byrne into their household. Byrne was Ethel's daughter and Sanger's niece, so out of this nexus she was highly influential on the part of Marston's views that were conventionally feminist. He was also fairly influential on her in impregnating her as they all lived in the same house.
--Marston didn't buy Olive a wedding ring; he bought her a set of gold bracelets she wore all of her life, ones you recognize Wonder Woman also wears as a symbol of her power, though these bracelets,which have rings attached to them, are also recognizably bdsm devices. Olive has children with him and raised all four of her and Holloway's four children so his wife could work, keeping all of this a secret (lie) even to the kids through most of their adult lives. A pretty nice deal for feminist Marston, to get one women to raise his kids for him and another to support him since he hardly made any money for most of his life. So, he was anti-domination of women in chains. . . and also way into women in bondage/chains. So was Olive, apparently, so it was understood to be consensual. Symbolic of love bonds, he insisted in characterizing them. But who knows what might be the layers of truth behind all this?
--As Lepore makes clear, there was hardly an issue's worth of Wonder Woman comics that didn't involve her and all sorts of other women being attached by chains to the wrists and necks and ankles, directed with amazingly detailed scripts by Marston. I pulled some Wonder Woman comics off my shelf and viewed the examples Lepore shares with us, so it's pretty eye-opening and complex and interesting, to say the least. And there's a history of people who saw it right from the start as a little kinky/strange, but as you may know, she is also one of the most celebrated and loved comics figures in history.
I really liked this book a lot, found it hard to put down. Or unputdownable,as Chris Ware says of it. It's not mainly about this kinky aspect of the story, we get no salacious details about any of that, really, (sorry) but it does examine how the lie detecting/lies/deception make their ways into a feminist comic; well, a feminist comic about a Justice League superhero that looked like a Vargas girl or pinup model. This is a fascinating cultural text, really well written, that also takes comics history seriously. Highly recommend for comics fans, Wonder Woman fans, feminists, those interested in American history and a good yarn! Jill Lepore Lepore convincingly makes Wonder Woman the connective tissue between the suffragists and the women's movement, but the story behind her genesis is just fricken' amazing and almost unbelievable. William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator and a man Glen Weldon accurately describes as decidedly skeevy, was, A, a man, B, married to one woman, sleeping with two others and living happily with all three, C, was fascinated by bondage and tied, chained, fettered and imprisoned WW, the first female superhero, in every comic cell he could, D, a Harvard graduate whose lazy, sloppy research and weird teaching practices pretty much had him drummed out of academia, E, invented the lie detector, F through Z I could go on but why should I spoil it for you? You're so going to want to read this book for yourself.
Remember Margaret Sanger? Mother of birth control, we pretty much have the Pill because of her? She's the model for Wonder Woman, although she never acknowledged that she knew Marston or said she was his second wife's aunt, and she would have died a thousand deaths if she'd lived to have seen the David Levine cartoon of her dressed in a Wonder Woman-inspired costume, trampolining off a diaphragm. Levine had no idea of her relationship to the Marston menage because the family kept their living situation such a deep dark secret. Nevertheless
Voluntary motherhood, Sanger argued in Woman and the New Race, is for woman the key to the temple of liberty....It was a matter of liberating the feminine spirit--a spirit well represented in the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, who, Sanger explained, sought to arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves, their sexual selves. The feminine spirit, Sanger wrote, manifests itself most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than maternity...The philosophy of Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman...Years later, when Marston hired a young woman named Joye Hummel to help him write Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne [Marston's second wife] gave Hummel a copy of Woman and the New Race. Read this, she told her, and you'll know everything you need to know about Wonder Woman.
The last 150 pages of this book are notes, bibliography and index, she's really done her homework, but Lepore never lets the research get in the way of the story, or of the general air of bemusement that wafts up from every page. Along the way you come across such historical tidbits as this post-World War II snapshot
Women went home. Women's rights went underground. And homosexuals were persecuted. Is there a quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things? U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked in hearings about homosexuality in 1950.
Et tu, Margaret?
Marston died in 1947 and DC Comics abandoned Wonder Woman to the merciless care of writer Robert Kanigher, who
hated the character he called the grotesque inhuman original Wonder Woman....Wonder Woman became a babysitter, a fashion model, and a movie star. She wanted, desperately, to marry Steve. She gave advice to the lovelorn, as the author of a lonely-hearts newspaper advice column.
From helping defeat the Germans and the Japanese in World War II, to this. Later they even took away her powers and her magic lasso and her invisible plane. Someone at DC Comics should have been shot. She was rehabilitated (and pretty much reimagined) by Gloria Steinem on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine, and along with Batman and Superman is the only comic book superhero to have survived from inception into the present day. No matter what horrible thing they did to her character, she's still here.
This is a terrific book about American history, women's history, comic book history, the ability of families to hide reality and to hide from it, and the truly amazing facility of all human beings to ignore what is right in front of them. Highly, highly recommended. Jill Lepore The bizarre history behind the creation of Wonder Woman is weird even for the world of superheroes.
Jill Lepore (who is amazing in her own right in that she's a history professor at Harvard and she writes for The New Yorker) gives us the story of William Moulton Marston, an American psychologist and the man who invented the lie detector test. After trying and failing in several careers, in 1941 he turned to the burgeoning field of comic books, and created Wonder Woman with the help of his wife and his longtime mistress. Marston considered himself a feminist and had been influenced by the suffragist movement in the early 1900s.
The discussions about the appearance of Wonder Woman were interesting, and it's not surprising that the character caused a fair amount of controversy in those early years, especially since she was practically naked and the comics featured a lot of bondage. Lepore's book includes some great panels from various comics and lots of photographs; I listened to this book on audio, but I was glad I had a print copy to flip through because the illustrations were so helpful.
I was inspired to read this book after seeing the Wonder Woman movie (I heart Gal Godot), and I enjoyed learning about this unusual bit of history. I was especially intrigued to hear about the early days of other comic book heroes, including Superman and Batman, and to learn more about the women's movement in America. This is a fascinating story and I would recommend Lepore's book to other readers.
Meaningful Passage
Jill Lepore There's no doubt Lepore has done a stellar job of researching this material—a good example comes in the footnotes where she reveals how a murder trial William Moulton Marston (Wonder Woman's creator) testified as an expert at had been covered by no less than three different historical overviews, and nobody had realized the attorneys on the case were students of Marston. Lepore digs deep into the historial trends of the time (particularly the suffrage and birth control movements of the early 20th Century, which have surprising connections to the origin of Wonder Woman) and family records.
Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism, which hasn't been altogether good for feminism. Superheroes, who are supposed to be better than everyone else, are excellent at clobbering people; they're lousy at fighting for equality.
But Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book superhero. The secrets this book reveals and the story it tells place Wonder Woman not only within the history of comic books and superheroes but also at the very center of the histories of science, law, and politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hard-boiled detective. Wonder Woman's debt is to the fictional feminist utopia and to the struggle for women's rights. Her origins lie in William Moulton Marston's past, and in the lives of the women he loved; they created Wonder Woman, too. Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book character because Marston was no ordinary man and his family was no ordinary family. Marston was a polymath. He was an expert in deception: he invented the lie detector test. He led a secret life: he had four children by two women; they lived together under one roof. They were masters of the art of concealment.
Their favorite hiding place was the comics they produced. Marston was a scholar, a professor, and a scientist; Wonder Woman began on a college campus, in a lecture hall, and in a laboratory. Marston was a lawyer and a filmmaker; Wonder Woman began in a courthouse and a movie theater. The women Marston loved were suffragists, feminists, and birth control advocates. Wonder Woman began in a protest march, a bedroom, and a birth control clinic. The red bustier isn't the half of it.
Unfortunately, there's not a lot in the book to suggest Lepore is especially interested in Wonder Woman, or in Marston. While the most interesting part of the book (hands down) is the open marriage Marston lived in with two other women (both of whom contributed significantly to the origin of and influences on Wonder Woman), and their roles are inarguably the ones most needed to be brought into the historical record, it all flattens out pretty quick. The author is either so indebted to her sources (the surviving members of the Marston family, who gave her extensive access to their papers) or those papers are themselves so discreet you never get much of a feeling for anyone in any particular situation. Lepore insinuates how Marston's two wives felt, but it is a very meager insinuation.
And the situation grows ever more dire as Lepore recounts the story of Wonder Woman with the occasional insight but usually a tremendous lack of clarity. I know I'm the salacious type, but Lepore gains access to 95 pages of notes of a likely New Age orgy between Marston, his two wives, his aunt(!), and his wife's lover, and not only does Lepore barely manage to eke four pages out of it, the only connection she bothers to make between the bits of the Wonder Woman mythos and a transcript that refers to Love Girls, Mothers, and Love Leaders is that the nickname of one of the participants later pops up as the name of a cult leader in a comic. As a historian, Lepore only really seems excited by the idea of history being obscured or overwritten. She obviously enjoys the irony behind the creation of Marston's surprisingly enduring creation, but she seems to enjoy the creation itself not at all.
Anyway, it's an invaluable read if you're a fan of the original Wonder Woman stories, and if you get a kick out of imagining how and where a TV show or material based on the material might arouse emotions for all involved that Lepore herself doesn't bother with. Marston is a larger than life character, a huckster and a quack and probably a drunk, but one who quite clearly believed the feminist lifestyle he was espousing (even when he had difficulties transcending his era in other ways). It would be wonderful if he'd been given an ounce of complexity: instead, it's all too easy to imagine Lepore standing to the side, rolling a pointed finger around the side of her head as she recounts stories about him. Maybe Marston really doesn't deserve any better, but Wonder Woman does, and I'm sorry this isn't the book to do her amazing situation justice. Jill Lepore
A cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story.
Examines the life of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston and his polyamorous relationship with wife Elizabeth Holloway and mistress Olive Byrne, both of whom inspired and influenced the comic book character's creation and development.
-Abstract from WorldCat The Secret History of Wonder Woman
God, I wanted to like this. So. Much. Excruciating. Detail. At first I found the detail interesting, but it wore thin when I found myself 20 percent of the way through the book with no comic-book creation in sight. I gave up soon after. Jill Lepore The definitive work on Wonder Woman (WW). Jill Lepore explores all aspects of WW and her creator (William Moulton Marston) including many that have never seen the light of day before. When you consider the amount of 'projection' WW has absorbed over the years; how many groups have used her for their own agenda while denying her a place in a broader social context. Highest recommendation. Jill Lepore A fascinating account of William Moulton Marston, the man who created Wonder Woman, and the many women – especially his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and his partner, Olive Byrne – who contributed to Marston’s odd blend of psychosexual feminism. I’m a historian by training and a comics fan by chance, so combine the two and I’m happy as a clam.
— Megan Cavitt
from The Best Books We Read In November 2016: http://bookriot.com/2016/12/01/the-be...
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If you want a non-fiction read that’s weird and wonderful and KINKY, look no further than The Secret History of Wonder Woman. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of Wonder Woman, was a progressive suffragist and feminist with a penchant for BDSM and a secret polygamous family. One of his wives was the niece of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Oh, and he also invented the lie detector test, as one does. The whole book is beyond fascinating, but most of all I loved reading about the badass ladies of the early birth control movement. This is one of those books that will have you nudging everyone within elbow distance to say “Holy shit! Did you know… ?” — Rachel Smalter Hall
From The Best Books We Read In February: http://bookriot.com/2015/03/02/riot-r... Jill Lepore What does Wonder Woman, the superhero who first appeared in 1941, have to do with polyamory, pessaries, and the polygraph? As Jill Lepore reports in her fascinating new work of nonfiction, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, everything. Here are some of the book’s most fascinating revelations:
1. Psychologist and storyteller William Moulton Marston invented the first lie detector test while an undergraduate at Harvard. He then created Wonder Woman, whose magic lasso could force men to tell the truth, at age 48.
2. Unfortunately, Lepore writes, “for all of Marston’s charm, his [lie detector's] near-perfect laboratory results generally failed to impress men involved in actual criminal investigation” (pg. 51). He couldn’t sell or make any real money off of his invention. A trial judge dismissed evidence produced by the lie detector in 1922, saying, “When it is developed to the perfection of the telephone and the telegraph and wireless and a few other things we will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably, and it will bother some other judge, not me” (pg. 69). The defendant whom Marston was hoping to help was sentenced to life in prison. Another man later read Marston’s research and created his own similar lie detector, which he patented as the polygraph. There are now millions in use all over the country.
3. Marston was a well-born bohemian who drew on staunch feminist and free love ideals from the early 20th century and the influences of the two women he loved: his official wife, Betty Holloway Marston, who supported the family because, until Wonder Woman, Marston could not hold down a job; and his long-term live-in mistress, Olive Byrne, originally a student of Marston’s, who raised all of his children. In lieu of a wedding ring, Olive wore bracelets on which Wonder Woman’s bullet-deflecting bracelets were based. A third woman also shared the house with them, off and on; it’s implied she was Holloway’s lover and possibly Byrne’s, too.
4. Margaret Sanger, who went on to found what became Planned Parenthood, delivered a baby for the first time “when she was only eight years old” (pg. 82)—her niece, Olive Byrne. She then saved Olive’s life when Olive’s father, irritated by her crying, threw the baby into a snowbank. She went on to dedicate her life to making birth control available, affordable, and safe for women. Marston was a great admirer of hers.
5. The Amazons of Wonder Woman’s Paradise Island, including Diana Prince herself, are based on Utopian feminist literature of the early 20th century, including Inez Haynes Gilmore’s Angel Island, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, and Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race. “The philosophy of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman, precisely” (pg. 102).
6. Dr. Psycho, a Wonder Woman nemesis, was based on a real-life, anti-feminist German psychology professor of Marston’s at Harvard. When Wonder Woman frees Dr. Psycho’s mistreated wife, the wife asks, “What can a weak girl do?” The superhero replies, “Get strong! Earn your own living!” Wonder Woman becomes a General in the army and even, later, President of the United States. Lepore puts it this way: “What the king of the Mole Men and all villains in Wonder Woman share is their opposition to women’s equality. Against each of them, Wonder Woman fights for women’s rights of work, to run for political office, and to lead” (217).
7. Wonder Woman constantly finds herself chained up in the comics, in part because Marston drew on early 20th-century feminist iconography, which often portrayed women bound by the ties of patriarchy, and in part because Marston was a kinkster who found BDSM hot.
8. Marston got started in comics because Olive Byrne wrote puff pieces about him for Family Circle magazine, without disclosing that he was the co-parent of her two children. In one of those interviews, Marston praised the effect of comics on children, and Charles Gaines of DC Comics hired Marston as a consulting psychologist and adviser. It was Marston’s idea to stamp the DC logo on all comic books as a mark of quality. Urged by Holloway, he also told Gaines that a female superhero would help disarm comic book naysayers, who were legion and rabid.
9. The DC in DC Comics stands for “Detective Comics,” making “DC Comics” as redundant as “ATM machine.” (Marvel Comics, their chief rival, was originally called Timely Comics.) Charles Gaines, who founded what became DC Comics, believed in Superman when all other publishers passed, and took on the risk of Wonder Woman too.
10. “Wonder Woman sold like crazy. No one, aside from Superman and Batman, came close” (pg. 209).
11. Critics and psychologists denounced Wonder Woman for the strip’s “lesbian undertones.” One of Wonder Woman’s favorite exclamations is “Suffering Sappho!” Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, from which the word “lesbian” is derived. She also has various female friends and sidekicks, including Etta Candy, a chubby, cheerful college girl with whom Wonder Woman has this delightful exchange:
“Etta, you know, you ought to cut down on the candy. It will ruin your constitution.”
“My constitution has room for plenty of amendments.”
12. Dorothy Roubicek, probably the first female editor at DC Comics, worked on Wonder Woman and also was the person who suggested that Superman be given a vulnerability to Kryptonite, a detail which was worked into his storyline in 1943. She objected to Wonder Woman being tied up all the time, but Marston assured her that secretly “women enjoy submission,” at least when it came to sex.
13. Most superheroes foundered after WWII. Forgotten comic book heroes from the early days include The Wildcat, Mr. Terrific, The Black Pirate, Little Boy Blue, and the Gay Ghost. Wonder Woman, like Batman and Superman, marched on, but her brand got badly diluted after Marston died in 1947, stricken by polio and cancer, and then Gaines died as well. Censors imposed a strict code on the content of comic books. “Wonder Woman lived on but was scarcely recognizable…smiling, daffy, helpless” (pg. 271).
14. Second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, who loved Wonder Woman in the 1940s, brought her back in 1972, featuring her on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine with the headline “Wonder Woman for President.” As Lepore writes, “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” (pg. 210).
15. In early 1973, DC Comics began publishing “New Adventures of the Original Wonder Woman.” And in 1975, she moved to television: “ABC launched The New Original Wonder Woman. Set in the 1940s, it was based very closely on Marston’s comics” and ran for four years, starring Lynda Carter.
Bonus Random Delightful Facts
1. “The price to get into a nickelodeon was almost never a nickel.” (pg. 33).
2. “In 1910, 4 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one went to college; by 1920, that number had risen to 8 percent, 40 percent of which were women.” (pg. 17).
3. In the magazine The Nation in 1926, a woman explained that a modern woman was “not altogether satisfied with love, marriage, and a purely domestic career. She wants money of her own. She wants some means of self-expression, perhaps, some way of satisfying her personal ambitions. But she wants a husband, home, and children, too. How to reconcile these two desires in real life, that is the question.” (pg. 121).
4. “The word ‘feminism,’ hardly ever used before 1910, was everywhere by 1913″ and advocated for the belief that “women were in every way equal to men” (19).
5. At the turn of the century, “married women were not allowed to train as nurses” (83).
From my review for Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/15... Jill Lepore Actual rating: 3.5 stars.
This is a fascinating read about the creator of Wonder Woman, who was one exceptionally odd man. He seems to have genuinely believed that women would rule the world, but his own home was far from a matriarchy: he had one wife to work twelve hours a day in New York City, supporting the family, and another one (both Margaret Sanger's niece, and a former student) to raise the four children the two women managed to produce with him in the 1930s - when she was not writing puff pieces about him for Family Circle.
In background, he was a psychologist, and invented a lie detector (using blood pressure readings) while still an undergraduate at Harvard, but never patented it, and went on to be blacklisted from academe for the combination of his esoteric teachings and his very odd home life (which also included, in the 1920s, sex club meetings). Then, after failing to make a splash in Hollywood, he let his two wives support his family and raise it, while he pottered about the house in his underwear, only getting dressed for the occasional private client visit. His attempts to sell the FBI on his lie detector only resulted in J. Edgar Hoover opening a file on him.
And then in 1941 he invented Wonder Woman, and suddenly had a massive success on his hands. And she's a reflection of her strange creator, who genuinely believed in feminism and women's rights, but also was one very kinky man. She's as obsessed with lie detecting as he was, too.
Lepore claims, however, that American feminism having molded Wonder Woman (which she proves thoroughly), that Wonder Woman then went on to mold American feminism, and that's the problem it's had since 1972.
She goes nowhere near proving this supposition. (And only makes a feeble attempt at it in the last chapter or so.) It would be a stronger work without it. Jill Lepore
review ð PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ☆ Jill Lepore
