After graduation, he married Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, an unconventional woman who worked as an editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica and other publications. He’d later find Sanger’s books and ideas. Should we read Marston’s Wonder Woman strips as feminist manifestoes, or as the working out of issues by a somewhat troubled man, or both? Her book makes you inwardly cheer, “Go Wonder Woman!” one moment, and then fret, “Go Wonder Woman?” in the next.Īt Harvard, Marston was influenced by early feminists like Emmeline Pankhurst, who was prevented from speaking on campus in 1911. It’s complicated material that she capably explores, though she leaves you with uncomfortably torn feelings and a sense that this intellectual jigsaw puzzle is missing pieces. In “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” she fully tells Marston’s history for the first time, as well as the complete history of how so many crisp feminist ideas made their way into Wonder Woman comics. Once, so that she can be both entirely bound and movable, her fettered feet are welded to roller skates. She’s roped and then coffined in a glass box and dropped into the ocean. She’s winched into a straitjacket, from head to toe. In episode after episode, Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled. “Not a comic book in which Wonder Woman appeared, and hardly a page, lacked a scene of bondage. Lepore to count the ways, in a long but fascinating passage that shows off her neatnik prose style. How into fettering was Marston? Allow Ms. He was also a huckster, a polyamorist (one and sometimes two other women lived with him and his wife), a serial liar and a bondage super-enthusiast.
He was a Harvard graduate, a feminist and a psychologist who invented the lie detector test. On the other hand, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” is fundamentally a biography of Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator, William Moulton Marston (1893-1947).
It’s a yea-saying tale about how this comic book character, created in 1941, remade American feminism and had her roots in the ideas and activism of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. On the one hand, the story it relates has more uplift than Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane or her eagle-encrusted red bustier.
Jill Lepore’s new book, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” is a long, strange thing to chew on.
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