Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  Regardless of the veracity of his claims, Wertham’s allegations and the subsequent fallout prompted great changes throughout the comic book industry, including Wonder Woman.

  The Changing Content of Wonder Woman

  One of Wertham’s problems with Superman was his invulnerability, which made him an unstoppable agent of violence. It’s probably not a coincidence that Kryptonite, an element poisonous to Superman that rendered him powerless, appeared far more often and in different forms in Superman comic books in the years following the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. A more blatant example that’s been noted by many historians involved Batman’s supposed homosexuality. The addition of Batwoman to the Bat-universe in 1956, followed by Bat-Girl in 1961, is often seen as a direct response to Wertham’s allegations of homosexuality. These new romantic interests for the Dynamic Duo made the pair part of a nuclear family instead of two single fellows who enjoyed each other’s company almost exclusively. The changes Seduction of the Innocent prompted in Wonder Woman were more subtle, but there were clear shifts after 1954.

  In his very short critique of Wonder Woman, Wertham singled out the Holliday Girls as evidence of Wonder Woman’s supposed lesbian nature, but they hadn’t been a part of the series for years. The chart on the previous page shows the frequency of the Holliday Girls appearances by year for the entire Golden and Silver Ages. While the Holliday Girls were a staple of Marston’s tenure, appearing in every single issue, the beginning of Kanigher’s run in 1948 brought a speedy decline, and they disappeared for eight years starting in 1952. The Holliday Girls did come back sporadically after 1960, but never seemed to catch on. Kanigher wasn’t one to put a great deal of thought into his comic books, so their disappearance and subsequent reappearances were probably entirely random. The most likely explanation is that he just forgot about them for eight years. We can definitively state that Wertham had no effect on the Holliday Girls whatsoever, even though he mentioned them by name.

  Although Wertham didn’t mention Wonder Woman’s Amazon sisters directly, he talked about Wonder Woman being surrounded by women, so the chart below shows the frequency of the Amazons’ appearances. They were a regular part of the Marston years, dropped a bit once Kanigher took over, and then began to appear more frequently once the CCA started and Kanigher kicked off his new direction for the series. Quantitatively, this is the opposite of what we’d expect to see. After Wertham’s comments about relationships with other women, you’d think that the Amazons would appear less frequently after 1954. But graphs don’t always tell the whole story.

  Although Amazons appeared more often than they had before, how they appeared had changed. Before 1954, particularly during the Marston years, Wonder Woman associated with many different Amazons, like Mala, the warden of Reform Island. They all had competitions together and played bondage games, and there was an atmosphere of general camaraderie. After 1954, the Amazons became background players who barely said or did anything, and Wonder Woman interacted almost exclusively with her mother, Queen Hippolyta. The other Amazons were around, but Hippolyta was the only one with any dialogue or participation in the stories.

  This shift might have been spurred by Wertham. His claim that “mother-love is entirely absent” may have led DC to show Wonder Woman in a more familial environment to counteract Wertham’s lesbian accusations. After 1954, many of Hippolyta’s appearances involved her giving Wonder Woman advice about what to do with Steve. Similarly, a lot of Kanigher’s Wonder Girl stories had scenes where Hippolyta counseled her daughter on love, life, and beauty. Kanigher’s “Impossible Tales” teamed up everyone, with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot going on fun family adventures. Paradise Island became solely family oriented for Wonder Woman. A nice visit with your mother and bondage games with other young women were two very different things, and after 1954 Wonder Woman’s Amazon interactions were limited to the former.

  There were stark changes to the use of bondage imagery in Wonder Woman after 1954 as well. The chart on the next page shows every issue of Wonder Woman from 1952 to 1958, or Wonder Woman #51–102, in terms of the percentage of panels containing bondage imagery in each issue. In the early 1950s, the bondage totals were up and down, as we’d expect from the inconsistent Kanigher. His bondage totals were never as high as Marston’s, but it remained a fairly regular part of the book. The publication of Seduction of the Innocent didn’t do anything to halt the roller coaster of bondage totals, but things changed soon after the CCA was implemented.

  April 1955’s Wonder Woman #73 was the first issue of the series to have the seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority on its cover. The next issue was the last issue to have a total percentage of bondage higher than 10 percent. Three issues later, Wonder Woman #77 was the last issue to have the percentage over 5 percent. Starting with Wonder Woman #78 in November 1955, the bondage in the series nearly died out completely. Zero percent was the most common total and, compared to the years before, the use of bondage was almost nonexistent. There were no other notable changes to the book; Kanigher’s new direction for the series, with its new artists, origin, and stories, didn’t begin until Wonder Woman #98, twenty issues and almost three years after the bondage dropped off.

  There appears to be a clear connection between the implementation of the Comics Code and the amount of bondage in the series. Wertham never mentioned Wonder Woman’s frequent use of bondage, but there were portions of the Comics Code that could be read as applicable to bondage. The Code stated that “suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable” and that “sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.” It’s possible that DC Comics or Kanigher himself, all of whom were well aware of the sexual connotation of Marston’s approach to bondage, decided to curtail its use in order to conform to the Code.

  Wonder Woman’s lasso usage also puts the CCA at the center of bondage-related changes. Before the CCA, Wonder Woman used her lasso in 9 percent of the series’ panels, but after the CCA the usage fell to 5 percent, a drop of nearly half. While this was a big decline, the change in how she used it was even more significant.

  In the early 1950s, when Wonder Woman used her lasso she roped people about half of the time and roped objects for the other half. In the late 1950s, when Wonder Woman used her lasso she only used it on people about 10 percent of the time and lassoed objects 90 percent of the time.* So not only did Wonder Woman use her lasso less frequently after the CCA, she also used it to tie up people far less often. That’s a double bondage drop, with the CCA right in the middle of these significant changes.

  The fallout from Seduction of the Innocent and the creation of the Comics Code Authority had some influence on the series. A writer would have to go out of his way to avoid bondage to get such a low percentage with Wonder Woman. After all, her main weapon was a lasso! It appears that someone decided to eliminate bondage from the series, and the timing suggests it was because of the Comics Code. There’s no smoking gun to prove this claim, no interoffice memo from DC Comics or some such, but the numbers speak for themselves. Wertham, who unknowingly went after Marston’s comics with his Holliday Girls outrage and inadvertently stumbled onto the book’s possible lesbian subtext, unintentionally was the catalyst for the death of Marston’s favorite metaphor.

  The Real World Carries On

  The Golden Age Wonder Woman and the typical American woman of the 1940s were different in many ways, but at their core both embarked on a new role for women in a very complicated environment. Wonder Woman was a new kind of hero with several complex subtexts, while women had new wartime jobs and duties while managing their responsibilities at home and the difficulties of the war years. The Silver Age Wonder Woman was better defined by simplicity; over the years, Kanigher undid most of Marston’s complexity, resulting in a character who was no longer unique, whose heroic mission was a hassle that stopped her from getting married, who didn’t fight real criminals, who let her boyfriend agg
ressively control their relationship, and who lacked any sort of metaphor or subtext other than the importance of romance and marriage. The Silver Age Wonder Woman retreated to a traditionally feminine role, and the rest of popular culture from this era would have you believe that all American women did the same.

  Cold War culture and domestic containment resulted in a focus on women solely as wives and mothers, happy homemakers who spent all of their time caring for their family. The rapid spread of suburbia facilitated this role, and American popular culture perpetuated the image of this ideal woman who found complete contentment in domesticity. Sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show, as well as magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, furthered this message of domestic, suburban bliss. It seemed that everyone was happy in the late 1950s, and if they weren’t it was because they were living outside of this ideal life. However, these cheery depictions weren’t completely accurate. In reality, the 1950s were a complicated time for women, and the simplicity of the Silver Age Wonder Woman wasn’t at all mirrored in the real world.

  The 1950s are often seen as a sort of lost decade for women, an unfortunate period between their new roles during World War II and the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, but this wasn’t the case. The progress made during the war didn’t disappear altogether when it ended, and second wave feminism didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere two decades later. Throughout the 1950s, women played pivotal roles in social change that improved their position in society. Many women who remained in the workforce after the war were involved in union activities, helping to gain better wages and benefits for all workers. Among these benefits were better hours, maternity leave, and on-site child care for many professions.

  Also, women were heavily involved in the civil rights movement, attending protests, marches, and sit-ins across the nation to fight for equal rights and civil liberties. After Martin Luther King Jr., the name most commonly associated with the civil rights movement is probably Rosa Parks, who famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955. Beyond Rosa Parks, innumerable women of all colors and classes were involved in every level of the civil rights movement. In fact, the civil rights movement was both inspiration and a breeding ground for many women who later got involved in the women’s liberation movement. The advances made by women in the 1950s improved their quality of life and paved the way for future progress.

  The 1950s were also remarkable in terms of women taking control of their sexuality. Many women worked tirelessly in the area of birth control, with great success. Beginning in 1953, Katharine Dexter McCormick funded research on oral contraception that ultimately resulted in the first birth control pill, also known as “the pill,” in 1960. McCormick’s friend and Marston’s aunt Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was also a tireless advocate for birth control and worked to educate women about their birth control options and change laws that limited these options. Although we tend to associate the battle for women’s sexual freedom with the late 1960s, the groundwork was laid in the decades before. Women worked together to help each other however they could, from large organizations like Planned Parenthood to secret, local networks where women could procure illegal means of birth control or abortions. The pill wasn’t available to all American married women until 1965 or to unmarried women until 1972, while many states had laws against other birth control devices, and abortions were illegal until Roe v. Wade in 1973. Because of these prohibitions, women banded together to assist each other and to fight to secure their reproductive rights.

  Strides were made in other areas of sexuality as well; the postwar era saw the emergence of a strong and vibrant lesbian subculture. The authorities viewed these women as deviants and tried to harshly repress them, but their efforts were in vain and the subculture continued to thrive. Lesbian feminism was a significant aspect of the women’s liberation movement and was, yet again, firmly rooted in the 1950s.

  The participation of women in activities outside of the domestic norms showed that many women weren’t satisfied with the lives that the dominant Cold War culture had prescribed for them. This dissatisfaction was most famously articulated in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which hit the shelves in early 1963. Friedan looked at the lives of white, middle-class, suburban women and found that the role society had foisted upon them wasn’t fulfilling for many of them. Through surveys, Friedan discovered that women lacked their own identity and that their lives revolved entirely around their families and not around themselves. Friedan blamed the media, like women’s magazines and advertising, for causing women to focus solely on housewifery, and she argued that this trapped women in a lifestyle where their efforts were undervalued and their desires and potential were set aside for those of their husbands or children.

  The Feminine Mystique was an instant success; within three months of its publication it reached the New York Times bestseller list despite its unknown author and daring subject matter. Many women identified with Friedan’s characterization of the “Problem That Has No Name,” this dissatisfaction with suburban life, and many historians cite the publication of The Feminine Mystique as the spark that brought about the women’s liberation movement. It had been building throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, with innumerable women laying the groundwork for its emergence, and in 1963 the lives of American women were about to change forever.

  When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in December 1955, Wonder Woman was playing baseball with a gorilla and fighting a robot octopus in Wonder Woman #78. When the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the pill as an oral contraceptive in June 1960, Wonder Woman went to a parade with Steve and fought giant balloon animals brought to life in Wonder Woman #114. When The Feminine Mystique was published in February 1963, Wonder Woman was at a carnival with Steve and was turned into a giant by nefarious aliens in Wonder Woman #136. The world was changing in many ways, but Wonder Woman wasn’t changing with it.

  If anything, Wonder Woman was sinking further into innocuous story lines and defining herself more and more through her relationship with Steve. In Wonder Woman #136, a confident Steve told Wonder Woman what to do and extolled the pleasure of his company, stating, “All you have to do is perform a few feats for charity—and spend the rest of your time with me—enjoying yourself!” Steve dictated Wonder Woman’s activities and later described her as “my Wonder Woman.” The Silver Age Wonder Woman wasn’t in tune with the lives of women in the real world, particularly those who were working to improve the role of women in American society. The 1950s saw the gradual undoing of Wonder Woman’s complex nature, and by the early 1960s, Wonder Woman was a generic superhero. But the comic book industry was about to change again, and these changes would lead to a radical new direction for Wonder Woman as the Bronze Age began.

  *Recent research by Carol Tilley shows that Wertham’s treatment of these teen testimonials was often sloppy. In one instance, he combined two separate anecdotes into one testimonial. Twice he overemphasized how the reader felt about Batman, omitting that one teen thought other comics characters better fulfilled his erotic fantasies and rewording another testimonial to put the focus more on Batman. This is problematic in terms of research methodology, but the fact remains that several gay teens read homoerotic undertones in Batman comics. The issue is one of degree, not whether or not teens read these undertones in the first place.

  *As far as I can tell, this editorial doesn’t exist in any issue of Psychiatric Quarterly between 1941 and 1954, the years covering Wonder Woman’s first appearance to the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham was terrible at citations, and it’s possible the editorial comes from somewhere else, but I’ve searched every issue of Psychiatric Quarterly to no avail.

  *His only exception was a case where two women in a prison experienced weight loss and a general deterioration of health because of “the excessive amount of passion response repeatedly evoked by their female lovers”�
��or, basically, having too much sex.

  *The Golden and Silver Age Wonder Woman sounded a lot like Ron Burgundy, though I don’t think Wonder Woman ever exclaimed “By the beard of Zeus!”—and “Great Odin’s raven!” is a whole other pantheon.

  *In Wonder Woman #131 in July 1962, Kanigher wrote a story explaining all of Wonder Woman’s expressions. Diana Prince said, “Sappho was so sensitive, she couldn’t stand the sight of suffering in any form,” and that’s why Wonder Woman says “Suffering Sappho!” However, a) that doesn’t make any sense, and b) that’s not at all what Sappho was known for.

  *Statistics side note: These numbers are for the percentage of Wonder Woman’s lasso usage, not for the overall book. Given the shift to campy, fantastical stories in the Silver Age, you might think that Wonder Woman stopped lassoing people and started lassoing spaceships and giant birds instead. This could account for the difference, not the CCA. But when we look at the numbers per issue, we see that while lassoing people dropped from 5 percent of the panels per issue before the CCA to less than 1 percent after, the percentage of panels where Wonder Woman lassoed objects remained at 5 percent for both periods. Objects didn’t replace people; she tied up fewer people but the same number of objects, and the overall drop in the total use of her lasso came from tying up people far less often.