The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Margaret Sanger gagged, in protest of censorship (illustration credit 13.3)

  Wonder Woman and her mother gagged. From “The Four Dooms,” Wonder Woman #33 (February 1949) (illustration credit 13.4)

  Feminism and the birth control movement were not without effect on the sex lives of college girls. In the 1920s, college women were far more likely to engage in premarital sex, and to achieve orgasm, than their counterparts just ten years earlier. In his pioneering sex surveys in the 1930s, Alfred Kinsey found that of women born before 1900 (like Sadie Holloway, born in 1893), only 14 percent had sex before marriage, compared to 36 percent of women born between 1900 and 1910 (like Olive Byrne, born in 1904). Women of Olive Byrne’s generation, who came of age right after women gained the right to vote, were also more likely than women of Holloway’s generation to embrace sex as a source of pleasure. But they were less likely than women of Holloway’s generation to tie sex-as-pleasure to feminism.13

  During Christmas vacation, Olive Byrne worked in New York, at Margaret Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau, on Sixteenth Street. Sanger had opened the clinic, with Slee’s money, in 1923. At Tufts, Olive Byrne became the undergraduates’ source for contraception. Everyone knew she was Sanger’s niece. “Always there were people when I was in college coming around asking me if I knew birth control methods,” she said. “The only thing was you had to go to New York to get the material.” It helped if you could say you were a friend of Olive Byrne’s. “If any of the people you know at school are down in New York and want to come in and get some information you tell them to ask for me,” Sanger told her. “Tell them to say you sent them and we will take care of them.”14

  Olive Byrne during her senior year at Tufts (illustration credit 13.5)

  One way Olive Byrne got by at Tufts was by trading on her radicalism and her sophistication: she was voted the wittiest, cleverest, and most distinctive student in the class of 1926.15 And one way in which she was distinctive was her androgyny. During her senior year, she got her hair cut in what was known—for its boyishness—as an “Eton crop.” She dressed like a boy, too, a fashion far more common in En-gland than in the United States. “The ‘Boyette’ not only crops her hair close like a boy but she dresses in every way as a boy,” the London Daily Mail reported in 1927. “Her ambition is to look as much like a boy as possible.”16

  In the fall of 1925, Olive Byrne, boyette, took a class with a wildly charismatic young professor who’d come from Washington, D.C., where he’d been involved in a sensational murder trial.17 She found him irresistible.

  THE BABY PARTY

  WILLIAM MOULTON MARSTON, professor of psychology, arrived at Tufts University in the autumn of 1925. He was thirty-two years old, and hulking. He weighed more than two hundred pounds. Since being arrested for fraud and fired from American University, he’d worked for the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, administering psychological tests to students in a school on Staten Island and to inmates in a Texas penitentiary. He’d also published an article in which he attempted to salvage his academic career by venturing into a new field: the study of sex.

  In the 1920s, psychologists were fascinated by sex, sexual difference, and sexual adjustment, not only because of Freud’s influence, but also because of the rise of behavioralism. Lewis Terman, who helped develop the IQ test, invented a test to measure “masculinity” and “femininity”; its purpose was to identify deviance. According to the behavioralist John B. Watson, feminism itself was a form of deviance: a feminist was a woman unable to accept that she wasn’t a man. “Most of the terrible women one must meet, women with the blatant views and voices, women who have to be noticed, who shoulder one about, who can’t take life quietly,” Watson wrote in the Nation, “belong to this large percentage of women who have never made a sex adjustment.”1

  Marston first revealed his fascination with sex and sexual difference in an article he published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology at the end of 1923. In “Sex Characteristics in Blood Pressure,” he reported on the results of an investigation he had conducted at Harvard between 1919 and 1921, aided by “Mrs. E. H. Marston” and “supplemented by subsequent work by the writer.” He’d wanted to discover in what ways women’s brains work differently than men’s. He and Holloway had conducted blood pressure tests on ten men and ten women. They’d tried to get them upset, and then they’d tried to arouse them.

  “With female subjects, the most effective sex-stimulus was found to be, not the presence or conversation of a strange man,” Marston reported, “but sex topics of conversation with a person well known.” He believed his study demonstrated that women are more emotionally volatile than men (“Emotions capable of producing major b.p. changes fluctuate within the female consciousness with great facility and rapidity, while any emotional influences that find their way into expression in the male organism tend to persist”) and that most of women’s emotions were founded in their sexuality (“there being a far greater number of adequate stimuli to sex-emotion in the female organism”). The emotion women were most likely to experience was anger, Marston reported; the emotion men were most likely to experience was fear. The kinds of statements that got women agitated were things like “I was so mad I could have killed her!” What got men riled were statements like “I may not get that teaching job.”2 But what this kind of research had most clearly proved to Marston was how much he liked doing this kind of research, especially the part about getting women excited.

  In the fall of 1925, a Tufts newspaper announced his arrival: “Dr. William M. Marston will be Assistant Professor of Philosophy, centering his attention particularly on psychology.”3 At American University, Marston had been a full professor and chairman of the Psychology Department. Tufts appointed him an untenured assistant professor. He was climbing down the academic ladder, not up. With every step down, his teaching load got heavier. At Tufts, he taught eight courses in two semesters: Experimental Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Comparative Psychology, the History of Psychology, the Psychology of Human Behavior, a research seminar, and two sections of Applied Psychology.4

  From “The Fun Foundation,” Sensation Comics #27 (March 1944) (illustration credit 14.1)

  Holloway didn’t come with him to Massachusetts. Instead, she took a job in New York, as managing editor of a psychology journal, Child Study: A Journal of Parent Education, where she worked with Josette Frank, an expert on children’s literature who was one of the journal’s editors.5 Child Study, started in 1924, was published by the Child Study Association of America; its purpose was to teach parents how to raise children. Using birth control, wealthier women were having fewer children; they were expected to devote more attention to them; they needed to be taught the science of motherhood. It was in this same spirit that Parents’ Magazine was founded, in 1926.6

  In his Experimental Psychology class at Tufts in the fall of 1925, Marston had as a student a girl whose hair was cut like a boy’s. She was Margaret Sanger’s niece. She was chic and sophisticated and radical and desperately unhappy; she had had an unbearably lonely childhood. Possibly, she was suicidal. He suggested that she come to a clinic he had just opened to treat students with adjustment problems.

  Marston later wrote a story in which Wonder Woman leaps into Niagara Falls to rescue a pretty girl named Gay, who is attempting to drown herself. (Women who loved other women began referring to themselves as “gay” in the 1920s; Gertrude Stein used the word that way in 1922.)7 “Poor child! You’ve lived a terrible life,” Wonder Woman says to Gay, after rescuing her. “You’re fun-starved!” She brings her to Holliday College and introduces her to Etta Candy at Beeta Lambda: “I want you to take charge of this girl and make her have fun!” Etta teaches Gay how to play. “Having fun has made a new girl of me,” Gay says. “It’ll do the same for others. I’m going to start a Fun Clinic and teach despondent people how to enjoy life!”8 Inspired by Gay’s newfound happiness, Wonder Woman raises $1 billion for a Fun Foundation and opens Fun Clinics acros
s the country, “giving healthy recreations to millions of fun-starved Americans.”9

  Before meeting Professor Marston, Olive Byrne had taken three courses in the Psychology Department; she’d earned three C’s. Her coursework was stronger in her major, English, where she’d earned B’s. In Experimental Psychology, Marston gave her an A. Before that, the only A she’d gotten was in a gym class. In the spring of her senior year, she took three more classes with Marston: Applied Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, and a research seminar that was usually restricted to graduate students. Marston gave her three more A’s.10

  She began working as his research assistant. They decided—or maybe he decided and she agreed—to conduct a study together. He wanted to know how women felt when they were tied up and how other women felt when they beat them.

  At the time, Marston was developing a theory of emotions derived from what he called the “basic psycho-neural mechanisms of emotion.” He had begun this work while conducting psychological tests on more than three thousand men held in prisons in Texas; he was especially interested in “the homo-sexual relationships inevitable in prison life.” The results of these tests had suggested to Marston that there exist four primary emotions: dominance, compliance, inducement, and submission. At Tufts, he focused on what he called captivation, which he described as “an essential constituent of sadistic teasing or torturing of weaker human beings or animals.”11

  Understanding his interest in captivation, Olive Byrne took her professor to Alpha Omicron Pi, where freshmen pledges were required to dress up like babies and attend a “Baby Party.” Marston later described it: “the freshmen girls were led into a dark corridor where their eyes were blindfolded, and their arms were bound behind them.” Then the freshmen were taken into a room where juniors and seniors compelled them to do various tasks, while sophomores hit them with long sticks.12 Each of these scenes appears in Wonder Woman comics, where initiates to Beeta Lambda are hit with sticks and, during “Baby Week,” wear diapers.

  From “School for Spies,” Sensation Comics #4 (April 1942) (illustration credit 14.2)

  At Tufts, Marston observed the party, and then he and Olive Byrne began conducting interviews together. “Nearly all the sophomores reported excited pleasantness of captivation emotion throughout the party,” he reported. “The pleasantness of their captivation responses appeared to increase when they were obliged to overcome rebellious freshmen physically, or induce them by repeated commands and added punishments to perform the actions from which the captive girls strove to escape.”13 Marston was fascinated.

  When Marston published his findings, he made sure to credit his assistant: “Studies of emotions reported by sophomores and upper class girls during their annual punishment of the freshmen girls were made by Miss Olive Byrne and myself, during the academic year 1925–1926.”14 What more the psychologist and his assistant did together that year is hard to say.

  From “Three Pretty Girls,” Sensation Comics #43 (July 1945) (illustration credit 14.3)

  Olive Byrne graduated from Tufts with a bachelor’s degree in En-glish on June 14, 1926, at a ceremony during which Jane Addams was awarded an honorary degree.15 Ethel Byrne took the train from Truro to watch her graduate, celebrating an education that she hoped would allow her daughter an escape from the slavery of involuntary motherhood. Holloway came, too. “I’d like you to meet somebody special,” Marston told his wife.16

  In a photograph taken on that day, Olive Byrne, one eye hidden by a lock of dark hair, wears her cap and gown and smiles, shyly, her head tilted down. On her right is Holloway, a good six inches shorter, wearing an elegant suit and a cloche, and carrying Olive’s diploma. On Olive’s left, and with his arm around her, stands Marston, tall and wide and grinning, in his academic regalia—cap and gown and Harvard hood. Set apart, on Marston’s other side, is Ethel Byrne, in a pale coat and a brimmed hat. It’s a family photograph but a bewildering one: Marston and Holloway look as if they must be Olive Byrne’s parents, except that they’re too young. (They were only eleven years older than she was.) Ethel Byrne looks as though she might be an aunt.

  One day, Olive Byrne, pasting the photograph into a family album, took out a pen. “EHM,” she wrote on Holloway’s jacket. Over Ethel Byrne’s coat, she wrote, in blue ink, a single word: “MOTHER.”

  Left to right: Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Olive Byrne, William Moulton Marston, and Ethel Byrne, at Tufts commencement in 1926 (illustration credit 14.4)

  HAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE

  OLIVE BYRNE, the wittiest, cleverest, and most distinctive graduate of the Tufts class of 1926, never made it to medical school.1 “I find that my plans for the coming year have not come to pass as I anticipated,” she wrote to Margaret Sanger’s husband, J. Noah Slee, on September 5, 1926, three months after she graduated from Tufts. Slee had offered to pay for Olive to go to medical school, but she decided instead to go to graduate school in psychology at Columbia, and to work for—and live with—Marston.

  “I can make enough money this year to pay for my room, board and clothes working with Dr. Marston on his book and lecture work,” she told Slee. “But in order to do graduate work at Columbia, I will have to ask for your assistance.” She asked him to pay her tuition. “I do so want to be independent but I also want to do something worth while when I am independent.”

  Ethel Byrne did not approve.

  “Mother only laughs when I tell her what I want to do,” Olive told Slee.2

  Marston left Tufts when Olive Byrne graduated. He’d been there less than a year. He was probably fired. If his relationship with Byrne and the business with the Baby Party had been discovered, the dean of the college would likely have told him to leave. That kind of thing happens all the time in Wonder Woman comics.

  “What are you doing here?” Dean Sourpuss of Holliday College asks Professor Toxino. “You know you’re not welcome at this college!”3

  Byrne spent the summer after she graduated living with Marston and Holloway in Darien, Connecticut. “The Marstons have been awfully good, helping me with their almost unlimited knowledge of the subject I want to take up,” she wrote Slee. Once classes started, she planned to move to the city, where Holloway kept an apartment. “I’m going to live up near Columbia with Mrs. Marston.”4

  Marston had given Holloway a choice. Either Olive Byrne could live with them or he would leave her. This was something altogether different from whatever arrangement they had with Marjorie Wilkes Huntley.

  “He had a rather strange appreciation of women,” Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s editor at DC Comics, once said. “One was never enough.”5

  Holloway was devastated. She walked out the door and walked, without stopping, for six hours, thinking.6

  Decades later, Holloway explained that she, Marston, and Byrne had devised a “non-conformist” way to live. “All the basic principles” of their life together, she said, were arrived at “in the years 1925, 26, and 27 when a group of about ten people used to meet in Boston at Aunt Carolyn’s apartment once a week.”7

  Aunt Carolyn was Carolyn Marston Keatley, a sister of Marston’s father. She was a nursing supervisor at the Deaconess Hospital in Boston.8 She was an Aquarian: she believed in the teachings in a book published in 1908 called The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, by an American preacher named Levi H. Dowling. Dowling claimed to have found historical documents proving that Jesus, as a young man, had traveled to India and Tibet, where he learned a religion of peace. Keatley believed that she was living in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the beginning of a new astrological age, an age of love: the New Age.9

  Carolyn Marston Keatley, Marston’s aunt (illustration credit 15.1)

  The ten or so people who met at Keatley’s apartment during Olive Byrne’s senior year at Tufts included Keatley, Holloway, Marston, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, and Byrne. Theirs was a remarkably kinky New Age—kinkier, even, than the Baby Party. A ninety-five-page, single-spaced typescript of notes taken during the meetings at Keatley’s apar
tment chronicle a cult of female sexual power—specifically, a “clinic”—involving “Love Leaders,” “Mistresses” (or “Mothers”), and “Love Girls.” It sounds something like a sexual training camp. Love Girls “do not believe in or practice escape from or concealment of the love organs”; at the meetings, presumably, Love Girls wore no clothes. There are astrological overtones: a Love Leader and a Mistress and their Love Girl form a “Love Unit,” a perfect constellation. Much in the meeting notes refers to Marston’s theory of dominance and submission; females “in their relation to males, expose their bodies and use various legitimate methods of the Love sphere to create in males submission to them, the women mistresses or Love leaders, in order that they, the Mistresses, may submit in passion to the males.” Much in the notes concerns sex itself: “During the act of intercourse between the male and his Mistress, the male’s love organ stimulates the inner love organs of the Mistress, and not the external love organs,” but “if anyone wishes to develop the consciousness of submission, he or she must keep the sexual orgasm in check, and thus permit the nervous energy to flow freely and uninterruptedly into the external genital organs.” (The submissive partner was supposed to hold back orgasm.)

  Very few names are supplied in the meeting notes, although there are references to “the Messenger Betty,” “the messenger R,” and “the girl Zara.”10 Messenger Betty must have been Holloway: Marston called her Betty. Messenger R must have been Marston himself. In Olive Byrne’s diaries, “R” is code for Marston (her secret name for him was Richard). And “the girl Zara” must have been Huntley. “Zara or Zaz is the name given me by Doctor and Ms. Marston when we became a threesome,” Huntley once explained.11