"The Secret History of Wonder Woman"

[fiefoe]

It so happens that a couple of my recent reads are also about the period covered in this book, so it's nice to run into familiar names. Jill Lepore must have done heck a lot of research for this book to uncover so many family secrets.

• She came to the United States to fight for peace, justice, and women’s rights. She had golden bracelets; she could stop bullets. She had a magic lasso; anyone she roped had to tell the truth. To hide her identity, she disguised herself as a secretary named Diana Prince; she worked for U.S. military intelligence. Her gods were female, and so were her curses. “Great Hera!” she cried. “Suffering Sappho!” she swore.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. Unknown to the world, Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century, was part of Marston’s family.
• George Herbert Palmer, the frail, weak-eyed, sixty-nine-year-old Alford Professor of Philosophy... pined for his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been president of Wellesley College, an advocate for female education, and a suffragist. She’d died in 1902. He refused to stop mourning her. “To leave the dead wholly dead is rude,” he pointed out,
• his chief contribution to the advancement of philosophy was having convinced William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana to join what became known as “the Great Department”: Harvard’s faculty of philosophy. <> The key to teaching, Palmer believed, is moral imagination, “the ability to put myself in another’s place... Palmer told his class, as Marston sat, rapt, “the rise of philosophy has three influential causes: freedom, leisure, and wonder.”
• * In the fall of 1911, the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage announced a lecture series. The first lecture, to be held on October 31, was to be given by Florence Kelley, who’d fought for a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, and an end to child labor.
• Sadie Elizabeth Holloway met William Moulton Marston when they were both in the eighth grade, at a grammar school in Cliftondale... she went to Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts.. Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837. Plenty of critics were on hand to warn its students not to get carried away with any fancy ideas about equality.
• * “The time will come when some of us will look back upon the arguments against the granting of the suffrage to women with as much incredulity as that with which we now read those against their education,” said Mary Woolley, the president of Mount Holyoke,... In 1908, Woolley had a hand in making that campaign a nationwide effort, helping to found the National College Equal Suffrage League.
• * The word “feminism,” hardly ever used before 1910, was everywhere by 1913. It meant advocacy of women’s rights and freedoms and a vision of equality markedly different from that embraced by the “woman movement” of the nineteenth century, which, nostalgic for a prehistoric, matriarchal “mother-age,” had been founded less on a principle of equality than on a set of ideas about women’s moral superiority.
• In 1914, Greenwich Village feminist Margaret Sanger founded a magazine called the Woman 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.”
• * M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr, said, “No woman can amount to anything who does her own dusting.” To that, Holloway said, “Oh yes she can, if she gets up early enough in the morning.”16 Holloway always wanted everything.
• Her favorite book was Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, edited and translated by Henry Thornton Wharton and first published in 1885... Wharton’s Sappho was part of a Victorian Sappho revival, a Sapphic obsession that found especially ardent expression at women’s colleges.
• Sappho held a special place at Mount Holyoke. When Mary Woolley accepted the presidency of the college, she arranged for Jeannette Marks, a literary scholar who was also a suffragist, to be offered a position in the English Department. They had met when Woolley was teaching at Wellesley and Marks was a freshman; they lived together for fifty-five years.
• * In an essay called “The Hidden Self,” published in 1890, four years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, William James explained that a man has both a public self, the sum of his performances, and a private self, the sum of his passions.2 Every Jekyll has his Hyde. James was writing decades before either comic books or superheroes were invented, but his line of argument is no small part of why comic-book superheroes have secret identities:...  and Wonder Woman her Diana Prince. The distance between philosophy and pop is, really, remarkably small.
• Haywood had been charged with murder. Haywood pled not guilty. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, the most celebrated trial lawyer in the country.
• his criticism of the United States as a nation suffering from an excess of equality. Münsterberg believed in hierarchy, order, and Germany. To him, there was no better illustration of American decay and German purity than the ridiculous aspirations of American women: “the aim of the German woman is to further the interests of the household,” he maintained, but “that of the American woman is to escape.”... The last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle would be Dr. Psycho’s last student.
• In the Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall, Marston had been experimenting with machines that might tell truth from lies. To write movies, he had to turn lies into truths: he had to learn how to tell a story that wasn’t true but that, on film, would seem to be.
• Motion pictures—pictures that moved, or “movies,” as they were called starting in 1902—were so new that what to call a script hadn’t yet been settled. (“Screenplay” wasn’t used before 1916.) The word “photoplay,” meaning a dramatic film, was coined in 1909. Using “scenario” to mean a movie script dates to 1911... There was no need to write dialogue, for instance, since movies had no sound. The work mostly involved thinking of a good story and picturing how it could be told by piecing together scenes
• If he had never created Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston would be remembered for this experiment. He invented the lie detector test. A century on, it’s still in use. It’s also all over Wonder Woman.
• Münsterberg offered a theory of cinema at a time when cinema had hardly begun. He interviewed directors; he spoke to actresses. He explained the close-up. He explained crosscutting. He wanted to know: “What psychological factors are involved when we watch happenings on the screen?”17 What, to the mind, are movies? <> Münsterberg came to believe that there is no better psychological laboratory than a nickelodeon, in much the same way that Marston later came to believe that there is no better form of psychological propaganda than a comic book.
• In exercises held at Sanders Theatre, E. E. Cummings, a member of Marston’s class, delivered a speech about modernism called “The New Art.” He quoted a poem by Amy Lowell: “Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper / Like draggled fly’s legs”;
• At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, five thousand women staged a protest. Hughes began supporting woman suffrage. Some women supported Hughes, because of his position on suffrage; others supported Wilson, because of his position on peace. In the end, it was women voters who, by rallying behind the peace movement, gained Wilson a narrow victory: he won ten of the twelve states where women had already been enfranchised. Without them, he would have lost.
• The war that Wilson hoped would end all wars all but silenced the campaign for woman suffrage, a campaign that had been closely aligned with the peace movement.
• Marston, who did not conduct the interrogations but merely read graphs documenting the soldiers’ blood-pressure changes, was right thirty-four out of thirty-five times, achieving the astonishing success rate of 97.1 percent. His test, he concluded, was nearly perfect; the only problem with it was that some people weren’t as good at applying it as he was.26 It looked very fishy. As Yerkes delicately put it, Marston’s results “did not command the confidence of all members of the Psychology Committee.”
• MARJORIE WILKES, who believed in both suffrage and bondage, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1889... In the 1940s, Huntley helped out with the inking and lettering of Wonder Woman, including panel after panel depicting women shackled, hands and feet.
• Holloway and Marston struggled to find their own kind of equality. “Can it be in the divine order of things that one Ph.D. should wash the dishes a whole lifetime for another Ph.D. just because one is a woman and the other a man?” asked the writer of a 1921 essay called “Reflections of a Professor’s Wife.”
• “I have arranged here for the entire testimony of my 18 witnesses to be submitted separately to two juries,” Marston reported to Wigmore, “one of 12 men and one of 12 women.”8 Marston’s study of the reliability of testimony was really a study about women’s political participation. <> Gaining the right to vote had by no means led automatically to female jury service.
• IN THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE of William Moulton Marston, James A. Frye was experiment number six. Marston had staked his academic reputation on the Frye case. He expected the appeal to reach the U.S. Supreme Court and make him famous the world over. <> The brief for the appellant, very likely written by Marston himself, consisted almost entirely of an argument on behalf of Marston’s work:
• Frye v. United States is a landmark in the law of evidence and one of the most cited cases in the history of American law. It established what’s known as the Frye test, under which, to be admitted as evidence, a new kind of scientific principle has to have gained general acceptance. “Frye,” like “Miranda,” has the rare distinction of having become a verb. To be “Frye’d” is to have your expert’s testimony deemed inadmissible... People who cite Frye don’t know or care who Frye was or whom he is supposed to have killed, and they haven’t bothered to find out much about Marston, either.
• first, Frye’s lawyers were Marston’s students; second, at the time Frye’s lawyers were working on Frye’s defense, they were also involved in an experiment in the reliability of testimony, undertaken in consultation with the twentieth century’s most important scholar of the law of evidence, John Henry Wigmore; and third, on March 6, 1923, five days after Mattingly and Wood filed their appeal, their professor was arrested for fraud.7
• OLIVE BYRNE, who was thrown away, was born in February 1904 in the back of a four-room house in Corning, New York, a city of glass. She was delivered by her mother’s older sister, a twenty-four-year-old nurse named Margaret Sanger... When she was six, her mother came to visit—she had risen, it seemed to Olive, from the very grave—and hugged her so close that the brooch on her dress left a scratch on Olive’s cheek. All she could ever remember of her mother, after that, was the scratch.
• Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger believed in free love, socialism, and feminism.12 They worked for the Socialist Party Women’s Committee, the IWW, and the Masses, a socialist monthly... and went to meetings of Heterodoxy, a women-only club that held meetings on subjects like “What Feminism Means to Me.”13 (Both clubs were founded in 1912.) They knew Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman, John Reed, and Crystal Eastman and her brother Max. They lived in a world of free love, of heterodoxy, and of Amazons, breaking chains.
• Wonder Woman was born in bohemia. In the 1910s, when Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger were living in Greenwich Village, Amazons were everywhere.
• Margaret Sanger, who dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank, thought women ought to be conscious makers of people, too. But she had a different word for that kind of thing.20 She called it birth control.
• * Nine days after the clinic opened, an undercover policewoman posing as a mother of two came and met with Ethel Byrne, who discussed contraception with her. The next day, Byrne and Sanger were arrested. They were charged with violating a section of the New York State Penal Code, under which it was illegal to distribute “any recipe, drug, or medicine for the prevention of conception.” ... “I shall go on a hunger strike at once,” Ethel Byrne announced in court.
• In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception”: if a woman isn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex.
• * The day Margaret Sanger was released from prison, Ethel Byrne met her and brought her home.33 But Ethel Byrne never forgave her sister for making that promise, on her behalf, to the governor of New York. She thought her sister had wanted, all along, to nudge her out of the movement.34 For the movement Margaret Sanger wanted to lead, Ethel Byrne was too radical.
• She started studying to be a nurse. At St. Joseph’s, the nuns had crushes on the girls and the girls had crushes on the nuns, but Olive managed to keep out of trouble by becoming an excellent liar.
• * “I think what Margaret was doing was not so much dropping my mother per se as it was getting the movement away from the fringes of socialism, out of Greenwich Village and into uptown New York because the money for anything is where the people are who have money and not in your ragtag, bobtail people,” Olive Byrne later said.
• Sanger forged new alliances. At her trial in 1917, the judge had ruled that Sanger had no right to distribute contraception but that physicians did, so Sanger decided to ally the birth control movement with doctors, and with an emerging medical literature on the importance of female sexual pleasure... Meanwhile, Sanger courted alliances with conservatives and eugenicists,
• The next year, Sanger, who had divorced her husband, began a decades-long affair with H. G. Wells.
• Picturing and talking about women as chained and enslaved was ubiquitous in feminist literature, a carryover from the nineteenth-century alliance between the suffrage and abolitionist movements.
• Woman and the New Race.15 Among the people who read it were Mr. and Mrs. William M. Marston, who in 1920 were studying for graduate degrees in psychology, at Harvard and Radcliffe. The philosophy of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman, precisely.
     _With the beauty of Aphrodite, the wisdom of Athena, the strength of Hercules, and the speed of Mercury, she brings to America woman’s eternal gifts—love and wisdom! Defying the vicious intrigues of evil enemies and laughing gaily at all danger, Wonder Woman leads the invincible youth of America against the threatening forces of treachery, death, and destruction.16
  Women should rule the world, Sanger and Marston and Holloway thought, because love is stronger than force.
• Like Mary Sears, Etta Candy is “rotund.” She is addicted to sweets and is forever offering up exclamations like “Bursting brandy drops!” and “Great chocolates!” (Etta’s father’s name is Sugar Candy; ... “My constitution has room for lots of amendments.”7
• In 1929, when Sanger visited Boston to lecture at Ford Hall, city authorities banned her lecture, so she appeared on stage with a gag over her mouth, while Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. read a statement on her behalf. “I see immense advantages in being gagged,” it read. “It silences me, but it makes millions of others talk.”
• In the 1920s, psychologists were fascinated by sex, sexual difference, and sexual adjustment, not only because of Freud’s influence, but also because of the rise of behavioralism... According to the behavioralist John B. Watson, feminism itself was a form of deviance: a feminist was a woman unable to accept that she wasn’t a man.
• In his Experimental Psychology class at Tufts in the fall of 1925, Marston had as a student a girl whose hair was cut like a boy’s. She was Margaret Sanger’s niece. She was chic and sophisticated and radical and desperately unhappy; she had had an unbearably lonely childhood.
• Aunt Carolyn was Carolyn Marston Keatley, a sister of Marston’s father... The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ... claimed to have found historical documents proving that Jesus, as a young man, had traveled to India and Tibet, where he learned a religion of peace. Keatley believed that she was living in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the beginning of a new astrological age, an age of love: the New Age... A ninety-five-page, single-spaced typescript of notes taken during the meetings at Keatley’s apartment chronicle a cult of female sexual power—specifically, a “clinic”—involving “Love Leaders,” “Mistresses” (or “Mothers”), and “Love Girls.” It sounds something like a sexual training camp.
• * “This, then, is the dilemma of the modern mother,” Tyson wrote, “stated so often, in one way or another, and as often left unsolved: on the one hand, a keen interest in her professional work, a real need of income, the fear of mental stagnation, and the restlessness that comes from filling all her day with petty things; on the other hand, new demands in child care that were unknown even a decade ago; a supply of domestic helpers that is fast diminishing both in quality and quantity;
• * Elizabeth Holloway Marston, a New Woman living in a New Age, made a deal with her husband. Marston could have his mistress. Holloway could have her career. And young Olive Byrne, trained in the science of psychology, would raise the children.24 They’d find a way to explain it, to hide it.
• Between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of PhDs awarded to women doubled, and then, for three decades, it fell.6 The gains made by women in the beginning of the twentieth century were lost, everywhere, as women who had fought their way into colleges and graduate programs found that they were barred from the top ranks of the academy.
• Much of The Art of Sound Pictures is a guide to eluding censorship. Marston and Pitkin dedicated a great deal of their attention to explaining, point by point and state by state, what could pass the censors and what couldn’t. Branding—“Scene showing branding iron in fire, if application of it is not shown”—okay in New York, Ohio, and Virginia, not allowed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Kansas.
• At Universal Studios, Marston had a hand in films like Show Boat, in 1929. He also helped get films past the censors, including All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. When Carl Laemmle’s son, Junior Laemmle, took over Universal, he turned it into a specialty shop for horror films: Marston’s theory of emotions lies behind the particular brand of psychological terror in Laemmle’s Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and The Invisible Man (1933).
• Then she peppers her account of her time with him with true facts—Marston had four children; Olive’s mother’s name was Ethel—but these are only so many islands of truth in an ocean of lies. _I’d mix truth and falsehood and see if he could tell which was which.
• Frye was paroled on June 17, 1939, after serving more than eighteen years in prison. After his release, he filed repeated petitions for a presidential pardon. He regretted that his attorneys had rested their argument on Marston’s credibility. He suspected that bias had contributed to his conviction, too:
• Keen to sell his book, Marston engaged in a series of publicity stunts. He staged events for the press in which he administered “love detector” tests on pretty girls. He revisited his blondes-versus-brunettes experiments.16 He took out a booth at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York... He boasted to reporters that he intended to found a Truth Bureau, to be affiliated with the FBI.
• He made his announcement at a two-hour press conference held at the Harvard Club of New York and said so much about his qualifications as one of the world’s most influential psychologists that the New York Times identified him, wrongly, as “former director of the psychological laboratory at Harvard.”
• * In the 1930s, Margaret Sanger was the best-known feminist in the world. “When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine,” H. G. Wells predicted in 1935. In London, she met with Jawaharlal Nehru; in India, she debated Mahatma Gandhi.
• * In United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that contraception did not violate obscenity laws if prescribed by a physician; the ruling effectively removed contraception from the category of obscenity. In 1937, the American Medical Association at last endorsed birth control.
• 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.
• She was the first woman artist to create her own action hero. Early in 1941, a newspaper syndicate hired her to write and draw a daily comic strip called, at first, Black Fury and, later, Miss Fury. Miss Fury, sleek and glamorous, is a socialite named Marla Drake who fights crime while dressed as a black panther. Mills published using the name “Tarpé Mills.”
• * In Wonder Woman, Marston created a character to answer every one of the comic-book critics’ objections. She’s strong, but she’s not a bully: “At last, in a world torn by the hatreds and wars of men, appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child’s play.” She hates guns: “Bullets never solved a human problem yet!” She’s relentless, but she always spares her victims. “Wonder Woman never kills!” Above all, she believes in the United States: “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”27 Wonder Woman left Paradise Island to fight fascism with feminism.
• The Justice Society was a good way to both promote established superheroes and try out new ones before giving them more pages or their own titles. Superman and Batman were honorary members; they didn’t have to show up unless the situation was dire.
• Wonder Woman joined the Justice Society in the August–September 1942 issue of All-Star Comics. It was not quite the triumph it might have been. She was named the society’s secretary.
• * In a story published in Sensation Comics in July 1942, Wonder Woman discovers that the International Milk Company has been charging outrageous prices for milk, leading to undernourished American children. The story came straight out of a Hearst newspaper that Harry G. Peter had worked for in the 1910s. In 1919, and again in 1926, Hearst had used his papers to attack the politician Al Smith as “one of the milk crooks” for conspiring with “the milk trust” to raise the price of milk, a form of profiteering that was killing American babies.
• Wonder Woman’s next adventure was inspired by Progressive Era labor activism, too, including a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. (Margaret Sanger had been involved in that strike and, likely, so had Ethel Byrne.
• But 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 a woman’s right to work, to run for political office, and to lead.
• which sport he relinquished with a chuckle and rose gallantly to his feet, a maneuver of major magnitude for this psychologic Nero Wolfe.”
  “Hello, hello, my Wonder Woman!” he calls out to her.
  “What’s the idea of calling me Wonder Woman?” she wants to know. (It gave them a great deal of pleasure, their game of hide-and-seek.)
• *She’s tied to railroad tracks. She’s pinned to a wall. Once, so that she can be both entirely bound and movable, her fettered feet are welded to roller skates. “Great girdle of Aphrodite!” she cries. “Am I tired of being tied up!”
• while it’s true that much of this same iconography holds a prominent place in feminist and suffrage cartoons and protests from the 1910s—in which women are chained and roped and gagged, as an allegorical representation of their lack of rights and liberties—there’s more to it than that. <> In his original scripts, Marston described scenes of bondage in careful, intimate detail, with utmost precision,
• Wonder Woman frees her. “Curse you Wonder Woman!” Mars cries. Quite how this story embraces women’s rights is difficult to figure.5 It’s feminism as fetish.
• * Gaines: He therefore enclosed, for Marston’s use, a memo written by Roubicek containing a “list of methods which can be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains. Each one of these can be varied in many ways—enabling us, as I told you in our conference last week, to cut down the use of chains by at least 50 to 75% without at all interfering with the excitement of the story or the sales of the books.”
• Hedy Lamarr, Fuzzy, and Molecat were rabbits. They’d had pet rabbits at Cherry Orchard for years. “We had a domestic crisis in the family today, which is in the nature of a grave reflection on me, your niece,” Olive Byrne once reported to Margaret Sanger. “Four weeks ago we had two rabbits, three weeks ago the number was increased, via blessed event, to eight. Father rabbit was hurriedly removed from mother’s vicinity and has lived a solitary life since. However, today we were presented with ten more—father apparently made an affectionate good bye.”
• On August 28, he was taken by ambulance to the Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. He had contracted polio.
• By the time Ong’s piece appeared, it was mostly obsolete. Wonder Woman had weakened. With the war over, and Marston confined to his bed, many Wonder Woman stories were being written by Joye Hummel, and those written by Marston had grown domestic.
• Kanigher filed Holloway’s instructions away. Then he did with Wonder Woman whatever the hell he wanted. <> Mayer quit. Holloway was all but forbidden from ever coming to the office again.
• One thing Sanger was keen to do was to write her sister Ethel out of the story of her life. In 1952, Sanger sold the rights to a film based on her autobiography. She then wrote a letter to Ethel Byrne, claiming that the scriptwriter wished to make a slight alteration to the facts of the founding of the birth control movement, regarding the trials the two women had faced in 1917. In the film, Sanger told her sister, “I should be the Hunger Strikee.” Ethel Byrne would not be mentioned; it would be as if she had never existed.
• 1957: Repeatedly, Wallace steered the conversation away from Sanger’s work and toward her personal life. Hadn’t she abandoned her first husband? Hadn’t she abandoned her children? And for what? He pressed her: “Could it be that women in the United States have become too independent—that they have followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career?”
• In 1973, the year Wonder Woman was named a “symbol of feminist revolt,” the Supreme Court issued a ruling legalizing abortion. But the aftermath of Roe v. Wade didn’t bolster the feminist movement; instead, it narrowed it. If 1972 was a legislative watershed, 1973 marked the beginning of a drought. Some gains were lost; others proved illusory.
• In the late 1970s and 1980s, the women’s movement stalled. Wages never reached parity; social and economic gains were rolled back; political and legal victories seemingly within sight were never achieved.26 Then, too, feminists were divided, radicals attacking liberals and liberals attacking radicals in a phenomenon so widespread it even had a name: “trashing.”27 As early as 1970, the founder of the New Feminist Theater warned, in a letter of resignation from the Congress to Unite Women, that feminist “rage, masquerading as a pseudo-egalitarian radicalism,” was becoming “frighteningly vicious anti-intellectual fascism.”28
• in December 1972, DC Comics published a “Special! Women’s Lib Issue” of Wonder Woman, edited by Dennis O’Neil and written by a science-fiction writer named Samuel R. Delany. It was meant to be the first installment of a six-part storyline; ... Only the first of Delany’s six “women’s lib” stories was ever published.
• In May 1975, six months before ABC aired its pilot starring Carter, the Redstockings held a press conference to announce the release of a sixteen-page report. It purported to prove (1) that Gloria Steinem was a CIA agent; (2) that Ms. was both a capitalist manifesto and part of a CIA strategy to destroy the women’s movement; and (3) that Wonder Woman was a symbol of the ruination of feminism.
• while the Redstockings’ conspiracy theory really was crazy, they did have a point about Wonder Woman. Who needs consciousness-raising and equal pay when you’re an Amazon with an invisible plane?
• One tragedy of feminism in the twentieth century was the way its history seemed to be forever disappearing. In 1969, Shulamith Firestone and a group of young feminists visited eighty-four-year-old Alice Paul in Washington, D.C. Paul had founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916, had gone on a hunger strike in 1917, and had drafted the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923. She brought her visitors into her parlor, where the walls were covered with oil portraits of suffragists. When she asked them to identify the women in those portraits, they couldn’t name a single one.39
• This scholarship shed little light on Wonder Woman. Her debt to Greenwich Village bohemianism, socialism, free love, androgyny, sex radicalism, and feminism; Holloway and Marston’s relationship to suffrage; their family arrangements; Jack Byrne and Fiction House; Wonder Woman’s ties to Olive Byrne, Ethel Byrne, and Margaret Sanger—this history hadn’t been forgotten; it had been deliberately and carefully hidden.
• For a long time, no one paid much attention to the fact that the creator of Wonder Woman was also the inventor of the lie detector test.
• By the 1980s, lie detector tests were being administered on two million Americans every year. The Reagan administration attempted to stop security leaks by ordering random testing: during his presidency, more than two hundred thousand government employees were required to take lie detector tests.
• * Wonder Woman didn’t begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank. The fight for women’s rights hasn’t come in waves. Wonder Woman was a 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.