Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  Marston made a very specific, and very accurate, reference with his use of the brank. The specificity alone is peculiar enough, suggesting he might have been more into bondage then he let on publicly. How did Marston know about St. Lazare’s prison and its unique use of the brank? There’s an interesting lead.

  In the early twentieth century, newspapers regularly bought ready-made articles from large syndicates to fill up their page counts. The International Feature Service included a Europe-based writer named Carl De Vidal Hunt, who wrote a six-part series entitled “As the Fabulous French Women’s Prison Falls After 14 Years, Comes the First Look-in on Its Million Secrets,” a thorough history of St. Lazare’s prison published in American newspapers in 1932. One of the article’s most shocking revelations was the prison’s use of the leather brank. We can’t know if Marston ever read this series, but there aren’t many other references to St. Lazare’s and the brank elsewhere. Also, two of the six parts of the article were dedicated to white slavery, in which naïve girls were duped and forced to do all sorts of unpleasant work for cruel men, much like every Marston Wonder Woman story written.

  If Marston didn’t read the article, he still knew a lot about the prison and the brank. But if he did, it affected him so strongly that he remembered it for a decade. Either way, he ultimately referenced a bleak prison known for holding the father of sadism and put his heroine in a ridiculously degrading device in a comic book for children.

  This doesn’t sound like a man who was just using bondage as a metaphor. This sounds like a man who knew his bondage very well, a connoisseur who sporadically slipped in meticulous details about his fetish. There were curiously precise things like the brank, but there were creative things as well, like embedding Wonder Woman in a three-inch-thick statue of herself or freezing her in a block of ice or turning her into a being of pure color and shackling her inside a tube of boiling water meant to melt her like a crayon. The bondage was elaborate and detailed, and knowing that Marston thought it was acceptable to be sexually aroused by sadistically bound women casts his comics in a new light.

  Yet Wonder Woman escaped. Every single time. As much as we can call Marston a bondage fetishist, that Wonder Woman freed herself from every predicament redeems him on some level. Consider the brank: historically it was meant to silence women, to render them helpless. Both the scold’s bridle and the St. Lazare’s leather mask rendered a woman’s mouth ineffective. So what was the first thing Wonder Woman did when she was thrown in the tank and realized she was trapped in her lasso? She bit through the mouth of the brank, ripping it apart. She then used her teeth to undo the lasso, smashed her other bonds, and escaped. Wonder Woman literally tore apart the source of the brank’s power, straight away.

  Marston’s bondage fixation was fetishistic, even sometimes sadistic. Wonder Woman escaping these bondage scenarios was undoubtedly feminist, empowering, and redemptive. It seems that Marston created, and was himself, quite a paradox.

  The Interconnectedness of All Things

  When scholars and writers talk about the bondage in Wonder Woman, they usually do one of two things. They either call Marston a quack or a pervert and dismiss everything he wrote entirely, or they pretend that the bondage is inconsequential and focus on his progressive, feminist theories.

  Both the feminist and fetishist aspects of Wonder Woman came from the same place: Marston’s focus on submission, which surfaced in everything he wrote. On the one hand, he believed that women were the superior sex and would soon rule the world, leading him to create a strong female character who could defeat any foe and escape any predicament. On the other hand, the way Marston depicted submission led down a crooked road that resulted in the sadistic, sexual objectification of his heroine. Complicated and contradictory, the two sides cannot be separated.

  Dismissing the bondage imagery to focus on the positive, feminist aspects of Wonder Woman means that one would have to dismiss the theory of submission that’s at the root of bondage. By cutting away those roots, you lose the foundation of Wonder Woman’s feminism as well. To state that this fetishism invalidated Wonder Woman’s feminism, one would have to ignore the undeniably unique and progressive elements of the character. Both approaches are wrong; Wonder Woman was feminist and fetishist.

  *The Golden Age Wonder Woman would certainly have a thing or two to say to Bella Swan about that vampire fellow and her complete and total inability to do anything for herself.

  *For an article about how women should take over the world, Byrne went out of her way to make Marston sound big and powerful. She referred to him as “the mammoth,” “the big man,” “the psychological giant,” and a wise “oracle” who responded with “rumbling whoops of laughter.”

  *Seabrook was an author who was particularly interested in Satanism and voodoo, sadistic bondage, and cannibalism, and participated in all of these activities. He was also an alcoholic and a drug addict. The sergeant called Seabrook his “idol.”

  *At the time, in many countries it was illegal for nonmedical professionals to purchase or sometimes even read medical texts about sex, so translating these scientific ideas into more practical marriage manuals was how this new approach to sex was disseminated.

  *Usually when people talk about sex, it is about the man penetrating the woman. Marston totally flipped that around, seeing sex as a woman literally capturing a man’s penis with her vagina. To Marston, that’s why men have erections. Women use their feminine wiles on men to get them erect, making their penises easier to capture.

  *These numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because there were a few panels that featured both men and women in some sort of bondage scene, so there’s a slight overlap.

  *This all sounds a lot like the penis capturing discussed earlier.

  *This was the favorite issue of the army sergeant who had written the fan letter to Marston.

  INTERLUDE 1

  Wonder Woman’s Extra Features

  These days, the contents of most comic books are very basic, consisting of the story and some ads. However, from the 1940s through the 1960s, comics were filled with a variety of extra features. They usually included an essay or a prose story, some funny or informative short comic strips, and sometimes games or puzzles. Wonder Woman had many of these supplementary materials until the 1968 revamp, although most of them are now long forgotten because they rarely get reprinted in modern collections. This is unfortunate, because the changes to these features perfectly mirrored the changes to Wonder Woman herself as she moved from the Golden to the Silver Age. The progressive, feminist features during Marston’s tenure gave way to strips about marriage and romance in the 1950s as our quirky, feminist heroine became much more interested in settling down as a housewife.

  The Golden Age

  Reviewing the contents of Wonder Woman #1, we get a sense of what was included in a Golden Age issue of Wonder Woman:

  It started with a “Wonder Women of History” strip about Florence Nightingale that covered all of Nightingale’s life; it showed how her caring for injured animals when she was a child led to her serving in war hospitals when she grew up, and how this then led to her founding schools for nursing. It’s her entire biography jam-packed into four pages.

  There was a two-page prose story by Jay Marr titled “A Message from Phil.” In the story, a girl named Phillys saved a submarine by communicating telepathically with her injured engineer twin brother, Phil.

  After the story came a two-page comic strip called “Sweet Adeline: Songs Without Music” by Art Helfant. A hapless family frustrated with running a hotel decided to dig for oil instead, and were overjoyed to find a geyser of black gold until a maintenance man told them they’d just hit the building’s oil tank.

  On the back inside cover was “Good Books Worth Reading,” a book recommendation from editorial advisory board member Josette Frank. She suggested Little Oscar’s First Air Raid by Lydia Mead, with art by Oscar Fabres, a timely choice.

  Below the book recommendat
ion was “Superman’s Secret Message (Code Pluto No. 8),” an encoded message that could be deciphered by readers who had the key. Take a crack at this impenetrable cipher: GWCZ NQZAB TQVM WN LMNMVAM QA BPM TQVM IB BPM EQVLWE AMTTQVO ABIUXA IVL JWVLA!*

  There was quite a range of features in the Golden Age, along with over fifty pages of Wonder Woman stories. It was a lot of material for ten cents!

  The comic strips changed nearly every issue but were a regular component of the series, though Phillys and Phil were never heard from again. Soon Wonder Woman was host to the adventure stories of Jon L. Blummer’s heroic aviator Hop Harrigan, which tied into the popular Hop Harrigan radio show. While there were various extra features in Wonder Woman, they were dwarfed by “Wonder Women of History”; its four pages often equaled or topped the page count of every other feature combined.

  “Wonder Women of History” was the pet project of Wonder Woman’s celebrity associate editor, Alice Marble, the tennis star who became involved in comics after she retired from her stellar sports career. The first issue of Wonder Woman included an announcement of Marble as the book’s associate editor and a message from Marble herself. She wrote that in her travels around the country she had realized “what a large part comics and comic books play in the life of the average American boy and girl!” and added, “Wonder Woman being my favorite comic character, I am very happy, indeed, to become associated with it!” Marble’s editorial role was fairly ceremonial, but she wrote “Wonder Women of History” every issue, and she eagerly looked for ideas for which women to profile.

  After the first issue premiered, Marble sent packages to several notable American women asking for their help. The package contained items like Wonder Woman #1 and a copy of Marston’s article “Women: Servants of Civilization” from Tomorrow magazine, as well as a letter. Marble wrote that “women still have many problems and have not yet reached their fullest growth and development” and that “Wonder Woman marks the first time that daring, strength and ingenuity have been featured as womanly qualities.” She asked each of the recipients to use an included form to list the famous women they’d like to see profiled and to send it back to her. The whole campaign was a very thorough operation.

  However, it looks like Marble left her editorial position after sixteen issues, or roughly four years, because the byline “as told by Alice Marble” no longer appeared on “Wonder Women of History” after Wonder Woman #16. While the exact details of her departure are unknown, it was likely for personal reasons. In 1944, the newly married Marble suffered a miscarriage after a car accident, then days later learned that her husband had been killed in the war. She attempted suicide soon after, though she survived and recovered,* but it’s reasonable to assume that comic books weren’t much of a priority for her during this time. Despite the loss of Marble, “Wonder Women of History” continued after her departure, profiling over fifty women before it was canceled.

  Each edition of “Wonder Women of History” followed the same pattern: the subject overcame some kind of adversity, usually related to her gender, and ultimately accomplished something of great importance. They were heroic stories, and showed how one woman could have a big impact and influence the world. As fantastic as Wonder Woman was, presenting real-life role models alongside her adventures showed that being a strong and successful woman wasn’t just for people with superpowers.

  Due to their short length, the writing on “Wonder Women of History” had to be to the point, but that didn’t stop Alice Marble and, after she left, famed editor Julius Schwartz from crafting thorough and engaging stories. The art was intriguing as well. It used a realistic style to present an authentic depiction of each woman’s historical setting. The first six strips were drawn by legendary comics artist Sheldon Moldoff, one of the main artists for Batman during the Golden and Silver Ages. He was followed by notable artists like Paul Reinman, Bob Oksner, and Alfonso Greene.* The strips were always engaging as well as informative.

  “Wonder Women of History” covered an impressive array of professions. No matter what career a young reader was interested in, the feature likely had an ideal role model. Medicine was the best-represented field, and the strips included five nurses, three doctors, and various medical researchers and health reform advocates. There were obvious choices like Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, but also many lesser-known women like Florence Rena Sabin, the first woman to graduate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Dorothea Lynde Dix, an advocate for the mentally ill whose work led to the creation of America’s first mental asylums.

  Women’s rights was a popular topic as well. The women profiled spanned the history of women’s fight for the right to vote, from Lucretia Mott and Emma Willard in the early 1800s to Susan B. Anthony in the latter half of the century to Carrie Chapman Catt and the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

  Abolitionists and civil rights advocates had several representatives too, including Sojourner Truth, a former slave turned abolitionist; Julia Ward Howe, the writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; and Lillian D. Wald, one of the founders of the NAACP. The rest of the biographies depicted a myriad of professions; there were three astronomers, three authors, two aviators, two First Ladies, two lawyers, two Nobel laureates, a journalist, a missionary, an opera singer, a saint, a sculptor, a sharpshooter, and many others.†

  As if showcasing strong women wasn’t enough, the feature was also diverse in terms of race and nationality. While Americans dominated “Wonder Women of History,” with Great Britain and France close behind, there were women like Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the famed wife of the Chinese general; Mumtaz Mahal, the Indian empress for whom the Taj Mahal was built; Emilja Plater, a Polish/Lithuanian revolutionary; and Queen Margrete, a medieval queen of Scandinavia, just to name a few. The Native American population was represented too, with Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark’s Shoshone guide.

  Between “Wonder Women of History” and the adventures of the amazing Amazon, the early years of Wonder Woman presented women as heroes in both a literal and a fanciful manner. Young girls could play as Wonder Woman in the backyard every afternoon after they studied hard at school each day to be the next Marie Curie or Clara Barton. This progressive double feature was incredibly rare in the 1940s; women had just earned the right to vote two decades before, and many people still weren’t pleased about that. While the war may have given women some new opportunities in the workforce, that quickly ended once the fighting was done and the men came home. Encouraging young girls to grow up to be anything other than housewives and mothers wasn’t a huge priority, but Wonder Woman told them they could be anything they wanted to be. However, by the late 1940s, the supplementary contents of Wonder Woman began to change.

  The Interregnum

  After Marston’s death in 1947 and before Wonder Woman’s shift to the Silver Age in 1958, the additional contents of the series were completely revamped. This started soon after Marston passed away, thus the timing seems more than coincidental. Marston died in May 1947, and 1948 saw two big changes to the book’s supplementary materials. First, “Wonder Women of History” lowered its page count, and second, the prose section shifted from stories to essays.

  Before 1948, almost every edition of “Wonder Women of History” had been four pages long, but the profile of Sacajawea in Wonder Woman #27, published in January 1948, was only two pages. As was the profile of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the following issue. The next two subjects, Dorothea Lynde Dix and Nellie Bly, each had three-page strips, but Jenny Lind and Mary Slessor were the only women to have a four-page profile after 1948. From January 1948 until the feature’s final appearance in May 1954, the twenty-nine women profiled got an average of 2.4 pages each.

  Furthermore, “Wonder Women of History” became increasingly intermittent over these six years. It sporadically skipped months, and then the feature disappeared for seven issues after Wonder Woman #57 in January 1953, finally returning more than a year later. But this return was sh
ort-lived; the next two women profiled, medical scientist Florence Rena Sabin and lawyer Gail Laughlin, were the last two new profiles, receiving only one page each. Laughlin’s profile was buried with the advertisements at the very end of the comic book, and after Wonder Woman #66 the feature was over for good. “Wonder Women of History” faded away without any fanfare, a rather inauspicious end for a strip that had been in Wonder Woman since its very first issue.

  The shift from prose stories to essays was, in its initial years, insignificant. The adventure stories were replaced by mildly interesting essays on seemingly random topics: the first essay was entitled “Race to the Top of the World” and discussed attempts to reach the North Pole; the second, “You Name It,” explained the origins of several common last names; topics for the next several essays included the calendar, the Colossus of Rhodes, pineapples, and unique headdresses from around the world. The essays were gender neutral, aimed only at those curious about fruit, headwear, or the ancient wonders of the world. This informative new endeavor lasted for a few years, but by 1952 the essays had a different aim. The topics were geared toward girls, as the following list of essays shows:

  Wonder Woman #51—“Let’s Dance!”

  Wonder Woman #52—“What the Well-Dressed Women Wore 300 Years Ago”