The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  “You know, Mrs. Sanger,” he said, “that if she will only promise not to break the law henceforth I will free her at once.”

  “She is in no mental condition to promise anything,” Sanger said. “She will perish if you do not set her free. I will take the responsibility of guaranteeing that she will not violate the law if you will release her.”

  The governor signed the pardon that night.

  Byrne was released from prison. “Eyes closed, her face twitching with pain, Mrs. Byrne was carried from her hospital cell,” the New York Tribune reported. She went by stretcher from the warden’s office to a boat to Manhattan, and then by ambulance to the apartment at 246 West Fourteenth Street. She had served ten days of a thirty-day sentence.27

  She had also gained the spotlight. Sanger, meanwhile, had started a new journal, the Birth Control Review; its first issue appeared in February 1917. For an art editor, Sanger hired Lou Rogers.28

  During Sanger’s trial, the district attorney called to the witness stand a parade of women who had gone to the Brooklyn clinic.

  “Have you ever seen Mrs. Sanger before?”

  “Yess. Yess, I know Mrs. Sanger.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  “At the cleenic.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “To have her stop the babies.”

  Sanger’s attorney cross-examined the same witnesses:

  “How many children have you?”

  “Eight and three that didn’t live.”29

  In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception”: if a woman isn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. Sanger was found guilty on Friday, February 2, the day after Byrne was pardoned. Sentencing was scheduled for the following Monday.

  “Will you go on a hunger strike if you are sent to the workhouse?” a reporter asked. Sanger said she hadn’t decided.30

  On February 5, Sanger was sentenced to thirty days. She refused to pay a fine instead of going to prison. But she didn’t go on a hunger strike; she served her time. From the Queens County Penitentiary, on Long Island, Sanger wrote to Byrne, telling her sister that she had “made the finest fight ever made by any woman in the U.S.A.” (“Women from the workhouse keep coming here & ask for you,” she told her.)31

  “What would you think of speaking now & then?” Sanger asked Byrne. “Think it over.”32 But speaking, even now and then, would have violated the terms of Byrne’s pardon.

  The day Margaret Sanger was released from prison, Ethel Byrne met her and brought her home.33 But Ethel Byrne never forgave her sister for making that promise, on her behalf, to the governor of New York. She thought her sister had wanted, all along, to nudge her out of the movement.34 For the movement Margaret Sanger wanted to lead, Ethel Byrne was too radical.

  WOMAN AND THE NEW RACE

  WHEN OLIVE BYRNE WAS A GIRL, she spent the summer far from orphanages and convents, on the vaudeville circuit. Her uncles Billie and Charlie Byrne were female impersonators known as the Giddy Girls. “The BYRNE & BYRNE MUSICAL COMEDY COMPANY Announce Their Giddy Girls,” the billing read. In 1917 and 1918, they went from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Kansas and back again, three shows a day. Olive sang in the chorus.1

  In 1918, when Olive Byrne was fourteen, she left Nazareth Academy for the Mount St. Joseph Academy in Buffalo. She started studying to be a nurse. At St. Joseph’s, the nuns had crushes on the girls and the girls had crushes on the nuns, but Olive managed to keep out of trouble by becoming an excellent liar.2

  When she was sixteen, she visited her mother in New York; it was the first time she’d seen her in ten years. She stayed with Ethel Byrne and Rob Parker in the apartment in Greenwich Village, at 246 West Fourteenth Street. Margaret Sanger had gone to California, where she was writing a book she was calling “Voluntary Motherhood.” “Got off a chapter,” Sanger wrote in her diary one day. But Olive always insisted that it was Parker who wrote Sanger’s books.3

  Olive knew that her mother and Parker were sleeping together. At the time, she said, “I looked for sexual overtones in a handshake.” And she knew, too, that they weren’t married, even though “Aunt Margaret Sanger told me that Bob and Ethel had been married in Nantucket.” At that, Ethel Byrne had only laughed and said, “Margaret was known to invent ‘nice covers’ for circumstances that she thought might become a matter of scandal, embarrassing to herself.”4

  There was more than scandal at stake. The Espionage and Sedition Acts, passed in 1917 and 1918, had exposed many of Sanger’s and Byrne’s Greenwich Village friends to persecution. For their opposition to the war, Max Eastman, John Reed, and other editors and writers for the Masses were indicted for conspiracy. Emma Goldman spent two years in prison for opposing the draft. For making an antiwar speech in Ohio, Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. Sanger decided to cut all of her ties with anyone whose stance on the war threatened the success of the birth control movement. That meant leaving Ethel Byrne out of it. “I think what Margaret was doing was not so much dropping my mother per se as it was getting the movement away from the fringes of socialism, out of Greenwich Village and into uptown New York because the money for anything is where the people are who have money and not in your ragtag, bobtail people,” Olive Byrne later said. “My mother was not a good ‘uptown’ person: she was a rebel, far more a rebel than Margaret ever was and she never was anything else. You have to comply a little bit, you know, to get anywhere, and my mother wouldn’t comply with anybody for anything.”5

  Sanger forged new alliances. At her trial in 1917, the judge had ruled that Sanger had no right to distribute contraception but that physicians did, so Sanger decided to ally the birth control movement with doctors, and with an emerging medical literature on the importance of female sexual pleasure. In 1918, in the Birth Control Review, Sanger published an essay by Havelock Ellis called “The Love Rights of Women”; Lou Rogers contributed the drawings.6 The next year, Sanger, who had divorced her husband, began a decades-long affair with H. G. Wells. (A barely fictionalized Sanger is the hero’s lover in Wells’s autobiographical 1922 novel, The Secret Places of the Heart.)7 Meanwhile, Sanger courted alliances with conservatives and eugenicists, who were interested in using contraception to control the population of “mental defectives”—by force, if necessary. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League; six years later, a survey conducted of nearly a thousand of its members found them to be disproportionately Republican, from small towns or suburbs, and Rotarians. Faced with a membership who objected to her feminism, Sanger was forced to resign as the league’s president.8

  Women chained by unwanted pregnancies. From Sanger’s Birth Control Review, 1923 (illustration credit 12.1)

  Sanger’s feminism was of a very particular sort. Olive Byrne, living with Parker and Ethel Byrne in the winter of 1920, heard a lot about the book Sanger was working on, “Voluntary Motherhood,” whose title changed, first to “The Modern Woman Movement.” It was published in October 1920, two months after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, with a new title: Woman and the New Race. Between 1920 and 1926, Woman and the New Race and Sanger’s next book, The Pivot of Civilization, sold more than half a million copies.9

  Woman and the New Race placed the birth control movement on the stage of history as a struggle of even greater importance than suffrage. “The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude,” Sanger wrote, promising that contraception would “remake the world.” No freedom was more important: “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.” And to that revolt against slavery, no one had been more important than her sister: “No single act of self-sacrifice in the history of the birth-control movement has done more to awaken the conscience of the public or to arouse the courage of women, than did Ethel Byrne’s deed of uncompromising resentment at the outrage of jailing women who were attem
pting to disseminate knowledge which would emancipate the motherhood of America,” Sanger wrote. (Or maybe it was Parker who wrote that.) Woman, Sanger argued, “had chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal.”10 The time had come to break those chains.

  Wonder Woman chained by men. From “The Count of Conquest,” Wonder Woman #2 (Fall 1942) (illustration credit 12.2)

  Picturing and talking about women as chained and enslaved was ubiquitous in feminist literature, a carryover from the nineteenth-century alliance between the suffrage and abolitionist movements. Charlotte Perkins Gilman described a feminist this way: “Here she comes, running out of prison and off pedestal; chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”11 Chained women inspired the title of another of Sanger’s books, Motherhood in Bondage, a compilation of some of the thousands of letters she had received from women begging her for information about birth control; she described the letters as “the confessions of enslaved mothers.”12 An illustration commissioned by Lou Rogers for the cover of Sanger’s Birth Control Review pictured a weakened and desperate woman, fallen to her knees and chained at the ankle to a ball that reads, “unwanted babies.”13

  Birth control could unlock those chains. Voluntary motherhood, Sanger argued in Woman and the New Race, “is for woman the key to the temple of liberty.” The emancipation of women, Sanger argued, wasn’t a matter of ballots; it was part of a struggle that went all the way back to ancient Greece. It was a matter of liberating the “feminine spirit”—a spirit well represented in the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, who, Sanger explained, “sought to arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves,” their sexual selves. The feminine spirit, Sanger wrote, “manifests itself most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than maternity.” It had been suppressed by force: the laws, religions, and customs that had denied women recourse to contraception. Women’s struggles had led, the world over, to woman seeking out “violent means of freeing herself from the chains of her own reproductivity.” Overpopulation is the cause behind all human misery, including poverty and war, Sanger argued. But “force and fear have failed from the beginning of time.” Birth control is “the real cure for war” and “love is the greatest force of the universe.” When love defeats force, “the moral force of woman’s nature will be unchained,” Sanger predicted, and the world will be made anew.14

  “Let this book be read by every man and woman who can read,” Havelock Ellis said about Woman and the New Race.15 Among the people who read it were Mr. and Mrs. William M. Marston, who in 1920 were studying for graduate degrees in psychology, at Harvard and Radcliffe. The philosophy of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race would turn out to be the philosophy of Wonder Woman, precisely.

  With the beauty of Aphrodite, the wisdom of Athena, the strength of Hercules, and the speed of Mercury, she brings to America woman’s eternal gifts—love and wisdom! Defying the vicious intrigues of evil enemies and laughing gaily at all danger, Wonder Woman leads the invincible youth of America against the threatening forces of treachery, death, and destruction.16

  Women should rule the world, Sanger and Marston and Holloway thought, because love is stronger than force.

  Years later, when Marston hired a young woman named Joye Hummel to help him write Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne gave Hummel a copy of Woman and the New Race. Read this, she told her, and you’ll know everything you need to know about Wonder Woman.17

  THE BOYETTE

  IN 1922, when Olive Byrne was eighteen, she left Byrne & Byrne and the Giddy Girls and spent the summer with her mother in Truro, on Cape Cod. Margaret Sanger had bought a house in Truro from John Reed, who sold it to her in 1917, just before he left the United States for Russia to report on the Bolshevik Revolution. (Reed was arrested in 1918, on his way home.) Ethel Byrne bought a house nearby, a sea captain’s house on Mill Pond Road, a short walk from the railway depot. Byrne’s house had no electricity and nothing but a cast-iron stove in the kitchen. She put up a sign: EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY. She drank at all hours. She made a colored glass path out back, out of empty liquor bottles, planted neck side down. It’s still there, glinting, like sea glass, in the sand.

  Ethel Byrne liked to go to Provincetown, one town over, to visit friends. Truro and Provincetown were refuges for Greenwich Village radicals and a haven for homosexuals. Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger believed in free love, which meant they believed in sex outside of marriage, and considered marriage itself a form of oppression. People who believed in free love didn’t necessarily regard homosexuality as simply another form of sexual expression. But Ethel Byrne did.1

  In the summer of 1922, Ethel and Olive Byrne rode the narrow, winding road from Truro to Provincetown in a beat-up Ford touring car. One night, they went to a party where eight men were sitting with their arms around one another, kissing. “Though I’d heard of homosexuals,” Olive later wrote, “I’d never met any.”2

  Margaret Sanger didn’t spend the summer of 1922 in Truro with Ethel and Olive Byrne. She spent it on a world tour, raising money and contemplating an offer of marriage from a millionaire. She knew that accepting it would look like a betrayal of her principles; she also knew that the movement she was leading needed money. On September 14, 1922, Sanger’s forty-third birthday, she married J. Noah Slee, a sixty-one-year-old oil magnate, at a city clerk’s office in London. They kept the marriage secret for over a year. But Sanger must have telegrammed her sister and told her the news because days later and out of the blue, Ethel took Olive Byrne to New York, to a college directory office on Forty-second Street, and insisted that Olive apply to college, straightaway. Ethel Byrne might have been shut out of the birth control movement, but she was determined that her sister’s millionaire husband would pay for her daughter to become not a nurse but a doctor.

  At the college directory office, Olive and her mother pored over admissions applications and cabled admissions offices. The semester had already begun; most freshmen classes were already filled. In the end, Ethel Byrne decided to send her daughter to Jackson, the women’s college of Tufts University. Olive Byrne packed her bags, went to Grand Central Station, got on a train to Boston, and arrived at Tufts, alone and two weeks into the semester. Her tuition was paid by J. Noah Slee.3

  She threw herself into college life. She joined the glee club and the staff of the Tufts Weekly. She was chairman of the Social Committee. She was tall and lean; she played basketball. She won a leading role in the class operetta, The Wisdom of Neptune. She had her hair bobbed and got the nickname Bobbie. (She makes an appearance in Wonder Woman as a Holliday College student named Bobbie Strong.) Olive Byrne was a freethinker and a radical; she believed, too, in free love. “We thought we were very daring,” she said. She founded the Tufts Liberal Club, modeled on the Liberal Club her mother and aunt had belonged to in Greenwich Village, inviting anyone who was “a chivalrous free-thinker, ie, free of all bias” to join. She was elected vice president (the highest-ranking office open to a woman; the president was always a man).4

  In her studies, though, Olive Byrne was behind even before she arrived. “The important subjects for medical school, chemistry and biology, were not difficult for me,” she explained, but she found the math hard. At the end of the first semester of her freshman year, she was put on academic probation. She was saved, she liked to say, by a friend: “Deliverance came in the rotund shape of a junior named Mary Sears.” With Sears’s tutoring, Byrne scraped by with C’s.5

  Olive Byrne (front row, with headband) with Alpha Omicron Pi at Tufts in 1923, at the end of her freshman year. Mary Sears, the inspiration for Etta Candy, is to her right, wearing a tie.(illustration credit 13.1)

  Mary Sears was the inspiration for Wonder Woman’s best friend, a Holliday College student named Etta Candy. At Tufts, Sears belonged to a sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi. At Holliday College, Etta Candy belongs to Beeta Lambda. Like Ma
ry Sears, Etta Candy is “rotund.” She is addicted to sweets and is forever offering up exclamations like “Bursting brandy drops!” and “Great chocolates!” (Etta’s father’s name is Sugar Candy; her brother’s name is Mint. Her boyfriend goes to Starvard College.)6

  “You know, Etta, you ought to cut down on the candy. It will ruin your constitution,” Diana Prince tells her.

  “My constitution has room for lots of amendments.”7

  In an Alpha Omicron Pi photograph taken in the spring of Olive Byrne’s freshman year, she’s in the front row, wearing a short-sleeved, boat-necked polka-dotted dress and a flapper’s thick band in her short hair, smiling. Mary Sears is sitting next to her.8

  Wonder Woman is rescued by Etta Candy and the Holliday College girls. From “America’s Guardian Angel,” Sensation Comics #12 (December 1942) (illustration credit 13.2)

  “I wasn’t a very gung-ho type of sorority sister,” Byrne explained, but, in February of her freshman year, she was initiated. “I felt good about that,” she wrote. “At last I belonged to a family.”9

  During her sophomore year, Byrne helped manage the basketball team and performed in the class play. Her grades improved.10 She invited her aunt to campus to speak, as a guest of the Liberal Club. The Tufts administration refused to allow Sanger on campus, just as, years before, Harvard had banned Emmeline Pankhurst. Sanger was used to that. In 1929, when Sanger visited Boston to lecture at Ford Hall, city authorities banned her lecture, so she appeared on stage with a gag over her mouth, while Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. read a statement on her behalf. “I see immense advantages in being gagged,” it read. “It silences me, but it makes millions of others talk.”11 When the Tufts administration banned Margaret Sanger from campus, Olive Byrne arranged for her to speak instead at a church in Somerville, nearby.12 Wonder Woman is gagged by villains all the time, too. But in the end, she always has her say.