The Secret History of Wonder Woman

A main theme of the book is women’s rights and feminism, which infuses the text from start to finish. The author’s main thesis is that the character of Wonder Woman was based on Progressive Era struggles for women’s rights. The very first chapter sets the tone for this, as biographical information for William Marston shares space with the background of the woman suffrage movement, culminating in Emmeline Pankhurst’s visit to Cambridge to speak to Harvard students when he was an undergraduate there. Lepore then continues to braid these two strands throughout the text.

While excerpts of Wonder Woman comics are used in early chapters to make connections to events in the women’s rights movement, the main section on Wonder Woman doesn’t appear until the third and final section of the book (more than halfway through). The earlier chapters lay the groundwork by focusing on Marston’s early life and the efforts of Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne to advance the cause of women’s rights. The author then shows how they intersect in Wonder Woman. As Lepore notes, Sanger’s era is often called “first wave” feminism and the 1960s and 1970s referred to as the “second wave,” but “there was plenty of feminist agitation in the 1940s in the pages of Wonder Woman” (225).