Searching for the Amazons

by John Man

  Postscript: A few statistics53

  The 588th/46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment served for three years, June 1942-May 1945. How many achieved what? Many figures are quoted, few of them well sourced. Twenty-four thousand-plus sorties? That’s easily possible – forty planes (maximum) with two- or three-person crews flying several sorties per night for three years. The tonnage of bombs dropped? Perhaps 3,000 (23,000 is one figure given online, which must be nonsense, because U-2s/Po-2s could carry only 300 kilograms, maximum). Twenty-four pilots made Heroes of the Soviet Union, out of thirty-three awarded to women in the whole war. Twenty-six dead in combat, out of a total of 124 Night Witches (pilots and navigators), backed up by ninety-nine mechanics, armourers and engineers.

  47 A pomposity is a collection of professors, as a murmuration is a collection of starlings.

  48 Though in 2017 Choo Waihong published her account of a near-matriarchy, The Kingdom of Women, describing the Mosuo people of Yunnan, whose households are run by grandmothers, with the men acting as labourers and mates without parental responsibilities. The history of the matriarchy debate is covered in great depth in Cynthia Eller’s Gentlemen and Amazons. See Bibliography.

  49 An Ant-37, newly redesigned and redesignated as a DB-2. It was a prototype, never mass-produced.

  50 Pilot Evgeniia Zhigulenko said, ‘Marina Raskova . . . went to Stalin about this. And strange as it may seem this monster told her “You understand, future generations will not forgive us for sacrificing young girls.” It was she herself who told us this, this fascinating woman.’ (Quoted originally in Helene Kayssar and Vladimir Pozner, Remembering War: A U.S.-Soviet Dialogue (OUP, 1990); requoted by Reina Pennington. See Bibliography.

  51 They had started with outdated two-seater Su-2 light bombers, but upgraded to Pe-2s in June, with three seats: pilot, navigator and gunner/radio operator.

  52 His name was Oberfeldwebel (Staff Sergeant) Josef Kociok, a flying ace who had determined to deal with the troublesome Night Witches. He became a Nachtjäger, ‘night hunter’, one of a small specialist unit against which the Night Witches had no defence. He died in September 1943 when his plane hit a crashing Russian Ilyushin DB-3 bomber and his parachute failed to open.

  53 Mainly from Reina Pennington’s Wings, Women, and War.

  12

  WONDER WOMAN: THE SECRET ORIGINS OF AN AMAZON PRINCESS

  ‘BEFORE SHE WAS WONDER WOMAN, SHE WAS DIANA, PRINCESS of the Amazons.’ So begins the storyline of the 2017 blockbuster movie. As always with superheroes, the plot involves saving the world, which suggests that the film is nothing but fun, at best, and utterly lacking in significance. Not at all. Wonder Woman is a lot more important than you might think. How an Amazon from several centuries BC became today’s superhero (or superheroine; usage varies) is not the point of the movie, but it’s a story in its own right, leading back almost 100 years into an America of dominant men, a few rebellious women, and one man who was, amazingly, a feminist in one respect – he dreamed up Wonder Woman as an icon of female power and independence. ‘Feminism made Wonder Woman,’ as the Harvard history professor Jill Lepore puts it in her superb account,54 ‘and then Wonder Woman remade feminism.’

  The starting point is the mix of radical themes, events and people forming the campaign for women’s rights before, during and after the First World War, many of which – the ones I focus on here – played into the themes, events and people forming the context for the creation of the original Wonder Woman and her Amazonian origins. In what follows, watch out for themes now familiar to us, including: Greeks; a women’s homeland of infinite happiness; sexual equality; a rejection of marriage; obsessions about secrecy, lies and truth; patriotism; bondage; and an obscure item of jewellery. The story is an intriguing mixture of very public exposure and a veil of secrets.

  Take first the extraordinary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist sociologist who wrote Women and Economics (1898) and several other very serious books arguing for women’s rights. Luckily for her cause and her readers, she also had a sense of humour. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she lived out her ideals, leaving her husband, Charles Stetson, and taking their daughter Katherine to California. After the divorce, she and her ex agreed that Katherine should live with Charles. He married one of Charlotte’s best friends. Everyone got on well. She remarried (George Gilman, a first cousin) and moved back to New York, where she continued lecturing and writing: half a dozen non-fiction books and three novels by 1915, winning wide respect for both her feminism and her socialism. She worked ferociously hard, writing every word of her own magazine, the Forerunner (1909–16), in which she serialized her three utopian novels, expressing her anti-traditionalist views: that women were as courageous, creative, generous and virtuous as men; that male dominance was not a given; that culture can trump biology; that revolution should happen; and that it should come as the result of non-violent action by women.

  Herland, written in 1915 and one of those novels serialized in the Forerunner, is the story of three male adventurers who stumble on ‘an undiscovered country of a strictly Amazonian nature’ (the only mention of ‘Amazon’ in the book). It is the homeland of a society of women who live without men, in which virgin birth produces only girl children and in which community is all. The women are anti-Amazons, driven to cooperate, not to fight and conquer. There are no family homes, which Gilman thought created inequality and inhumanity. All the women look after all the children. Explaining their ways to the three aghast intruders, they were used by Gilman to spotlight the oddities of American society. Why, one of the women wonders innocently, do those Americans with the fewest children have the most servants? Terry, the most macho of the three men, complains that even young and beautiful women are unsexy because they lack deference and fragility. In fact, the women have had sexual desire bred out of them, and they are the better for it. If the men want to marry them, they can only do so on the basis of equality.

  In later life, after her husband’s death, Gilman moved back to California, where she was joined by her first husband’s wife, herself a widow. In 1932, she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Three years later, having finished her autobiography, she used chloroform to kill herself.

  Gilman was writing at a time when women’s rights were a major issue. Women were now going to college in ever-increasing numbers,55 and among them were ‘suffragists’ demanding the vote – ‘New Women’ who were often referred to as Amazons. In 1908, Mary Woolley, president of the first women’s college, Mount Holyoke, helped found the National College Equal Suffrage League. She was also a feminist, aiming to establish gender equality in all things, leading an American equivalent of Emmeline Pankhurst’s campaign in Britain. Included in this was birth control, spearheaded by Margaret Sanger in the magazine Woman Rebel, with its challenging subhead: ‘No Gods, No Masters’. She campaigned to break the bonds of prejudice and prudery wherever she saw them. In the US, as in England, there were arrests for distributing information about contraception, with frequent trials, imprisonments and hunger strikes. Margaret Sanger’s sister, Ethel Byrne, was the first woman prisoner in the US to be force-fed. Sanger got her released by guaranteeing that she would not break the law again, something for which Byrne never forgave her. Sanger pursued her agenda in the teeth of official opposition. Just after the 19th Amendment gave women the vote in August 1920, she published Woman and the New Race, arguing for even greater equality and for birth control – ‘the revolt of women against sex servitude’, as she called it – a cause for which she travelled internationally, including to England, where she, being an advocate of free love and needing money for her work and family, married the oil millionaire J. Noah Slee, then started a long-lasting friendship and occasional love-affair with H. G. Wells.

  One of the New Women at Mount Holyoke was Elizabeth (then known as Sadie) Holloway, whose boyfriend William Moulton Marston was at Harvard. Marston was doing research in experimental psychology and also dabbling in ‘photoplays’, as s
creenplays for silent movies were known. He was clever, handsome, restless, ambitious, and not at all the bulky figure he would become. He had had an idea: that telling a lie raised blood pressure, and that if this could be measured during an interrogation it would be possible to see if someone was telling the truth or lying. He and Holloway did an experiment. Using crime stories written by Holloway, Marston asked questions about the fictional crimes, identifying liars by their rising blood pressure and then comparing his results with judgments made by mock-juries. There were 107 tests. He was right 103 times – 96 per cent. The jury was right about 50 per cent. That’s how the lie detector was invented. His paper, based on these and later experiments, remained fundamental to future research into lie detection56 (it would ultimately prove rather less reliable, and was never accepted in court). Marston and Holloway married in 1915, and both went to law school, he in Cambridge (Harvard), she in Boston (Radcliffe).

  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.57 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 comm
itment 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 selfhelp 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.