The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Jill Lepore

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House

  of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lepore, Jill, [date]

  The Secret History of Wonder Woman / by Jill Lepore.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-385-35404-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-385-35405-9 (eBook)

  1. Wonder Woman (Fictitious character) 2. Marston, William Moulton, 1893—1947.

  3. Superhero comic books, strips, etc. 4. Feminism—United States—History.

  5. Women’s rights—United States—History. I. Title.

  PN6728.W6L48 2014

  741.5′973—dc23

  2014011064

  Cover image: WONDER WOMAN is ™ and © DC Comics.

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v3.1

  To Nancy F. Cott,

  for making history

  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, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!

  —All-Star Comics, December 1941

  With the announcement yesterday that the popular comics heroine “Wonder Woman” will now rate a whole magazine to herself beginning July 22, M. C. Gaines, publisher of All-American Comics at 480 Lexington Avenue, also revealed officially for the first time that the author of “Wonder Woman” is Dr. William Moulton Marston, internationally famous psychologist.

  —Press release, All-American Comics, Spring 1942

  “What’s the idea of calling me Wonder Woman?”

  —Olive Byrne, Family Circle, August 1942

  Wonder Woman was from the start a character founded in scholarship.

  —The ΦBK Key Recorder, Autumn 1942

  Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.

  —William Moulton Marston, March 1945

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE SPLASH PAGE

  PART ONE Veritas

  1 IS HARVARD AFRAID OF MRS. PANKHURST?

  2 THE AMAZONIAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

  3 DR. PSYCHO

  4 JACK KENNARD, COWARD

  5 MR. AND MRS. MARSTON

  6 THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

  7 MACHINE DETECTS LIARS, TRAPS, CROOKS

  8 STUDIES IN TESTIMONY

  9 FRYE’D

  PART TWO Family Circle

  10 HERLAND

  11 THE WOMAN REBEL

  12 WOMAN AND THE NEW RACE

  13 THE BOYETTE

  14 THE BABY PARTY

  15 HAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE

  16 THE EMOTIONS OF NORMAL PEOPLE

  17 THE CHARLATAN

  18 VENUS WITH US

  19 FICTION HOUSE

  20 THE DUKE OF DECEPTION

  21 FEMININE RULE DECLARED FACT

  PART THREE Paradise Island

  22 SUPREMA

  23 AS LOVELY AS APHRODITE

  24 THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA

  25 THE MILK SWINDLE

  26 THE WONDER WOMEN OF HISTORY

  27 SUFFERING SAPPHO!

  28 SUPERPROF

  29 THE COMIC-BOOK MENACE

  30 LOVE FOR ALL

  EPILOGUE Great Hera! I’m Back!

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COMICS INDEX

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  From Wonder Woman #1 (Summer 1942) (illustration credit pre.1)

  THE SPLASH PAGE

  WONDER WOMAN is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history.

  Superman first bounded over tall buildings in 1938. Batman began lurking in the shadows in 1939. Wonder Woman landed in her invisible plane in 1941. She was an Amazon from an island of women who had lived apart from men since the time of ancient Greece. She came to the United States to fight for peace, justice, and women’s rights. She had golden bracelets; she could stop bullets. She had a magic lasso; anyone she roped had to tell the truth. To hide her identity, she disguised herself as a secretary named Diana Prince; she worked for U.S. military intelligence. Her gods were female, and so were her curses. “Great Hera!” she cried. “Suffering Sappho!” she swore. She was meant to be the strongest, smartest, bravest woman the world had ever seen. She looked like a pin-up girl. In 1942, she was recruited to the Justice Society of America, joining Superman, Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern; she was the only woman. She wore a golden tiara, a red bustier, blue underpants, and knee-high, red leather boots. She was a little slinky; she was very kinky.

  Over seven decades, across continents and oceans, Wonder Woman has never been out of print. Her fans number in the millions. Generations of girls have carried their sandwiches to school in Wonder Woman lunch boxes. But not even Wonder Woman’s most ardent followers know the true story of her origins. She’s as secret as a heart.

  Wonder Woman, newspaper strip, May 12–13, 1944 (illustration credit pre.2)

  In an episode from 1944, a newspaper editor named Brown, desperate to discover Wonder Woman’s secret past, assigns a team of reporters to chase her down. She easily escapes them, outrunning their car in her high-heeled boots, leaping like an antelope. Brown, gone half mad, suffers a breakdown and is committed to a hospital. Wonder Woman, taking pity on him, puts on a nurse’s uniform and brings him a scroll. “This parchment seems to be the history of that girl you call ‘Wonder Woman’!” she tells him. “A strange, veiled woman left it with me.” Brown leaps out of bed and, not stopping to change out of his hospital johnny, races back to the city desk, where he cries out, parchment in hand, “Stop the presses! I’ve got the history of Wonder Woman!”

  Brown’s nuts; he hasn’t really got the history of Wonder Woman. All he’s got is her Amazonian legend.

  This book has got something else. The Secret History of Wonder Woman is the result of years of research in dozens of libraries, archives, and collections, including the private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston—papers that have never been seen by anyone outside of Marston’s family. I read the published material first: newspapers and magazines, trade journals and scientific papers, comic strips and comic books. Then I went to the archives. I didn’t find anything written on parchment; I found something better: thousands of pages of documents, manuscripts and typescripts, photographs and drawings, letters and postcards, criminal court records, notes scribbled in the margins of books, legal briefs, medical records, unpublished memoirs, story drafts, sketches, student transcripts, birth certificates, adoption papers, military records, family albums, scrapbooks, lecture notes, FBI files, movie scripts, the carefully typed meeting minutes of a sex cult, and tiny diaries written in secret code. Stop the presses. I’ve got the history of Wonder Woman.

&
nbsp; Wonder Woman isn’t only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism, which hasn’t been altogether good for feminism. Superheroes, who are supposed to be better than everyone else, are excellent at clobbering people; they’re lousy at fighting for equality.

  But Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book superhero. The secrets this book reveals and the story it tells place Wonder Woman not only within the history of comic books and superheroes but also at the very center of the histories of science, law, and politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hard-boiled detective. Wonder Woman’s debt is to the fictional feminist utopia and to the struggle for women’s rights. Her origins lie in William Moulton Marston’s past, and in the lives of the women he loved; they created Wonder Woman, too. Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book character because Marston was no ordinary man and his family was no ordinary family. Marston was a polymath. He was an expert in deception: he invented the lie detector test. He led a secret life: he had four children by two women; they lived together under one roof. They were masters of the art of concealment.

  Their favorite hiding place was the comics they produced. Marston was a scholar, a professor, and a scientist; Wonder Woman began on a college campus, in a lecture hall, and in a laboratory. Marston was a lawyer and a filmmaker; Wonder Woman began in a courthouse and a movie theater. The women Marston loved were suffragists, feminists, and birth control advocates. Wonder Woman began in a protest march, a bedroom, and a birth control clinic. The red bustier isn’t the half of it. Unknown to the world, Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century, was part of Marston’s family.

  Wonder Woman, disguised as a man, trying to hide an injured Steve Trevor from reporters. From “Racketeer’s Bait,” an unpublished Sensation Comics story (illustration credit pre.3)

  Wonder Woman has been fighting for women’s rights for a very long time, battles hard fought but never won. This is the story of her origins—the stuff of wonders, and of lies.

  PART ONE

  VERITAS

  From “In the Clutches of Nero,” Sensation Comics #39 (March 1945) (illustration credit p1.1)

  IS HARVARD AFRAID OF MRS. PANKHURST?

  WILLIAM MOULTON MARSTON, who believed women should rule the world, decided at the unnaturally early and altogether impetuous age of eighteen that the time had come for him to die. In everything, he was precocious.

  Moulton Castle, Newburyport, Massachusetts (illustration credit 1.1)

  He had arrived, however, remarkably late, or at least his mother thought so; for years, she had been under considerable pressure to produce him. She was one of five sisters; her only brother had died in 1861, after which her grieving father had built a turreted medieval manor north of Boston, where he’d closeted himself in a Gothic library in the tallest of its crenellated towers to write a treatise titled Moulton Annals, in which he traced his family back to the Battle of Hastings, in 1066. One Moulton had signed the Magna Carta; another—“thin-flanked, broad-chested, long-armed, deep-breathed, and strong-limbed”—had tramped through the pages of Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders. Measured against the valiance of such men, the annalist, a fainthearted veteran of the American Civil War, could hardly fail to find his own derring and doing a disappointment. (“Capt. Moulton’s enterprise was made evident by his attempt to establish a large carriage manufacturing business,” he wrote about himself, feebly.) The further his researches progressed, the more he despaired of his descendants: girls who glided idly over the parquet floors of Moulton Castle in lacy, wasp-waisted gowns, their hair twisted on the tops of their heads in tottering piles. Susan and Alice never married; Claribel and Molly bided their time. That left Annie, a spinster schoolteacher. In 1887, she married Frederick William Marston, a merchant of quality woolens for gentlemen’s suits; he was, it was whispered, beneath her. And so it came to pass that, upon this unpromising match, Captain Moulton staked the succession of a lineage that dated back to the Norman Conquest. At last, in 1893, at the late age of thirty-four, Annie Moulton Marston gave birth to a baby, a boy. They named him William. The conqueror.1

  The Moulton sisters inside the castle, 1885. Left to right: Susan, Claribel, Molly, Alice, and Annie (illustration credit 1.2)

  It might be said, then, that it was at once a betrayal and rather in the spirit of these romantic beginnings that in the winter of 1911, eighteen-year-old William Moulton Marston, a student at Harvard College, procured from a chemist in Cambridge a vial of hydrocyanic acid, with which he prepared to end his life.

  William Moulton Marston in 1894 (illustration credit 1.3)

  He had been born in a three-story Victorian house on Avon Street, in Cliftondale, Massachusetts. He was cherished; he was adored. His mother and alike his aunts, having no need to divide their attentions, lavished them upon him, tucking him into their laps. He ate Sunday dinner at Moulton Castle. He liked to gauge the distance between the genuine and the fake; he collected stuffed birds. He won his first school prize when he was seven years old. He held literary ambitions: he wrote poems and stories and plays.2 His mother detected signs of genius.

  His boyhood philosophy of suicide is what happens when pragmatism, fed by observation, finds a nest in the home of a very clever child, unquestioned by his parents. On Avon Street, a neighbor of the Marstons’ one day looked in the bathroom mirror, said, “What the hell,” and slit his throat.3 Boy Marston turned this over in his mind. “From the age of twelve to my late twenties,” he later explained, “I believed firmly in suicide.” If success could be achieved with ease, he reasoned, life was worth living; if not, “the only sensible thing to do was to sign off.” 4

  He was not, early on, tempted to sign off: he triumphed at everything he attempted. He grew tall and devilishly handsome, even if his ears poked out. His hair was dark and curly, his chin broad and dimpled. He grew from cub to lion. In eighth grade, at Felton Grammar School, he fell in love with a sharp, spindly girl named Sadie Elizabeth Holloway. She was whip-smart. She’d come to New England from the Isle of Man; she was a Manx. The next year, he was elected class president and she class secretary; no other outcome had been, to eitherof them, imaginable.5 Maybe it was then that he told her that they would name their first son Moulton.

  At Malden High School, Marston was elected class historian, president of the Literary Society, and editor in chief of the student literary magazine the Oracle. He wrote a class history in the form of a conversation with Clio, the goddess of history, “she, first of all the nymphs who sprung from Zeus.” He presided over a debate about woman suffrage. He played football: a six-foot, 184-pound left guard. During his senior year, his team won the state championship. When Charles W. Eliot, the emeritus president of Harvard, came to speak to the senior class, Marston decided where his destiny lay. “The effect of Harvard upon the after life of a man cannot be estimated,” he wrote in the Oracle.6 On his college application, in the blank marked “Intended Occupation,” he wrote one word: “Law.”7 His mind was unclouded by any doubt of his admission.

  Marston in 1911, as a Harvard freshman (illustration credit 1.4)

  He moved to Cambridge in September 1911, lugging a trunk stuffed with suits and books into a cramped room in a boardinghouse on the corner of Hancock Street and Broadway, east of Harvard Yard. And then he met, for the first time, an obstacle.

  “I had to take a lot of courses that I hated,” he explained. English A: Rhetoric and Composition was a required course for freshmen. “I wanted to write and English A, at Harvard, wouldn’t let you write,” he complained. “It made you spell and punctuate. If you wrote anything you felt like writing, enjoyed writing, your paper was marked flunk in red pencil.”8

  “During my Freshman year,” he wrote, “I decided that the time had come to die
.”9 English A had crushed him. But the course that convinced him to kill himself was History 1: Medieval History, taught by Charles Homer Haskins.10 Haskins, who wore a waxed, handlebar mustache, was dean of the graduate school. His interest was medieval scholasticism, the subject of his monograph The Rise of Universities. Later, he founded the American Council of Learned Societies. Professor Haskins’s Middle Ages weren’t half as swashbuckling as Captain Moulton’s Annals: Haskins loved scholars better than knights.

  History raises questions about the nature of truth. In a lecture Haskins delivered to freshmen, he distinguished the study of the past from the investigation of nature. “The biologist observes plants and animals; the chemist or physicist conducts experiments in his laboratory under conditions which he can control,” Haskins said. “The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe.” Instead, the historian has got to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it is unreliable.11 Haskins loved pawing through the cluttered junk drawer of the past and finding the gemstones among the shards of broken glass. To Marston, everything in that drawer looked like rubbish.

  “I didn’t care who had married Charlemagne’s great-grandmother’s sister, nor where Philip had breakfast the day he wrote a letter to the Pope,” Marston explained. “I’m not saying such facts are unimportant, only that they didn’t interest me and that I had to learn them. So I made arrangements to procure some hydro-cyanic acid from a chemist friend.”12

  Hydrocyanic acid kills in less than a minute. It smells of almonds. It is also the poison that Henry Jekyll uses to kill himself in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a story published in 1886, which Marston had read as a boy in his bedroom on Avon Street, a story about a man who becomes a monster.13