The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“William Moulton Marston, who believed women should rule the world, decided at the unnaturally early and altogether impetuous age of eighteen that the time had come for him to die. In everything, he was precocious.”

In two sentences, Lepore introduces the main character, the main theme (feminism), and something of Marston’s personality. The trait of precociousness also hints at Marston being ahead of his time, which he was in his thoughts on women as well as love and sex. The author also grabs the reader’s attention right away by mentioning suicide.

“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. ‘All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,’ as one feminist explained. Feminists rejected the idea of women as reformers whose moral authority came from their differentness from men—women were supposedly, by nature, more tender and loving and chaste and pure—and advocated instead women’s full and equal participation in politics, work, and the arts, on the grounds that women were in every way equal to men.”

Here the author explains the difference between women’s rights and feminism. The book deals with both, as do the Wonder Woman comics. Lepore covers the history of the women’s rights movement, spanning most of the 20th century while also drawing upon its 19th-century roots as far back as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. As such, it’s important to note the evolution of the movement, and she does that in part here. Marston and Holloway came of age at the same time feminism is emerging, and its principles had a strong influence on their thinking and ultimately the Wonder Woman comics.

“Harvard not only didn’t allow women to speak on campus, it also didn’t admit women as students. But Wonder Woman can’t keep away. She’s like Emmeline Pankhurst, swooping in and stirring everyone up. Much of the action in Wonder Woman comics takes place at ‘Holliday College’: the name’s a mash-up of ‘Holloway’ and ‘Holyoke.’ Once, disguised in a varsity sweater with an H on it—an unmissable allusion to a Harvard varsity sweater—Wonder Woman attends a lecture at Holliday College given by Dr. Hypno. Holliday College is full of sinister professors with names like ‘Professor Manly’ whose chief villainy is their opposition to feminism. Wonder Woman’s arch-nemesis is Dr. Psycho, an evil professor of psychology whose plan is ‘to change the independent status of modern American women back to the days of the sultans and slave markets, clanking chains and abject captivity.’”

This is an example of what Lepore does throughout the book, in effect mining Marston’s past for connections to Wonder Woman. As she relates the events of Marston’s life, she inserts information like the above, which are passages that explain the origins of some details, themes, and story lines found later in the Wonder Woman comics.