The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Wertham told the story of Edith, fourteen, a juvenile delinquent. “Her ideal was Wonder Woman,” he explained. “There was no question but that this girl lived under difficult social circumstances. But she was prevented from rising above them by the specific corruption of her character development by comic-book seduction. The woman in her had succumbed to Wonder Woman.” For Wertham, Wonder Woman was quite possibly the worst comic-book character of all. She could be vicious; her comic books were racist; she was a lesbian Batman, and the Holliday College girls were “gay.” Bender had written that Wonder Woman comic books display “a strikingly advanced concept of femininity and masculinity” and “women in these stories are placed on an equal footing with men and indulge in the same type of activities.” Wertham found the feminism in Wonder Woman repulsive. “As to the ‘advanced femininity,’ what are the activities in comic books which women ‘indulge in on an equal footing with men’? They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent.… Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones.”29

  Seduction of the Innocent was published on April 19, 1954. Two days later, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, headed by Kefauver, convened hearings in New York.30 William Gaines testified on the first day of the hearings. After his father’s death, Gaines had launched a run of horror comics, including The Vault of Horror and Tales of Terror. In 1952, he’d started publishing Mad magazine. “What are we afraid of?” Gaines asked during the hearings. “Are we afraid of our own children?” On the second days of the hearings, Wertham testified and said exactly what he was afraid of, revisiting each of the arguments he had made in Seduction of the Innocent. “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” he said. Bender testified the next day. Like William Gaines, Bender, who was forever underestimating Wertham, had a hard time taking his criticism of comics seriously. She said she found horror comics “unspeakably silly.” She tried, unsuccessfully, to turn the committee’s attention from comic books to film and television by pointing out that she’d seen children at her clinic who’d been driven into a panic by watching animated Walt Disney films. If anything in American popular culture was bad for girls, Bender thought, it wasn’t Wonder Woman; it was Walt Disney. “The mothers are always killed or sent to the insane asylums in Walt Disney’s movies,” she said.

  “Would you consider that excessive reading of crime and horror comics is symptomatic of emotional maladjustment?” she was asked.

  Only if the evidence was contrived, she answered: “It is conceivable, and I am sure if enough research work is done, sooner or later someone or other can find an incident in which a child can be got to say that he got the idea from such and such a comic book.” But she thought Wertham had extracted what amounted to false confessions.31

  It didn’t much matter what Bender said or didn’t say. She’d been set up. In a letter written to Kefauver in 1950, answering a questionnaire he’d sent her, Bender had disclosed to him her role as a member of DC Comics’ editorial advisory board and her monthly fee, which, by then, was $150.32 Urged by Wertham, Kefauver’s aim in calling Bender to testify was to discredit her, turning the best-credentialed champion of the comic-book industry into a “paid apologist” for the industry because she had been accepting money from DC Comics since 1944.33

  In the aftermath of the hearings, the Comics Magazine Association of America adopted a new code, closely based on the Hays Code. Under its terms, comic books could contain nothing cruel: “All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.” There could be nothing kinky: “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.” There could be nothing unconventional: “The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.” And there could be nothing homosexual: “Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.” Jack Liebowitz disbanded DC Comics’ editorial advisory board and formed a new one; Bender was not on it.34

  Most superheroes didn’t survive either peacetime or the code. The Justice Society closed its doors in 1948. Sensation Comics was canceled in 1953. Wonder Woman lived on, but she was scarcely recognizable. Robert Kanigher hated the character he called “the grotesque inhuman original Wonder Woman.”35 And he didn’t like Harry G. Peter’s art, either; he began easing him out. The first Wonder Woman cover drawn by someone other than Peter appeared in 1949. It featured Steve Trevor carrying a smiling, daffy, helpless Wonder Woman over a stream. Instead of her badass, kinky red boots, she wears dainty yellow ballerina slippers.36 Peter died in 1958.

  In the 1950s, Wonder Woman followed the hundreds of thousands of American women who had worked during the war only to be told, when peace came, that not only was their labor no longer needed but it threatened the stability of the nation, by undermining men. By the end of the Second World War, the number of American women working outside the home had grown by 60 percent; three-quarters of these women were married, and one-third were mothers of young children. Women’s work had been crucial during wartime. “There are practically no unmarried women left to draw upon,” Fortune magazine had reported in 1943. “This leaves, as the next potential source of industrial workers, the housewives.” At the end of the war, three-quarters of working women hoped to keep their jobs; very few were able to. They were told to quit, to make room for men returning from military service. Women’s pay was cut. Factories that had provided child care during the war cut those services. Unmarried women were told to marry; married women were told to have children. Working women went to the altar and to the maternity ward.37

  Wonder Woman became a babysitter, a fashion model, and a movie star. She wanted, desperately, to marry Steve. She gave advice to the lovelorn, as the author of a lonely-hearts newspaper advice column. In 1950, Kanigher killed off Etta Candy. (“Etta Candy! Jesus Christ!” he said.) He also abandoned “Wonder Women of History”; he replaced it with a series about weddings, called “Marriage a la Mode.”38

  From Robert Kanigher, “Wonder Woman, Romance Editor,” Wonder Woman #97 (March 1950) (illustration credit 29.4)

  Women went home. Women’s rights went underground. And homo-sexuals were persecuted. Is there a “quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?” U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked in hearings about homosexuality in 1950. At the State Department, a former FBI officer was put in charge of purging the civil service of homosexuals by administering lie detector tests. Those who failed were required to resign. Between 1945 and 1956, one thousand alleged homosexuals employed by the State Department and as many as five thousand employed by the federal government lost their jobs.39

  Marston, Holloway, and Byrne had led a secret, closeted life. It had its costs.

  LOVE FOR ALL

  OLIVE BYRNE AND ELIZABETH HOLLOWAY MARSTON lived together for the rest of their lives. They were inseparable.1

  Their four children tell very different stories about their family, the way the children in any family do. Pete says his father was like an express train and his mother was like a bulldozer. Byrne says his mother was a lot like Jane Eyre. Donn never forgave any of them for lying. O.A. would rather not say what she thinks.

  Olive Byrne never told her children that Marston was their father. She hinted, though, at some things. “You had a curious upbringing,” she wrote to her son Byrne in 1948, when he was a freshman at Harvard. Even if she admitted to nothing more, she admitted this much: it hadn’t been easy living the experimental life of William Moulton Marston. “I tried very hard to minimize his fanaticisms as far as you kids were concerned,” she told him. But there was only so much she had been able to do. “All this is by way of saying we must be tolerant with ourselves and allow ourselves some deviations from the straight line we set up to follow. Even more we must allow others the same prerogative.”2

  In 1948
, unable to prevail on DC Comics to hire her, Holloway, who’d taken time away, for bereavement, went back to her job at Metropolitan Life Insurance. Olive Byrne found another kind of work. “I am working for our local ‘Maternal Health Center’ clinic,” she wrote to Margaret Sanger, “and am most amused when they speak of you. Somehow they think you are a contemporary of Florence Nightingale.” It was as if Sanger had lived in another century, a Wonder Woman of History. Olive Byrne tried to explain to the people at the clinic that Sanger was alive and well, but she never told anyone at the clinic that she was Sanger’s niece. “I’m afraid they’ll expect too much of me!”3

  Pete, who’d gone to Harvard but quit after freshman year, married young and started a family. So did O.A, who dropped out of junior college. Both Byrne and Donn Marston graduated from Harvard; Margaret Sanger helped pay for their education. Their mothers were inseparable, but the children grew apart. Olive Ann dropped “Olive” from her name; Byrne Holloway Marston dropped “Holloway.”

  In 1952, Holloway and Olive Byrne—“the ladies,” the children called them—moved out of the house in Rye. “So you are leaving the nest,” Sanger wrote to her niece when she heard the news. “It is what we all must do. But it was a wonderful basis & roots for those children to develop in.”4 Olive Byrne and Holloway settled into an apartment in New York City. Marjorie Wilkes Huntley lived with them, every once in a while. During the stretches when all three of them lived together, Holloway and Huntley shared one bedroom; Olive slept in another.5

  In the 1950s, Sanger turned her attention to the question of how she would be remembered. She’d been sorting through her papers, preparing them for the Library of Congress and for Smith College, deciding what to keep and what to throw away.6 One thing Sanger was keen to do was to write her sister Ethel out of the story of her life. In 1952, Sanger sold the rights to a film based on her autobiography. She then wrote a letter to Ethel Byrne, claiming that the scriptwriter wished to make a slight alteration to the facts of the founding of the birth control movement, regarding the trials the two women had faced in 1917. In the film, Sanger told her sister, “I should be the Hunger Strikee.” Ethel Byrne would not be mentioned; it would be as if she had never existed. Sanger asked her sister to sign a release stating that she agreed that the film would not “portray me or any part of my life” and that, in the film, it would appear “that Mrs. Sanger engaged in the famous hunger strike instead of myself.” Ethel Byrne thought the release was “the funniest thing in the world,” according to Olive. She never signed it. The film was never made.7

  In much the same way that Sanger wished she could erase from the historical record the fact that Ethel Byrne, and not she, had gone on a hunger strike, she kept well hidden her ties to the comic-book superhero created by William Moulton Marston. Maybe she thought it was unimportant. Maybe she found it embarrassing. Maybe never mentioning it was among the things Sanger did to help keep Olive Byrne’s family arrangements secret, in order to avoid scandal for Olive and the children and harm to Sanger’s cause. Whatever the reason, in no part of the story of Sanger’s life, as she told it—as she saved it—did she ever mention Wonder Woman.

  Ethel Byrne died in 1955. In the last years of her life she lived with her son, Jack.8 Olive felt little but bitterness about her. “I could not bring myself to forgive Mother for leaving Jack and me,” she told Sanger. The funeral was gruesome. “The undertaker didn’t know her,” Olive wrote to Sanger, “so he frizzled her hair and painted her up so she didn’t look like anybody we know.” She scattered her mother’s ashes in Truro.9 Then she selected papers of her mother’s to give to her aunt, to include in the papers Sanger was preparing to donate to Smith College. Very few of Ethel Byrne’s papers survive.10

  In 1953, Olive Byrne took a job at Victor Chemical Works, in New York. “The job is not a world beater and requires very little intelligence,” she wrote Sanger. “This last I rather like since it is a change from being brilliant over a kitchen sink.” Sanger suggested that Olive consider trying to get a job at Life, Time, or Reader’s Digest.11 Olive said she thought she’d rather work for Dr. Abraham Stone, the director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in New York. The bureau was the clinical research arm of Planned Parenthood; a diaphragm-and-jelly contraceptive regime had been developed there in the 1930s.12 In the 1950s, Sanger and Stone were pressing for the development of an oral contraceptive.13 Olive Byrne never ended up taking a job at the bureau; instead, in 1955, Sanger hired her as her personal secretary.14

  In the 1950s, Planned Parenthood’s clinics provided mainly marriage counseling. Sanger had little to do with the organization she and Ethel Byrne had founded in 1916. Sanger had lost patience with it, ever since 1942, when it stopped calling itself the Birth Control Federation of America. “If I told you or wrote you that the name Planned Parenthood would be the end of the movement,” Sanger wrote to Planned Parenthood’s former national director in 1956, “it was and has proven true. The movement was then a fighting, forward, no fooling movement, battling for the freedom of the poorest parents and for woman’s biological freedom and development. The P.P.F. has left all this behind.”15

  Nevertheless, Sanger had a great many arrangements to manage and a great deal of mail to answer. In 1955, Olive Byrne and Elizabeth Holloway Marston went for an extended visit to Tucson, to stay in Sanger’s house so that Olive could handle Sanger’s affairs while she was traveling in Asia. “I am so happy your friend Betty Marston is there with you and doubtless you will return with her to New York,” Sanger wrote to Olive. Every time Sanger went, Olive and Holloway went to Tucson and stayed at her house. Sanger was most particular about the sleeping arrangements: “You and Betty can come and stay here in the room with two beds—not in my room.”16

  In 1956, Olive wrote to Sanger to tell her that her son Byrne had gotten engaged.

  “Does he know about birth control?” Sanger asked. “He and his bride should go hand in hand to Dr. Stone’s office or the M.S. Bureau and get well grounded in contraceptive technique.”17

  “I am fairly certain that Byrne is fully acquainted with BC,” Olive wrote, amused.18 (Byrne Marston was studying to become an obstetrician.)

  The night before the wedding, Olive and Holloway gave the rehearsal dinner.19 Sanger’s son Stuart and his wife and their two teenage daughters, Margaret and Nancy, lived in Tucson, too, right next door to Sanger’s house. Olive Byrne’s son Donn, visiting his mothers in Arizona, met Margaret Sanger’s granddaughter Margaret (his second cousin), and they fell in love. Donn Marston was studying law. “I can quite appreciate your Clarence Darrow,” Sanger wrote to Olive, on hearing the news. “It’s time we had something of the kind in our family.”20

  In 1957, Sanger, who’d grown ill, and difficult, and obsessed with her legacy, appeared on television in an interview with Mike Wallace. It proved devastating to her reputation. Sanger came across as paranoid, hostile, and weak-minded—intimated by Wallace and flummoxed by his questions. Repeatedly, Wallace steered the conversation away from Sanger’s work and toward her personal life. Hadn’t she abandoned her first husband? Hadn’t she abandoned her children? And for what? He pressed her: “Could it be that women in the United States have become too independent—that they have followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career?”21

  Sanger’s health worsened. Holloway retired in 1958. The next year, she and Olive Byrne moved to Tucson to take care of Sanger. “It is a wonderful idea that of you & ‘Bet’ to come here & find a house,” Sanger wrote Olive.22

  In 1960, the Pill, the product of Sanger’s decades-long advocacy of birth control research, was released to the public; it hardly ended the national debate about what, at the start of Sanger’s career, was called “voluntary motherhood.” But Ethel Byrne hadn’t gone on a hunger strike and nearly died in vain. And Olive Byrne, despite her bitterness toward her mother, was proud of the fight her mother had waged. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that the
banning of contraception is unconstitutional. In Tucson, Olive Byrne sat down at her typewriter and composed a letter to Justice William O. Douglas.

  Dear Sir:

  In writing the majority opinion invalidating Connecticut’s birth control laws you put an end to a most vicious disregard of individual liberty. It is of especial satisfaction to me because my mother, Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger (her sister) opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn 40 years ago. They were arrested at that time and persecuted and defiled for years afterwards by religious and political groups. I am sure Mrs. Sanger, who is very ill, would rejoice in this pronouncement which crowns her 50 years of dedication to the liberation of women from enslavement born of bigotry. All women, everywhere, must rejoice in this final victory over ignorance and intolerance.

  Very truly yours, Olive Byrne Richard (Mrs.)23

  Margaret Sanger died in September 1966, days before her eighty-seventh birthday. The New York Times called her “one of history’s great rebels.”24

  Olive Byrne’s son Donn and Margaret Sanger’s granddaughter Margaret Sanger were married in Tucson on March 25, 1961. The marriage announcement referred to the groom as the “son of Mrs. William Kendall Richard of Tucson.” The bride took her husband’s name.25

  Margaret Sanger Marston wasn’t willing to put up with the Marston family’s secrets. Donn Marston still didn’t know who his father was. His wife thought this was ridiculous and set for herself the task of convincing one of the ladies to tell her the truth. At last, she succeeded.