by Hanley, Tim
Discussing female superheroes, Wertham wrote: “They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent.” He added that “in no other literature for children has the image of womanhood been so degraded.” This was partly inaccurate; the alter egos of many female superheroes had jobs, including Wonder Woman. Wertham restricted the notion of proper womanhood to homemaking and child-rearing, which explains his assumption of lesbianism for Wonder Woman and other female superheroes.
To Wertham, a woman was supposed to be a wife and mother and take care of the home. Running off to fight crime was the opposite of being a homemaker and, following his logic, the opposite of being a wife and mother was being a lesbian. Wertham believed that if a woman wasn’t actively engaging in or pursuing a domestic, maternal lifestyle, then she just didn’t like men or children, and thus she was a homosexual. Wonder Woman’s adoption of Jan had lesbian overtones because it was impossible for Wonder Woman to be maternal; because she was a superhero, she was automatically a lesbian and lost any sort of maternal, nurturing potential.
Furthermore, Wertham decried the fact that “Wonder Woman is not the natural daughter of a natural mother, nor was she born like Athena from the head of Zeus.” In 1954, the Golden Age Wonder Woman origin story still stood, and she was made of clay and brought to life by the gods. Her lack of a “natural” mother or father placed her further outside of maternal, familial norms than her fellow female heroes and made her the archetype for Wertham’s narrow-minded lesbian deduction.
It sounds ridiculous, but this assumption of lesbianism is the only way to understand Wertham’s discussion of Wonder Woman. While he provided extensive evidence and clinical research for his discussion of a homosexual reading of Batman, he seemed to feel that a lesbian reading of Wonder Woman was as plain as the nose on his face. He even wrote that “if it were possible to translate a cardboard figure like Wonder Woman into real life, every normal-minded young man would know there is something wrong with her.” This was Wertham at his worst, and it takes away from his interesting arguments and progressive stances on other issues.
Amusingly, while Wertham’s baseless suppositions and sexist assumptions about Wonder Woman were terrible, shoddy work, his conclusion inadvertently stumbled onto a fascinating aspect of the character. A close look at Marston and Kanigher’s work on Wonder Woman shows that a reading of Wonder Woman as a lesbian isn’t off base at all.
Suffering Sappho!! Was Wonder Woman a Lesbian?
Marston’s key psychological work, Emotions of Normal People, didn’t mention lesbians, lesbianism, or any derivation of the term, but this was solely an issue of terminology. “Lesbian” suggests exclusivity in sexual preference, namely that you are a female who is attracted only to women. The terms “lesbianism” and “lesbian” were well established in psychological parlance by the time Emotions of Normal People was written, but Marston, as he was wont to do, used his own terminology.
Marston spent a lot of time discussing sexual relations between women as a part of “female love relationships.” He noted that women tended to form very close bonds and care for each other deeply, but he also found “that nearly half of the female love relationships concerning which significant data could be obtained, were accompanied by bodily love stimulation.” By “bodily love stimulation,” Marston meant sexual acts. He called this a physical love relationship, but was quick to explain that this was in addition to physical relationships with men.
Marston wrote that “in several cases, well-adapted love relationships with husband and children were not felt to be sufficient, without supplementary love affairs with other women.” This wasn’t lesbianism, but instead a type of bisexuality where heterosexuality was the default and sexual relations with other women were additional. Marston explained these relationships by referencing his earlier claim that women had twice as many love organs as men. With twice as much love to go around, he suggested, it was only logical that women would engage in sexual relationships with each other.
In the 1920s, sex and attraction outside of heterosexuality was seen as a perversion of the norm, and as a medical and psychological problem. Havelock Ellis argued that lesbians were women with aberrant masculine tendencies and described them as “the pick of the women who the average man would pass by.” The notion that nonheterosexual relationships were problematic was widespread and, as evidenced by Wertham in 1954, continued for some time.
Even Marston wasn’t immune to these theories; he argued that male homosexuality was a purely dominant relationship and not at all healthy for the participants. But while Marston avoided the term “lesbian,” his analysis of the effects of sexual relationships between women bucked the trend of his peers’ condemnation. He stated that:
With regard to the possibly deleterious effect upon women’s physical health of this type of love relationship with other women, I have been unable to verify […] that such love affairs between girls were always injurious to their physical health.*
From a psychological perspective, Marston found that “girls and women who indulge in this form of love expression appear to feel no abnormality or unnaturalness about it.” While not an endorsement of lesbianism, this was certainly an endorsement of sexual relations between women.
Marston’s examination of female love relationships may have been reflected in his personal life as well. His polyamorous relationship with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their lover, Olive Byrne, sounds similar to the sort of relationship Marston described in Emotions of Normal People. He even opened his discussion of “Woman’s Passion” with a preamble about his naïveté when it came to female love relationships, and how he learned much more about them “with the invaluable aid of my collaborators,” meaning Elizabeth and Olive. The fact that Elizabeth and Olive stayed together for nearly forty years afer Marston’s passing, until Olive’s death, suggests that there may have been more to their association than a mutual love of Marston. Marston may have lived in the middle of a female love relationship, and this could have influenced his work.
This, however, brings up a chicken/egg question for Marston. Much like it was difficult to determine whether his enjoyment of bondage led to DISC theory or if his discovery of DISC theory led to his prominent use of bondage, so too is it tricky to determine which came first: Marston’s advocacy of female love relationships or his enjoyment thereof. With bondage, we found that the fixation extended past metaphor into fetishism, and the same appears to be true here.
Emotions of Normal People contained many anecdotes about patients Marston had treated and stories he’d heard that illustrated his arguments concerning dominance and submission. These usually took the form of a paragraph that simply laid out the story, but there was one illustration that went above and beyond the rest. It included pages of tables and surveys, as well as pages and pages more of extensive examination of the data. It was one of the most, if not the most, detailed portions of the entire book and, perhaps not surprisingly, it involved both bondage and pleasure between women.
This extensive study concerned a “baby party,” a sorority initiation where freshmen were dressed as babies, blindfolded and bound, and then given various punishments, including paddling and performing stunts. Olive Byrne and Marston attended such a party at Jackson College in 1925, and Marston found it absolutely fascinating. Marston reported that the event was fun for nearly everybody involved; the initiators experienced the “excited pleasantness of captivation emotion” while for the initiates “about three-fourths of the girls physically made captive to other girls at the Baby Party experienced pure, pleasant passion emotion.” Marston ultimately came to the conclusion that:
it seems undoubtedly to be the fact that girls, acting as inducers, can evoke intense and very pleasant passion emotion from all normal and well-balanced girls […] without administering genital organ stimulation directly or indirectly.
This meant that women didn’t need to engage in direct sexual activit
ies with other women in order to evoke a sexually pleasurable response. This pleasure could come from simply submitting to another woman and being made helpless to their power, like in a bondage situation. The great detail of this section of Emotions of Normal People is noteworthy, and Marston continued this sorority theme, with the accompanying theme of sexual pleasure between women, in his other work.
In Venus with Us, Marston’s sex romp novel about the life of Julius Caesar, women engaged in bondage with each other and willingly became each other’s slaves. While this is certainly interesting in terms of Marston’s inter-female sexual pleasure fixation, an entire chapter of the book, entitled “Ladies’ Night in the High Priest’s Palace,” dealt with initiations remarkably similar to the baby party in Emotions of Normal People.
These initiations involved a mystery cult instead of a sorority, but the basic scenario remained the same: a group of women initiated a younger group of stripped down, blindfolded, and bound women into the ways of their secret society. Their cult worshipped a goddess named Bona Dea, and when Caesar asked if he could attend their initiations, Servilia told him, “Bona Dea is a woman’s goddess exclusively. The sacred rites practiced by us initiates would certainly interest you—intensely—if you could only know them. But you can’t.” The new initiates at the ceremony were “very young girls, some of them still in their early teens, with a few young married women recently converted to the service of the Good Goddess,” which was reminiscent of older classmates initiating freshmen.
Although the rituals of the ceremony weren’t detailed specifically, it was strongly hinted that they were of an erotic nature. Servilia’s teasing of Caesar suggested that something salacious was going on, and the action cut away from a neophyte beginning her initiation with the words “Cassandra felt the hands of several women busy themselves with her garments …” That seems to be a rather telling ellipsis.
Marston’s continuing fixation inevitably brings us to the Holliday Girls and their sorority, Beeta Lambda. A scene in Sensation Comics #3, the second appearance of the Holliday Girls, depicted Etta Candy and her fellow sorority sisters initiating Eve, a new member. The panel showed Etta swinging a piece of candy from a string in front of the blindfolded initiate, who was down on all fours and got paddled every time she missed when she tried to catch the candy in her mouth. Eve’s initiation continued in the next issue, where the kneeling initiate was paddled by a hooded girl and then chained to a radiator with a dog collar around her neck. When Eve escaped to attend a previous engagement, Etta and the girls gave chase with Etta calling out, “Woo-woo! Eve got away! Come on, girls! Bring your ropes and paddles.”
These initiation rituals were common for the Holliday Girls. In Wonder Woman #12, for example, Etta punished two initiates who were late for their duties by sentencing them to be bound, blindfolded, and left in the middle of the Holliday College campus, after which they had to find their way back to the sorority house in their impaired state. In another issue, an initiate called Etta the “grand mistress of spanks and slams.” Since we know that these initiations were always a source of sexual pleasure in Marston’s other work, we can conclude that inter-female sexual enjoyment was portrayed in Wonder Woman comics.
As for Wonder Woman herself, she too must have enjoyed female love relationships in a sexually pleasurable manner. Bondage was a regular game on Paradise Island, but we need to build on our previous conclusions. The “erotic element” Marston thought inherent in bondage wasn’t just a voyeuristic kink for readers; given Marston’s sexual interpretation of sorority initiations, the bondage was sexually pleasurable for the participants as well.
This raises an interesting point, because while female love relationships were always in addition to heterosexual relationships, there were no men on Paradise Island. If the only sexual activities the Amazons engaged in involved women via their bondage games, this would imply that they were, in fact, lesbians. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was a citizen of both Paradise Island and the world of men. But the Golden Age Wonder Woman regularly rebuffed Steve Trevor’s advances and returned home to engage in bondage games, and with enthusiasm. She had a far better time with her Amazon sisters than she ever did with Steve. Marston might have been trying to tell us something.
One of Wonder Woman’s signature catchphrases also hinted at lesbianism. She regularly exclaimed “Great Hera!” or “Merciful Minerva!”—referencing deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon like those with a Christian background say “Good Lord!” or “Oh my God!” These deities were some of the most powerful goddesses in the pantheon; Hera was the wife of Zeus, the chief god, and Minerva, the Romanized form of Athena, was the goddess of wisdom and the daughter of Zeus. Wonder Woman had a long list of expressions, and all of them had a similar origin: “Shades of Pluto!” “By Neptune’s trident,” and “Thunderbolts of Jove!” were just a few of her favorites, and all of them were connected to Greco-Roman gods.* But another of Wonder Woman’s signature catchphrases, “Suffering Sappho!” didn’t reference any deity at all.
Sappho was an ancient Greek poet from the sixth century BCE, best known for her poems in which female protagonists extolled their love for other women. Her home, the island of Lesbos, was the basis of the term “lesbian” when it was coined in the late nineteenth century, and the terms “lesbianism” and “sapphism” both referred to an erotic relationship between women until “lesbian” became the commonly used term in the early twentieth century. This was an unusual name for Wonder Woman to reference, to say the least. Hera and Minerva make sense as part of a go-to phrase, but Sappho was best known for poetry concerning love and attraction between women. To mention Sappho was to make a very specific reference to this type of attraction; Sappho wasn’t really known for anything else. If Marston or Kanigher were looking for alliteration, they could have referenced Selene, the goddess of the moon, or perhaps Semele, the mortal mother of the god Dionysus. “Suffering Sisyphus!” would have made a lot of sense. Mentioning Sappho only had one connotation and she was mentioned often, though not by Marston.
There’s one Sappho reference that was undoubtedly Marston, when he had Wonder Woman exclaim “By Sappho’s stylus!” in Wonder Woman #6. Sappho wasn’t mentioned again until a few years later in some Joye Murchison stories. In Comic Cavalcade #12, the Amazons watch a movie in Sappho Hall, and then Wonder Woman said “Suffering Sappho!” for the first time in Wonder Woman #20 in November 1946. The expression appeared a few times after this in stories attributed to Marston, but this is a gray area for credits. Marston was very sick at the time, so his scripts were likely coauthored or tweaked by Murchison or Kanigher, if he even wrote them at all.
When Kanigher took over full writing and editing duties for the series with Wonder Woman #30, “Suffering Sappho!” became a staple of Wonder Woman’s vocabulary. From Kanigher’s first issue in 1948 to when he revamped Wonder Woman in 1958, “Suffering Sappho!” was exclaimed over 160 times, or almost 2.5 times an issue.*
You have to dig into Marston’s work to see hints of lesbianism in his Wonder Woman, but Kanigher was much more direct. He mentioned Sappho frequently, and decades later in an interview with Trina Robbins he stated outright that all of the Amazons were lesbians. While Kanigher never had Wonder Woman engage in any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with another woman, it’s hard to get much clearer than that.
As much as we’ve been critical of Kanigher, it’s possible that he was subverting his own comic book. On the surface, Wonder Woman was all wrapped up in her relationship with Steve and wished she could settle down and become a housewife. However, the constant referencing of Sappho undercuts this heterosexual focus. In fact, the more romantic the comics got, the more Wonder Woman exclaimed “Suffering Sappho!”
Sensation Comics got a makeover late in 1949. The logo switched to a softer, more flowing script, and the series got a new cover artist. Instead of Wonder Woman battling bad guys and deflecting bullets, the covers showed Steve carrying Wonder Woman across a bro
ok or bringing her flowers. Sensation Comics suddenly looked like a romance comic more than a superhero book. Before this change, Wonder Woman said “Suffering Sappho!” occasionally during Kanigher’s run on the book, about 0.5 times per issue. After the new romantic style began, Wonder Woman said it nearly three times as often, at roughly 1.4 times per issue. More romance with Steve equaled more references to a lesbian poet. Of course, this could just be coincidental, but maybe this was Kanigher’s way of hinting at Wonder Woman’s true sexual leanings.
So was Wonder Woman a lesbian? To answer that question we have to go beyond the comic book itself and really read between the lines. Going purely by the comic book, Wonder Woman wasn’t a lesbian. There was nothing in the books that specifically identified her as such, and it’s unlikely that her young readers were familiar with Emotions of Normal People, Venus with Us, or Greek erotic poetry from the sixth century BCE. Ultimately, Wonder Woman was a fictional character and her life only consisted of the panels on the page. We can’t make any claims about Wonder Woman’s sexuality because it just wasn’t addressed. If anything, through her flirtations with Steve, and their dating in the Silver Age, the comic books implied that she was simply heterosexual. There were no overt references to Wonder Woman being attracted to women.
What we can say is that in light of Marston’s other work and Kanigher’s later interviews and references to Sappho, it’s fairly reasonable to interpret Wonder Woman as either bisexual or lesbian. Based upon the evidence, we can’t make any definitive statement about Wonder Woman herself, but we can state that due to Marston’s proclivities and the hints in his comic books, there may have been a bisexual or lesbian subtext to the series. It’s similar to Wertham’s claim that Batman and Robin weren’t gay but could be read as gay, except that in this case the evidence is far more compelling; I’m not aware of Batman’s creators writing any books that endorsed a homosexual lifestyle. As for Kanigher’s time on the book, it seems that he saw Wonder Woman as a lesbian, and he regularly hinted at this fact. In the end, Wertham was inadvertently onto something, in terms of both the Holliday Girls and Wonder Woman herself. His research was poor and his evidence laughable, but he accidently stumbled upon a conclusion that had some merit.
