The Secret History of Wonder Woman

In comic books, superpowers are almost always secret, the alter ego hiding them behind the plainclothes disguise. But most kinds of secrets don’t give any real power to their holders. That is true, for example, of the secret Jill Lepore chronicles in The Secret History of Wonder Woman: the women who lived with, and loved, William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s “creator,” never spoke publicly of their influence on the character. Their story carries enough intrigue of its own to make Lepore’s book readable whether or not you’ve ever read a panel of Wonder Woman comics; the superheroine is the plainclothes hook for a book that’s really about the ways men and women navigated ambition in the early women’s rights era.

The adventures of Wonder Woman, the book reveals,  were born out of a real witches’ brew of intellectual preoccupations. Lepore’s intellectual genetic sequencing finds William James–addled psychology, sorority bondage rituals, free love, and Margaret Sanger–era American feminism in the mix. But Wonder Woman’s cultural significance and heritage is only the starting point for Lepore. She is more interested in the way that hodgepodge emerged from a human story.

On a first read one might think there is a simple and familiar story hiding here, one about women doing the grunt work for men who chase their dreams. And on some level, there is: Marston was clearly the kind of man who considered himself destined for great things. But one dream after another just got snuffed out. Interested in psychology and the law, Marston invented a lie detector but then lost out on the credit for it to a more successful commercial version. He hoped to become a respected university professor but gradually fell through the academic cracks. A stint in Hollywood was a bust; he was too intellectual for the market-minded studio executive. It is, in fact, more than halfway through the book that we actually reach the invention of Wonder Woman; by then Marston is washed up at the age of forty-seven.

Lepore is nice about it, but thirty-odd years of professional dithering is rather a lot for a man with four children, a wife, and a mistress/second wife in his household. On the material end, it was Marston’s wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, who proved the more effective breadwinner. She’d attended law school, like her husband, and absolutely loved it, unlike him. But when they both did graduate study in philosophy, only he got the Ph.D. The research she did often ended up published under her husband’s name.

So Holloway took straight to the workforce instead, and unable to make real use of her legal training, ended up in a series of career tracks that included sales, editing, and insurance.

But that’s the material support. In fact, it is the other woman of the house to whom Lepore gives the title of muse:

Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

Byrne, who was Sanger’s niece, was a student of Marston’s when she began having a sexual affair with him. Her best friend would inspire a character in the comic books; she would introduce Marston to a strange, BDSM-like sorority ritual that would later surface in Wonder Woman #4. She was meant, in the larger Marston family, to be the one who would take on the duties of mothering so that Holloway could continue her career — as Lepore tells it.

The twists and turns of the story are delightful and well told; writing this review, I have a fear of including spoilers. The only light flaw in Lepore’s approach is her palpable reluctance to pass much judgment on Marston. She depicts his domestic arrangements pretty matter-of-factly and sunnily, but they evoke aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale, with one woman marked for children and the other for a higher calling. While Holloway and Byrne lived together virtually until death and clearly felt comfortable with their arrangement, one still longs a bit for Lepore to break in and point out that whatever their satisfaction, Marston reaped the lion’s share of that deal’s benefits.

But Lepore is more intrigued by the secrecy with which Holloway and Byrne guarded their involvement in the creation of Wonder Woman. Toward the end of her book, summing up the effect of the secret, she writes:

The fight for women’s rights hasn’t come in waves. Wonder Woman, one of the most important superheroes of the 1940s, was the product of the suffragist, feminist and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women’s liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women’s rights has been a river, wending.

And she’s right, of course, that the building of women’s sense of themselves was (and is) a cumulative thing. But you find yourself wishing, hoping, even angrily willing that circumstances had been such that the women who surrounded Marston could have more easily and openly claimed their place in it.