The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

A riveting work of historical detection, revealing that the origins of one of the world’s most iconic Superheroes hides within it a fascinating family story — and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism. Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator. Beginning in his undergraduate years at Harvard, Marston was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned from speaking on campus in 1911, when Marston was a freshman. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1930s, Marston and Byrne wrote a regular column for Family Circle celebrating conventional family life, even as they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth — he invented the lie detector test — lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights — a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. PRAISE FOR JILL LEPORE ‘Few historians handle weirdness as deftly or thoughtfully as Lepore … [Her] brilliance lies in knowing what to do with the material she has. In her hands, the Wonder Woman story unpacks not only a new cultural history of feminism, but a theory of history as well.’ The New York Times Book Review ‘Ms Lepore’s lively, surprising and occasionally salacious history is far more than the story of a comic strip. The author, a professor of history at Harvard, places Wonder Woman squarely in the story of women’s rights in America — a cycle of rights won, lost and endlessly fought for again … Her superb narrative brings that history vividly into the present, weaving individual lives into the sweeping changes of the century.’ The Wall Street Journal

A terrific book. I knew nothing about Wonder Woman, really–never read the comics or watched the TV series–but the story behind her creation and creator is fascinating. It involves Margaret Sanger, early feminist endeavors, polyamory, and much more. Sobering to read that in the late 1930s, there was a firm belief among feminists that there would be a female president with 10-15 years. Then the 1950s happened, and it has taken us much longer to get there.

Only been trying to read this book for probably a decade now. I love WW, and her backstory is fascinating, but keeping track of several different names, sets of initials, kids and who their parents are, gets confusing after a while, and I've always gotten bogged down trying to get through it. Had to give in and buy a copy just so I could take my time and get through a bit here and there! I did very much enjoy it, however, and I'm glad I've finally gotten through it.

The title was a bit misleading (it's not so much about Wonder Woman as about her creator), but it definitely laid the ground for the stuff that was about WW. The writing was... off, somehow, here and there, but overall a really interesting book.

Some quotes:
“In 1914, Greenwich Village feminist Margaret Sanger founded a magazine called the Women Rebel. The “basis of feminism,” Sanger said, had to be a woman's control over her own body, “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.” ~ p 21

“In Angel Island and Herland, men have to be taught that if they want to live with women - if they want to marry them and have children with them - they will be allowed to do so only on terms of equality. And for this to happen, there has got to be a way for men and women to have sex, but without the women getting pregnant all the time. The women in Gilman's utopia practice what at the time was called “voluntary motherhood,” a subject Gilman approaches with a certain primness. “You see they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless, involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another,” Gilman wrote, “but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.” ~p86

“IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC's editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.
Batman had debuted in Detective Comics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman's organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR's solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.”~ p 183-4

“With war devastating Europe, the disarming of the dark knight was Detective Comics' deferral to a cherished American idea about the division between civilian and military life. Superheroes weren't soldiers; they were private citizens. And so, late in 1939, one of Batman's writers drafted a new origin story for him: When Bruce Wayne was a boy, his parents had been killed before his eyes, shot to death. Not only did Batman not own a gun; Batman hated guns.” ~p184