The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Days after Roubicek sent that memo to Gaines, Alice Marble received a letter from a twenty-six-year-old, college-educated Pittsburgh man named Francis J. Burke. Burke professed himself a fan of Marble’s tennis career. “But I did not write you to talk about tennis,” he went on. “Your acting as associate editor of Wonder Woman surprised me because I would have thought you to be a ‘woman of the world,’ and, as such, capable of perceiving sex perversion when it stood unveiled before your eyes.” He was referring, he explained, to the representation in Wonder Woman of “characters in chains and bonds, particularly with characters who are chained and bound by pretty girls.” Burke confessed that he was among those “readers who are themselves obsessed with chains-and-bonds images and fantasies,” but he questioned whether this was the kind of thing that belonged in a comic book for children. He proceeded to give an elaborate account of a high school girl of his acquaintance—he gave her the name “Violet”—who, inspired by Wonder Woman, dressed up like Wonder Woman and led a secret society of high schoolers who called themselves the “Wonder Girls”; they dressed up in elaborate costumes, then tied boys up and beat them.14

  Gaines decided that he had better solicit the opinion of Lauretta Bender. Unlike Josette Frank, who didn’t have either an MD or a PhD, Bender, one of the most accomplished psychiatrists in the country, could not be so easily waved aside by Marston as lacking in expertise. Bender dismissed Burke’s letter as a “mash note.” Gaines also sent Bender a complete set of Wonder Woman, asking her for “any suggestions that you might have to eliminate any undesirable features.”15 He gave her a couple of weeks to read the comics, and then he sent Roubicek to Bellevue Hospital to interview her about the whole gamut of both Josette Frank’s concerns and Marston’s claims.

  In a memo to Gaines, Roubicek reported Bender’s reaction: “She does not believe that Wonder Woman tends to masochism or sadism. Furthermore, she believes that even if it did—you can teach neither perversion to children—one can only bring out what is inherent in the child. However, she did make this reservation—that if the women slaves wore chains (and enjoyed them) for no purpose whatsoever, there would be no point in chaining them.” Really, she was tremendously approving. Bender liked Wonder Woman, as well as the way Marston was playing with feminism. Plus, Roubicek noted, “she thinks that Wonder Woman’s costume is perfectly all right.” Most of all, “she believes that Dr. Marston is handling very cleverly this whole ‘experiment’ as she calls it. She feels that perhaps he is bringing to the public the real issue at stake in the world (and one which she feels may possibly be a direct cause of the present conflict) and that is that the difference between the sexes is not a sex problem, nor a struggle for superiority, but rather a problem of the relation of one sex to the other.” Roubicek summed up: “Dr. Bender believes that this strip should be left alone.” Bender also wrote Gaines a letter, telling him she found Wonder Woman fascinating, since the psychological implications of the character’s adventures “strike at the very heart of masculinity and femininity and of aggression and submission.”16

  Bender’s view of Wonder Woman aligned with her ideas about comic books and fantasy generally. Bender believed that fantasy “is a constructive aspect of the child’s experimental exploration of reality, or his progressive relating of himself to reality, of his trial-and-error attempts to solve his reality problems.” And she believed that comic books, “like the folklore of other times, serve as a means to stimulate the child’s fantasy life and so help him solve the individual and sociological problems inherent in his living.” As for Wonder Woman, Bender had this to say: “She is an ordinary but good human being until she puts on her costume, when she can overcome all physical resistances. She can help people in need. She can change the direction of a warship or a bomb in flight. She can make herself little and offer herself for play to a lonely child. Her power to attract and hold lies in a lariat, which her author, William Moulton Marston, says represents ‘love appeal.’ One is not always convinced by his symbols, perhaps because he is too conscious of them. But ‘Wonder Woman’ represents a good try at solving the very timely problems of the girl’s concept of herself as a woman and of her relationship to the world.”17

  Gaines was hugely relieved. Nevertheless, not everyone on Gaines’s editorial advisory board agreed with Bender. W.W.D. Sones, a professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education, wrote to Gaines that, while he was unconcerned by Wonder Woman’s costume (she had “athletic” rather than “Hollywood” legs, in his view), he found there to be rather an excess of “chains and bonds,” even though, “true enough, cruelty and suffering seem not to be involved.” Still, he thought Marston’s explanation—the mumbo jumbo about submission—was hogwash. “The social purpose which he claims is open to very serious objection,” Sones wrote. “It is just such submission that he claims he wants to develop that makes dictator dominance possible. From the standpoint of social ideals, what we want in America and the world is cooperation and not submission.”18

  Gaines decided to keep Frank and Sones at bay, and placed his trust in Marston and Bender. Then, in September 1943, Gaines got the letter he’d been dreading. It came from John D. Jacobs, a U.S. Army staff sergeant in the 291st Infantry, stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. It was addressed to “Charles Moulton.” Gaines opened it. “The comic magazine, Wonder Woman, interests me as no other ‘reading material’ which I have ever been able to find in such volumes,” Jacobs began. “I am one of those odd, perhaps unfortunate men who derive an extreme erotic pleasure from the mere thought of a beautiful girl, chained or bound, or masked, or wearing extreme high-heels or high-laced boots,—in fact, any sort of constriction or strain whatsoever.” He wondered, “Have you the same interest in bonds and fetters that I have?” He wanted to know, too, whether the creator of Wonder Woman himself had in his possession any of the items depicted in the stories, “the leather mask, or the wide iron collar from Tibet, or the Greek ankle manacle? Or do you just ‘dream up’ these things?”19

  Gaines forwarded the letter to Marston, with a covering note.

  “This is one of the things I’ve been afraid of, (without quite being able to put my finger on it),” he wrote. Something had to be done. He therefore enclosed, for Marston’s use, a memo written by Roubicek containing a “list of methods which can be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains. Each one of these can be varied in many ways—enabling us, as I told you in our conference last week, to cut down the use of chains by at least 50 to 75% without at all interfering with the excitement of the story or the sales of the books.”20

  Marston wrote Gaines right back.

  “I have the good Sergeant’s letter in which he expresses his enthusiasm over chains for women—so what?” As a practicing clinical psychologist, Marston said, he was unimpressed. “Some day I’ll make you a list of all the items about women that different people have been known to get passionate over—women’s hair, boots, belts, silk worn by women, gloves, stockings, garters, panties, bare backs, sweats, breasts, etc. etc.,” he promised. “You can’t have a real woman character in any form of fiction without touching off a great many readers’ erotic fancies. Which is swell, I say.”

  Cut down on chains and ropes by 50 or 75 percent? Marston refused. He was sure he knew what line not to cross. Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, he said. “It’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them.” He added, in closing, “Please thank Miss Roubicek for the list of menaces.”21

  Four months later, Josette Frank resigned from the editorial advisory board.

  “Recent issues have omitted whippings, tortured women in chains, and other objectionable features,” she told Gaines, but “I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is the basic theme of the strip t
hat is offensive, rather than its detail, or in addition to its details.” That is, “the theme of men against women and women against men is hardly a suitable one for children’s story material.” Not to mention that the whole thing was “full of significant sex antagonisms and perversions.” There was nothing for it but to quit.22

  Once again, Gaines sent Frank’s complaints to Marston. And once again Marston dismissed them. He pointed out that no one is ever actually whipped or tortured in his comic books. And as to the comic’s perversions, “Frankly, I don’t know what she means,” Marston insisted. “Probably my basic idea of women fighting male dominance, cruelty, savagery and war-making with love control backed by force is what she means by ‘sex antagonism.’ ” As for bondage: “My whole strip is aimed at drawing the distinction in the minds of children and adults between love bonds and male bonds of cruelty and destruction; between submitting to a loving superior or deity and submitting to people like the Nazis, Japs, etc.,” he explained. “If this is wrong or vicious my entire career as a consulting psychologist is based on malice and misconception.”23 That, really, got exactly to the heart of the matter: Was his entire career as a psychologist based on a misconception?

  Gaines turned once more to Bender. He arranged to have five hundred copies of DC comic books sent to the children’s ward at Bellevue Hospital: a gift for the patients.24 (Bender usually brought a copy or two home to her own children.)25 And then he sent Roubicek to Bellevue to interview Bender again.

  “Essentially she agrees with Dr. Marston that the strip cannot possibly be harmful to children and that he is merely presenting them with a solution to a social problem current in the world today—i.e., the struggle between man and woman to clarify their respective positions in the world,” Roubicek reported. “She says it is not a sexual struggle in the genital sense, and no doubt Miss Frank reads into the strip some of her own confusion with regard to these problems, as no doubt many people will do if they have such problems.” But, Bender was sure, “CHILDREN do not read any such sexual meanings into the strip.” Roubicek concluded that, happily, “she thinks we shouldn’t let this controversy bother us at all.”26

  Wonder Woman gets a newspaper strip. From “Wonder Woman Syndication,” Independent News, April 1944 (illustration credit 27.8)

  Gaines wanted to understand what influence comic books have on the children who read them, but neither psychology nor psychiatry had a definitive answer to that question. He probably didn’t mind not getting to the bottom of the problem. He was in no position to abandon Wonder Woman. The day Josette Frank resigned, Gaines and Marston signed an agreement for Wonder Woman to become a newspaper strip, syndicated by King Features. Out of the hundreds of comic books published, no other comic-book superhero, aside from Superman and Batman, had ever made the gigantic jump from comic books to newspaper syndication, with its vast daily circulation. To celebrate, Gaines had his artists draw a panel in which Superman and Batman, rising out of the front page of a daily newspaper, call out to Wonder Woman, who’s leaping onto the page, “Welcome, Wonder Woman!”27

  Gaines had another kind of welcome to make, too. He asked Lauretta Bender to take Frank’s place on the editorial advisory board. She accepted.28

  From Editor and Publisher, May 6, 1944 (illustration credit 27.9)

  Marston wrote the newspaper strip stories himself; Harry G. Peter did the drawing.29 The strips were tamer than the comic books, but Wonder Woman was still, as ever, fit to be tied. In an ad King Features ran to persuade newspapers to pick up the strip, her name is written in rope.

  SUPERPROF

  IN THE SPRING OF 1944, Marston was enjoying unbridled success for the first time since his student days at Harvard. Wonder Woman had ten million readers. Flush with cash, he rented offices on the fourteenth floor of a building at 331 Madison Avenue, at Forty-third Street. The sign on the door read MARSTON ART STUDIO.1

  He had so much work, writing for Sensation Comics, All-Star Comics, Comic Cavalcade, Wonder Woman, and now for a daily newspaper strip, that he needed an assistant. He decided to hire a student in a psychology class he was teaching at the Katharine Gibbs School. The final, take-home exam required students to write eight short essays answering prompts about Marston’s theory of emotions. The questions suggest that most of what Marston taught the young women studying at the Gibbs school was how to be more assertive at work. (Question 6: “Advise Miss F. how to overcome her fear of talking with the company Vice President who is in charge of her Division and whom she has plenty of opportunities to contact if she chooses; also tell Miss F. why these contacts are to her advantage.”) Olive Byrne graded the exams. One of them proved to be so good that she thought Marston himself could have written it. She handed it over to him. The exam had been written by a very pretty young woman named Joye E. Hummel.2

  Joye Hummel, c. 1945 (illustration credit 28.1)

  In March 1944, a few weeks before Hummel was scheduled to graduate, Marston invited her to tea with him and Holloway at the Harvard Club in New York. He told her he wanted to hire her to help write scripts. Hummel was nineteen years old. He thought she could help him write slang. She was astonished and delighted. “I always did have a big imagination,” she said.3

  Marston installed Hummel at the office at Forty-third and Madison, where he himself “personally handled every aspect of the production up to the point of sending to the printer,” according to Holloway. All of this work, Holloway later said, was overseen by Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, who “was office executive for the Art Studio, knew every phase of the work plus the background and history.”4 Hummel doesn’t remember Huntley being there very often. But Harry G. Peter was there every day, and Hummel got along well with him. Peter smoked a pipe; he always had it hanging out of the corner of his mouth.5 He was a famously sloppy dresser. Hummel once had to fish him out of a charity ward at Bellevue Hospital; he’d been taken for an indigent after being treated for getting a chicken bone caught in his throat.6 Hummel and Peter were rarely alone in the office. Peter employed three artists: a colorist named Helen Schepens and a married couple who did the lettering. Marston was often there, too, and so were his kids. Huntley would bring O.A. into the studio; O.A. loved to watch Peter work. “He would put me on a stool and say that if I was a good little monster, I could watch him draw,” O.A. said. “I could have sat there for eight hours.” Peter hardly spoke. “He was more Thurberesque,” Byrne Marston said. “Witty but not very many words.”7

  At first, Hummel typed Marston’s scripts. Soon, she was writing scripts of her own. This required some studying. To help Hummel understand the idea behind Wonder Woman, Olive Byrne gave her a present: a copy of Margaret Sanger’s 1920 book, Woman and the New Race. She said it was all she’d need.8

  Life at Cherry Orchard was louder than the quiet of Marston Art Studio. Marston loved to hold parties at his house. Pete Marston, once he was old enough to get a driver’s license, was given the job of ferrying the drunks home. Holloway never drank. Instead, she carried around a highball glass filled with water and a tiny bit of scotch and pretended to sip it. Olive Byrne drank till she collapsed. She and Marston once went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting together. (AA was founded in 1935.) They did not join.9

  Whenever he had guests, Marston would pull out his lie detector. “One of the things they did to you when you came to visit at their house was to take a lie detector test,” Sheldon Mayer said, “not because they didn’t trust you but they wanted to have fun with you.” At DC Comics, Mayer and Marston “fought like hell,” but “once you went to his home,” Mayer said, “you were the guest and he was the most delightful host, the most remarkable host, with a lovely bunch of kids from different wives and all living together like one big family—everybody very happy and all good, decent people. And what I liked about those kids is they used to love the way I played the piano, which was very bad, but it didn’t matter to them because they were all tone-deaf.”10

  Mayer and his wife moved out to Rye. He spent a lot of t
ime at Cherry Orchard. He’d draw cartoons for the kids. He once made O.A. a flipbook. He’d sing them dirty songs. To the tune of “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” he sang, “The king was in his counting house, counting out his money. The queen was in her parlor, eating bread and honey. The maid was in the kitchen, explaining to the groom, ‘The vagina, not the rectum, is the entrance to the womb!’ ”11

  Gaines, for all his troubles with the bondage in Wonder Woman, had grown fond of Marston, too, and of the whole family, which was one of the reasons he put up with the chains and ropes. Like Mayer, Gaines was perplexed by Marston’s family arrangements, but he adored Marston’s kids. When O.A. got appendicitis, Gaines visited her in the hospital and brought her a stuffed monkey; she named it Charlie.12

  At Cherry Orchard, counting Marston, Holloway (“Keets”), Olive (“Dots”), Huntley (“Yaya”), and the four kids, there were eight residents, not including pets. “We now have six cats and a dog!” Marston reported to thirteen-year-old Byrne in the summer of 1944, when Byrne was away at summer camp. “Dots wanted to dispose of the new kits before you kids came home but I thought you’d want to see them so we’re keeping them for you until then. If you know any kids at camp from near here who want kittens, better promise them one.” Also: “Hedy Lamarr’s litter are pretty big now,” Marston wrote Byrne. “Fuzzy hasn’t been around for several days—Yaya thinks he’s dead. Molecat is about to have another family.”13