by John Man
In 1918, Marston was sent to Camp Upton, New York, for six months to treat shell-shock victims. The librarian there was a certain Marjorie Huntley (née Wilkes), a deeply committed suffragette. They started an affair, which ceased when Marston returned to Harvard, where he got his PhD in 1921. Both he and Holloway read Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race. She was keen on Greek, and had a special love of Sappho, poetess and Lesbian, literally and perhaps sexually. All this had interesting consequences for the creation of Wonder Woman, as we shall see.
There is a fourth to be added to the list of characters: Olive Byrne, Ethel Byrne’s daughter and Margaret Sanger’s niece. She did medicine at Tufts, her tuition being paid for by her aunt’s new millionaire husband, J. Noah Slee. She was radical, witty and popular. She wore on her wrists heavy silver bracelets, one African and the other Mexican. She had a fat friend who loved candy and helped her with her maths (bear with me: it’s relevant). She cut her hair like a boy, dressed like one as well, and was a vital source of contraceptives for her female friends.
In 1925, Tufts acquired William Marston as a new assistant professor of psychology. Aged thirty-two, he was now vastly overweight – ‘Not fat,’ as Olive Byrne described him later, ‘just enormous all over’; and also, she said, ‘the most genuine human being I’ve ever met.’ He was equally taken with her. She received As in Experimental Psychology and was soon acting as his assistant, principally with his work on what he called ‘captivation’, what we would call ‘bondage’, because bondage and submission were part of the college induction rituals that the participants seemed to enjoy. Marston was very interested in submission and dominance, which, along with compliance and inducement, were (according to his theory) the four primary emotions. Soon after, Olive Byrne moved in with Marston and Holloway.
This story is drifting in a rather strange direction. Marston has a wife, has had a mistress and now has a third woman, much younger, living in the family home. It should be a recipe for disaster. But these were interesting times, full of novelty and experiment, psychological, social and sexual. Every week, the four of them – husband, wife, mistress (when she was around), acolyte and second mistress – used to meet in Boston at the apartment of Marston’s aunt, Carolyn Keatley, along with five others. Keatley was a nursing supervisor who believed that this was the beginning of a New Age, the Age of Aquarius, the age of peace and love.fn4 Notes of what happened suggest that this was a sort of sexual training clinic to explore an interplay of dominance and submission. Marston was particularly interested in what he called ‘love binding’, the importance of inducing submission by tying and shackling. Females,
in their relation to males, expose their bodies and use various legitimate methods of the love sphere to create in males submission to them, the women mistresses or Love leaders, in order that they, the Mistresses, may submit in passion to the males … During the act of intercourse between the male and his Mistress, the male’s love organ stimulates the inner love organs of the Mistress, and not the external love organs … If anyone wishes to develop the consciousness of submission, he or she must keep the sexual orgasm in check.
They were a threesome, and occasional foursome. What they all seemed to be after was independence. How to achieve this, given the difficulty of dealing with male dominance, marriage, children and careers? The question was not just theirs. It was asked in countless magazine articles, with no good answers. Holloway had a particular problem: she got pregnant, but had no intention of leaving her job as an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Between the four of them, there was a solution. Marston could keep his mistress, Holloway would have the baby, and Olive Byrne would give up her PhD to look after it. It would be fine as long as the arrangements were kept secret, which was something at which everyone in this little group had considerable talent.
Secrecy was vital, for professional reasons. All four collaborated in a way that would have been scandalous, indeed ruinous, if revealed, not only because of their domestic arrangements but also because they scratched each others’ backs to the point of professional corruption. Marston’s latest book, Emotions of Normal People, largely ignored by the press and academics, received a great review in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. It was written by Olive Byrne, who had collaborated with Marston on the book. He himself had never quite made it in academia. Now his lectureship (at Columbia) was not renewed, ostensibly because the post vanished, more likely because his interests were just too eccentric. Holloway helped by commissioning him to write an article for the Britannica, ‘Emotions, Analysis of’. Other than that, he was out of work and about to become a father. In his turn, Marston was happy to acknowledge his debt to his women.
He returned to the movies, and the network grew. At Columbia, one of his friends was Walter B. Pitkin, psychologist, journalist, American editor of the Britannica and thus Holloway’s boss. He and Marston used to go to movies together, and discuss the whys and wherefores of their psychological and emotional impact. In January 1928, in a publicity stunt, Marston and Byrne set up an experiment in a New York theatre, measuring the excitement – that is, blood pressure – in six pretty girls watching Greta Garbo in the silent movie Flesh and the Devil. The experiment with the ‘love meter’ was widely reported. By chance, Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Studios in Hollywood, was looking for a psychologist who would help with the coming age of talking movies and also find ways of pre-empting the strict rules of censorship. Laemmle read about the ‘love meter’ experiment and invited Marston to Hollywood as director of PR. He, Holloway, Byrne and the new baby, Pete, spent almost three years there, with Marston working on films that included Show Boat and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Marston got Pitkin hired as a story editor, and the two wrote a book together, The Art of the Sound Picture, offering advice on how to write a script with universal appeal, which meant giving it a flavouring of ‘erotic passion’.
While in Hollywood, the group took another step into deception and nonconformity. Olive Byrne married someone claiming to be William Richard, who was in fact William Marston. There would be two children, both named after their non-existent ‘father’, who (she told them) had died as a result of being gassed in the First World War. The three children could now be looked after by Byrne, while Holloway earned the money to support them, working from home, until Universal decided that what they really needed was a way to measure audience reactions, and opted for a rival lie detector, the polygraph.
Back the Marston entourage went to New York, to an apartment on Riverside Drive, where they were joined occasionally by Marjorie Huntley. Soon Holloway bore another child, a girl, and kept on working, while the others spent time in family places in Cliftonville, Massachusetts, and Cape Cod, with all four adults and the four children – not so much a family, more a commune – moving to Rye, New York state, in 1935. Holloway commuted daily to support everyone. They all did their bit. Everyone loved the children. Marston and Holloway formally adopted Olive Byrne’s two sons, who thereafter had two mothers. It all worked surprisingly well, this odd mix of feminism and love and commitment and secrecy swirling round a massive male weighing 21 stone 6 pounds (136 kilograms).
Olive Byrne landed a job as staff writer on an up-and-coming weekly called Family Circle. Writing under the name Olive Richard, her first article was a profile of Marston, whom she pretended never to have met, describing her own children as though seeing them for the first time – truth peppered with lies, as her whole life was. Fittingly, the article was called ‘Lie Detector’. There were to be many others with the same formula. Marston was doing odd writing jobs, yet still – after science, the law, films, advertising, writing and a good deal of self-promotion – had not found a proper outlet for his talents.
All this while, Margaret Sanger had been fighting to legalize birth control. In 1937, she arranged to have a crate of Japanese diaphragms mailed to her. They were seized as obscene and destroyed by US Customs. On appeal, the court ruled they were not obscene if prescribed by
a doctor. Soon afterwards, the American Medical Association endorsed birth control.
On 10 November 1937, Marston seized a window of opportunity to promote his latest book, a collection of self-help essays called Try Living. He called a press conference in the Harvard Club of New York and announced, ‘Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love, than man … They will clearly come to rule businesses and the nation and the world … The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy – a nation of Amazons in a psychological rather than a physical sense.’ The press loved it: ‘NEGLECTED AMAZONS TO RULE MEN IN 100 YEARS, SAYS PSYCHOLOGIST’ (Washington Post); ‘FEMININE RULE DECLARED FACT’ (Los Angeles Times).
The same year saw the birth of a phenomenon: comic books. They had started as cheap magazines made up of strips of newspaper cartoons, or ‘funnies’. For several years they were used to promote sales for half a dozen retailers: buy the comic for 5 cents, get a 5-cent reduction on whatever else you were buying. The business was dominated by Maxwell Charles Gaines, who realized that if there was a good market, he could commission his own comics, sell direct and keep the profits. Suddenly, here was a new art form, a crossover between books and movies. He founded All-American Publications to exploit this novel idea. Others followed, in a publishing explosion. Many websites track the titles, companies, editors, writers and artists who worked in a fury of creativity that would turn the 1940s into a Golden Age of comic books. In 1938, Action Comics introduced Superman (in Issue 8, an original copy of which has sold for over $3 million). By summer of 1939, Superman had graduated to a comic book of his own. He soon had dozens of rivals, one of them being Batman in Detective Comics (Issue 27, for which collectors today would pay over $1 million). At 10 cents a copy, comic books sold by the million to kids who would never have bought a book, and also to book readers like the Marston children.
The comic-book boom coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War. Superman suddenly seemed less of a fighter for justice, more like a Nazi Stormtrooper. Besides, some educationalists deplored comics. There was a great deal of violence in them. Some asked, were comics Fascist? A despicable campaign to undermine children’s minds?
It was Olive Byrne who gave Marston his opening into comic books. In a Family Circle article, she profiled him as the one man who could tell American mothers about the dangers and benefits of comics. Her formula was the same: she was a naïve reporter who had no connection with Marston, he the great psychologist. She quoted him as saying that Superman was an excellent model, developing ‘national might’ to protect ‘innocent peace-loving people’. Comics were fine, he said, as long as they didn’t show torture.
Max Gaines, or Charlie as he was to some, wanted to counteract the criticisms levelled at comics. He decided that an editorial advisory board would do the job, one member of which would have to be a psychologist. He happened to read Olive Byrne’s Family Circle article and saw a solution to his problem. He offered Marston the position of consultant psychologist on the advisory board of what had just become DC Comics (DC stands for Detective Comics).
Marston wondered about developing a different sort of superhero, one who conquered not through violence but through love. To which, according to one source,fn5 Elizabeth Holloway said, ‘Fine. But make her a woman.’ True or not, Marston was in a good position to follow up his Harvard Club announcement three years previously that women would – should – will – rule the world. What was needed, he told Gaines, was a female superhero, a latter-day Amazon.
He wrote up his experiences and arguments in an article published in the American Scholar a couple of years later, ‘Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics’. First, he pointed out the astonishing size of the potential readership: 1.5 billion comic strips in the 2,300 dailies, 2.5 billion in the comic sections of the Sunday papers. ‘They have become a seven-day, morning-afternoon-and-evening mental diet for a vast majority of Americans.’ Critics say comics are for only ‘the most moronic of minds’. No, because comics appeal to something fundamentally human: ‘They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial-box of consciousness … Pictures tell any story more effectively than words.’ They always have. With modern printing, comics have evolved way beyond anything comical, and beyond being just adventure strips: ‘Their emotional appeal is wish-fulfillment.’ That’s the appeal of Superman. But there’s a problem with Superman: there is no real drama because he is invincible. Sure, he does good, but might it not be possible to give kids a more constructive model?
It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing – love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. ‘Aw, that’s girl’s stuff!’ snorts our young comic reader. ‘Who wants to be a girl?’ And that’s the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
Max Gaines was sceptical. There had been heroines in comics, and they hadn’t worked.
Ah, countered Marston, ‘but they weren’t superwomen – they weren’t superior to men in strength as well as feminine attraction and love-inspiring qualities.’
‘Well,’ said Gaines, ‘if a woman hero were stronger than a man, she would be even less appealing.’
‘No,’ replied Marston, ‘men actually submit to women now. Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!’
Gaines reluctantly agreed to give it a go. ‘Well, Doc, I picked Superman after every syndicate in America turned it down. I’ll take a chance on your Wonder Woman. But you’ll have to write the strip yourself. After six months’ publication, we’ll submit your woman hero to a vote of our comic readers.’
Wonder Woman made her debut in All Star Comics Issue 8, in December 1941, with Marston credited as consulting psychologist and writer (under a partial pseudonym, Charles Moulton). ‘Introducing Wonder Woman’ opens with a sprinting figure dressed in a sporty, star-spangled skirt, as if made from an American flag. She has bracelets on her wrists and a tiara holding her dark, curly hair. The opening text, in easy-to-read capitals (and many exclamation marks!), joins past and present, hinting at her links with Greek gods, ignoring the fact that in Greek legends the Amazons were not Greeks or Greek allies, but enemies:
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 … WITH A HUNDRED TIMES THE AGILITY AND STRENGTH OF OUR BEST MALE ATHLETES AND STRONGEST WRESTLERS, SHE APPEARS AS THOUGH FROM NOWHERE … AS LOVELY AS APHRODITE – AS WISE AS ATHENA – WITH THE SPEED OF MERCURY AND THE STRENGTH OF HERCULES, SHE IS KNOWN ONLY AS WONDER WOMAN.
She lives on uncharted Paradise Island, peopled only by women. A plane crashes. A princess and her friend pick up the injured pilot and take him to hospital. The queen, Hippolyte (spelled in the Greek style), arrives to ask what’s going on. Papers on the man identify him as Steven Trevor, US Intelligence. The princess tends him and falls in love with him. The queen tells her why this is wrong, AND THIS IS THE STARTLING STORY UNFOLDED BY HIPPOLYTE, QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS, TO THE PRINCESS, HER DAUGHTER! The text continues in regular format, because there’s a lot to cram in.
‘In the days of Ancient Greece, many centuries ago, we Amazons
were the foremost nation on earth. In Amazonia, women ruled and all was well,’ until Hercules arrived. Hippolyte challenged him, knowing that she could not lose, because she had a magic girdle given her by Aphrodite, goddess of love. She won, but Hercules tricked the girdle from her and enslaved the Amazons, chaining them in manacles. Aphrodite helped Hippolyte regain the girdle. The Amazons freed themselves and left by ship to find a new home. But they all had to wear bracelets to recall the man-forged manacles, remind them ‘always to keep aloof from men’ and act as shields that can deflect bullets. They found Paradise Island, where there is ‘no want, no illness, no hatreds, no wars.’ The girdle gives them all eternal life.
Because of the deal with Aphrodite, the American must go home. A Magic Sphere reveals his world, for ‘we are not only stronger and wiser than men – but our weapons are better – our flying machines are more advanced!’ With it, the princess, as yet unnamed, has been taught ‘all the arts and sciences and languages of modern as well as ancient times’. What Hippolyte sees in the Magic Sphere is that Steve Trevor was the victim of a German plot, managed by the evil von Storm, whose accomplice praises his boss with the classic line: ‘The malignance of your ideas is refreshing, mein Herr.’ What to do? Hippolyte consults Aphrodite and Athena. They tell her the world is in a mess and that ‘American liberty and freedom must be preserved’. Steve Trevor must be sent back, and with him ‘your strongest and wisest Amazon – the finest of your Wonder Women!’ Races and competitions reveal the princess as the one. Hippolyte sends her off in – of all ridiculous things – an invisible plane, with a suitable American-style costume and a name at last: ‘Let yourself be known as Diana, after your godmother, the goddess of the Moon!’
