The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Marston is the central figure in the book, as everything Lepore writes about intersects in him: the Wonder Woman character and her roots in feminism and psychology, the origin of the lie detector test, and the polyamorous structure of the Marston family. Born in 1893, he graduated from Harvard in 1915, which was at a time when the struggle for woman suffrage was at its height. This had a profound and lifelong influence on him. Two other aspects of his undergraduate life had ramifications for the rest of his life, namely his psychological research with Professor Hugo Münsterberg on lie detection and his writing a prize-winning screenplay. The former resulted in an early career path while the latter led to his work in another form of storytelling—comics.

Marston’s family took the form it did at his instigation. He and his girlfriend Elizabeth Holloway married the same year they both graduated from college and began their life together in tandem: each studied for a law degree followed by a graduate degree in psychology. In 1925 he met Olive Byrne at Tufts University, where she was a student in his psychology classes. She became his research assistant in lie detection experiments and later his lover, living with the Marstons in New York and Connecticut.