The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Page 40
5. Noll to MCG, March 13, 1942, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1. In the end, Gaines managed to convince Noll to take Sensation Comics off his objectionable list. Noll to MCG, April 30, 1942, CSAA Papers, box 24, folder 239.
6. Gardner Fox, “The Justice Society of America,” All-Star Comics #3, Winter 1940, and reproduced in All-Star Comics Archives (New York: DC Archive Editions, 1991), vol. 1. The best account of the Justice Society is Roy Thomas, ed., The All-Star Companion: Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Justice Society (Raleigh, NC: Two-Morrows, 2000). The quotation is from Gardner Fox, “The Roll Call of the Justice Society,” All-Star Comics #5, June–July 1941.
7. “The Justice Society of America Initiates Johnny Thunder!” All-Star Comics #6, August–September 1941.
8. All-Star Comics #8, December 1941–January 1942.
9. Gardner Fox, “The Justice Society Joins the War on Japan,” All-Star Comics #11 (June–July 1942).
10. Advertisement in Sensation Comics #5, May 1942. On the rise of public-opinion polling, market research, and popular quantitative social science, see Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
11. And there was another interesting result. “For the first time in the past four or five years that I have been getting these polls from readers,” Gaines remarked, “we noticed more than the average amount of adults sending in these coupons. For example, in the first thousand or so, over 25 are from men and women—mostly over twenty, whereas in previous polls, we had only one or two out of a thousand, or none at all.” MCG to LB, March 20, 1942. The returns are reported in this letter and in another: Dagmar Norgood (from All-American Comics) to LB, March 16, 1942. Both letters are in the Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1. Gaines also sent the results of the survey to Josette Frank: MCG to Frank, March 23, 1943, CSAA Papers, box 24, folder 239.
12. Dagmar Norgood (head of the DC Comics Education Department) to LB, February 12, 1942, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1.
13. The best source of biographical and autobiographical information about Bender is the biographical material in the Bender Papers, box 18, folder 4. Quotations from Bender’s 1916 high school commencement address are taken from her unpublished memoir, “LB, M.D.,” Bender Papers, box 18, folder 4. Bender began working in the Psychiatric Division of Bellevue Hospital in October 1934. LB to J. Franklin Robinson, June 13, 1956, Bender Papers, box 1, folder 9. She favored group therapy. In the 1930s, she was especially known for her work in using puppets, art, dance, and music with children. See, e.g., LB to Karl M. Bowman (Bowman was the director of the hospital), November 28, 1939, Bender Papers, box 1, folder 9. She resigned as senior psychiatrist in charge of the children’s ward in February 1956; she continued on as an attending psychiatrist. Sol Nichtern and Charlotte Weiss, Annual Report, Ward PQ6, Children’s Ward, Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, November 1, 1956, Bender Papers, box 1, folder 9.
14. LB, Sylvan Keiser, and Paul Schilder, Studies in Aggressiveness, from Bellevue Hospital, Psychiatric Division, and the Medical College of New York University, Department of Psychiatry (Worcester, MA: Clark University, 1936). Some of Bender’s work on childhood schizophrenia later became controversial; in 1944, she conducted an experiment in which she administered electroshock therapy to three hundred children diagnosed with schizophrenia.
15. “Dr. Paul Schilder, Psychiatrist, Dies,” Boston Globe, December 9, 1940. Bender later published a collection of Schilder’s writings, which she dedicated to her three children; she mentions their ages at his death in Paul Schilder, Contributions to Developmental Neuropsychiatry, ed. LB (New York: International Universities Press, 1964), x. Bender refers to her own children in her testimony in 1954. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, April 21, 22, and June 4, 1954 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1954). And see the biographical note in the Bender Papers.
16. Bender’s testimony, Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 154–55.
17. LB and Reginald S. Lourie, “The Effect of Comic Books on the Ideology of Children,” Journal of Orthopsychiatry 11 (1941): 540–50. A typescript of this article can be found in the Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1. Lourie was a resident for one year; see LB to Marian McBee, September 16, 1942, Bender Papers, box 6, folder 1.
18. H. Carter Dyson, “Are the Comics Bad for Children?” Family Circle, April 17, 1942. The accompanying editorial, “Sticking by Superman,” had originally appeared in the Burlington (VT) Daily News.
19. WMM to Sheldon Mayer, June 3, 1942, WW Letters, Smithsonian, and “The God of War,” Wonder Woman #2, Fall 1942.
20. Gaines reported early tallies in MCG to LB, April 30, 1942, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1.
25. THE MILK SWINDLE
1. Gardner Fox, “The Black Dragon Menace,” All-Star Comics #12, August–September 1942.
2. Gardner Fox, “Food for Starving Patriots!” All-Star Comics #14, December 1942–January 1943, and Gardner Fox, “The Man Who Created Images,” All-Star Comics #15, February–March 1943.
3. Gardner Fox, “The Brain Wave Goes Berserk,” All-Star Comics #17, June–July 1943.
4. WMM to Sheldon Mayer, April 12, 1942, WW Letters, Smithsonian. See also Roy Thomas, “Two Touches of Venus,” Alter Ego 3, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 14–18; Thomas, All-Star Companion, 67–68; and Karen M. Walowit, “Wonder Woman: Enigmatic Heroine of American Popular Culture,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1974, pp. 112–18.
5. Ben Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: Final Edition, 1911–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 135. Proctor cites the New York American for October 8–9, 1926, pp. 1–2; October 10, 1926, p. 1L; October 11, 1926, p. 1; October 12, 1926, p. 6; October 13, 1926, pp. 1, 30; then daily to November 1, 1926, p. 1.
6. “The Milk Swindle,” Sensation Comics #7, July 1942.
7. Chesler, Woman of Valor, 75–78.
8. “Department Store Perfidy,” Sensation Comics #8, August 1942.
9. “The Return of Diana Prince,” Sensation Comics #9, September 1942.
10. WMM, “Women: Servants for Civilization,” Tomorrow, February 1942, 42–45.
11. “The Sky Road,” Wonder Woman #10, Fall 1944.
12. “School for Spies,” Sensation Comics #4, April 1942.
13. “The Unbound Amazon,” Sensation Comics #19, July 1943.
14. “The Unbound Amazon,” Sensation Comics #19, July 1943, and “The Greatest Feat of Daring in Human History,” Wonder Woman #1, Summer 1942. Wonder Woman’s encounters with the king of the Mole Men run in the comic strip from October 28, 1944, to November 18, 1944.
15. “The Secret City of the Incas,” Sensation Comics #18, June 1943.
16. MS, “The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps,” June 17, 1942, in Selected Papers of MS, 3:132–33.
17. MS to Robert L. Dickinson, February 20, 1942, in Selected Papers of MS, 3:115; Gordon, Moral Property, 247; and MS, “Is This the Time to Have a Child?,” 1942, in Selected Papers of MS, 3:127.
18. [WMM], “Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author of Best-Selling ‘Wonder Woman,’ Children’s Comic,” press release, typescript [June 1942], WW Letters, Smithsonian.
26. THE WONDER WOMEN OF HISTORY
1. MCG to LB, June 23, 1942, in Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1.
2. The family was scattered that summer. Byrne was spending a few weeks with family friends in Michigan. “Zaz, M. and I will probably drive up to Boston and some of the beaches up there,” Marston wrote to Byrne (that is, he and Huntley and Pete were going to the Cape, to see Ethel Byrne). “Mom is taking Donn and OA up to Aunt Margaret’s” (that is, Olive Byrne was taking them to Margaret Sanger’s). WMM to BHRM, undated but summer 1942, in the possession of BHRM. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, “For Jupiter and Greece,” By Jupiter: A Musical Comedy (New York: DRG Record
s, 2007).
3. [WMM], “Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author.”
4. WMM to Sheldon Mayer, April 16, 1942, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
5. Neither of the two modern reprint editions of Wonder Woman comics, The Wonder Woman Chronicles and The Wonder Woman Archives, includes the four-page “Wonder Women of History” insert. I read the series as it appeared in the originals, as archived at DC Comics. (In the decades since, the significance of “Wonder Women of History” has been entirely overlooked, partly because it is difficult to find. It has never been included in reprint editions and survives only in the original issues of Wonder Woman, which are rare. The artist is unknown.)
6. In the summer of 1942, Marston and Marble were interviewed together on the radio. Alice Marble with Dale Leatherman, Courting Danger (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 177; WMM to BHRM, undated but summer 1942.
7. Alice Marble, Associate Editor of Wonder Woman, to LB, July 23, 1942, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1. The self-addressed, stamped envelope included with the mailing is still with the letter; Bender did not submit any nominations.
8. Bert Dale, “Funny Business,” Forbes, September 1, 1943, 22, 27. WMM estimated Wonder Woman’s readership in 1945 as two and a half million: WMM to Coulton Waugh, March 5, 1945.
9. On that type of distribution, see MCG to LB, March 14, 1944, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 2. As a promotional campaign, designed as much to defend comics as to promote them, “Wonder Women of History” has much in common with another effort of Gaines’s. In 1942, he began printing a comic book called Picture Stories from the Bible. As with Wonder Woman, he arranged to have the first issue sent to Bender. Gaines donated all the profits from the sale of Picture Stories from the Bible to religious organizations. See Edward L. Wertheim, Secretary, Advisory Council, Picture Stories from the Bible, press release, November 1, 1945, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 3.
10. The advertisement is reproduced in Daniels, Wonder Woman, 92.
11. Marble was a popular lecturer at women’s colleges, where she told women students about her tennis career and mentioned, too, her work for Gaines: “I have revealed, to their delight, that I write a comic strip,” she later wrote. Alice Marble, The Road to Wimbledon (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), 161.
12. Although Marble mentioned writing comics in her 1946 autobiography, she did not say anything about it in a later autobiography: Marble with Leatherman, Courting Danger. Nor is her affiliation with DC Comics mentioned in Sue Davidson, Changing the Game: The Stories of Tennis Champions Alice Marble and Althea Gibson (Seattle: Seal, 1997).
13. WMM to MCG, February 20, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
14. “The Ordeal of Queen Boadicea,” Sensation Comics #60, December 1946.
15. Roubicek was very interested in history, according to Jeff Rovin, who was her assistant at DC Comics in 1971 and 1972. He remembers her telling him about how historical stories had been placed in the middle of comic books in the past, saying that it had been a good idea. Rovin, interview with the author, July 25, 2013.
16. Details about the life of Dorothy Roubicek, later Dorothy Woolfolk, are hard to come by. Her papers survive only in fragments, in the collections of other people. Information about her parents and her birth can be found in the U.S. censuses, especially those for 1915, 1935, and 1940. Further details, not all of them reliable, come from Jocelyn R. Coleman, “The Woman Who Tried to Kill Superman,” Florida Today, August 20, 1993. The only photograph I have come across is from 1955 and appears in Thomas, All-Star Companion, 22. Much of my information comes from Roubicek’s daughter, Donna Woolfolk Cross. Cross is the daughter of Dorothy Roubicek and William Woolfolk; she was born in 1947. Donna Woolfolk Cross, interview with the author, October 30, 2013, and e-mail to the author, November 7 and 12, 2013. Many thanks to Donna Woolfolk Cross for her candor.
17. [WMM], “Noted Psychologist Revealed as Author.”
18. “Wonder Women of History: Susan B. Anthony,” Wonder Woman #5, June–July 1943.
19. The wave metaphor, while it remains popular, has been subject to serious scholarly criticism. For a representative selection of the range of recent challenges, see the essays in Nancy A. Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Wave: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), and in “Is it Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor,” Feminist Formations 22 (2010): 76–135. The introductions by Hewitt (No Permanent Wave, 1–12) and Kathleen A. Laughlin (“Is it Time to Jump Ship?,” 76–81) are valuable summaries of the debate.
20. “Battle for Womanhood,” Wonder Woman #5, June–July 1943.
21. “The Purloined Pressure Coordinator,” Comic Cavalcade #4, Fall 1943.
22. “The Adventure of the Life Vitamin,” Wonder Woman #7, Winter 1943.
23. “America’s Wonder Women of Tomorrow,” Wonder Woman #7, Winter 1943.
24. Gallup’s polling on this question over the years is reported and challenged in Streb et al., “Social Desirability Effects and Support for a Female American President,” Public Opinion Quarterly 72 (2008): 76–89.
25. “A Wife for Superman,” Hartford Courant, September 28, 1942.
26. “The Amazon Bride,” Comic Cavalcade #8, Fall 1944.
CHAPTER 27. SUFFERING SAPPHO!
1. OBR, “Our Women Are Our Future,” Family Circle, August 14, 1942. Marston sent a copy of this article to Gaines and asked him to send it to Bender. The clipping, with a covering note saying, “Dr. Marston thought you might be interested in this,” is in Bender’s papers, box 16, folder 7.
2. OBR, “Fit to Be Tied?” Family Circle, March 21, 1937.
3. “Department Store Perfidy,” Sensation Comics #8, August 1942.
4. WMM, typewritten script for Wonder Woman #1, Episode A, dated April 15, 1942, DC Comics Archives.
5. WMM, typewritten script for Wonder Woman #2, Episode A, undated, DC Comics Archives, pp. 7–8, 14, 15. Compare to “The God of War,” Wonder Woman #2, Fall 1942, pp. 4C, 8A, 19–21, 25.
6. Mayer quoted in Daniels, DC Comics, 61.
7. Frank summarizes the report in Josette Frank, “What’s in the Comics?” Journal of Educational Sociology 18 (December 1944): 214–22. On the background behind this issue, see Harvey Zorbaugh (associate editor of the journal) to LB, July 31, 1944, Bender Papers, box 12, folder 17. Zorbaugh had hoped to include an article by either Sterling North or Clifton Fadiman (“in any case, it will be an article of violent criticism of the comics,” Zorbaugh told Bender), but in the end, neither critic contributed.
8. Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “The Comics as a Social Force,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18 (December 1944): 204–13.
9. Josette Frank to MCG, February 17, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian. Gaines also forwarded a copy of this letter to Bender; it is in her papers, box 16, folder 1. Frank had been following Wonder Woman from the start. In October 1941, Gaines sent her “an advanced copy of ‘All-Star Comics’ #8, which contains the introductory episode of ‘Wonder Woman.’ ” MCG to Josette Frank, October 16, 1941, CSAA Papers, box 24, folder 239. She had also long complained about how the magazine “flaunts a partly dressed woman on the cover” and that “the ‘ladies’ in this strip always seem to appear in chains or irons,” as in a letter to Harry Childs, dated February 8, 1943, CSAA Papers, box 24, folder 240.
10. WMM to MCG, February 20, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
11. BHRM, interview with the author, July 14, 2013.
12. WMM to MCG, February 20, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
13. Dorothy Roubicek to MCG, February 19, 1943, and Roubicek, pencil sketch of Wonder Woman costume with penciled annotation to WMM from MCG, February 19, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
14. Francis J. Burke to Alice Marble, February 20, 1943, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 6.
15. MCG to LB, February 26, 1943, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1.
16. Dorothy Roubicek to MCG, March 12, 1943, Memo, WW Letters, Smithsonian. Bender found the whole controversy trul
y fascinating, writing to Gaines:
I must tell you I am really very much interested in the content of the psychological problems of Wonder Woman, and would appreciate it very much if you would keep in touch with me on other material coming in concerning Wonder Woman.… I have been discussing some of these problems in various lectures which I am giving and am really interested to go into the psychological implications because these seem to strike at the very heart of masculinity and femininity and of aggression and submission which is very significant in our modern culture.
LB to MCG, April 6, 1943. Gaines replied, assuring her that he would keep her posted. MCG to LB, April 13, 1943. Both letters are in the Bender Papers, box 16, folder 1.
17. LB, “The Psychology of Children’s Reading and the Comics,” Journal of Educational Sociology 18 (December 1944): 223–31; quotations are from pp. 225, 226, and 231. A marked draft of this essay can be found in the Bender Papers, box 13, folder 20.
18. Nyberg, Seal of Approval, 14. W.W.D. Sones to MCG, March 15, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian. Sones’s letter inspired a lengthy, quasi-scholarly reply from WMM: WMM to W.W.D. Sones, March 20, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian. It recapitulates the basic arguments of The Emotions of Normal People. Gaines sent copies of both letters to Bender; they are in her papers, box 16, folder 1.
19. John D. Jacobs to “Charles Moulton,” September 9, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
20. MCG to WMM, September 14, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
21. WMM to MCG, September 15, 1943, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
22. Josette Frank to MCG, January 29, 1944, WW Letters, Smithsonian, and Bender Papers, box 16, folder 2. Gaines forwarded a copy of this letter to Bender.
23. WMM to MCG, February 1, 1944, WW Letters, Smithsonian.
24. MCG to Helen Frostenson, Children’s Ward, Bellevue Hospital, c/o LB, Psychiatric Division, January 21, 1944, Bender Papers, box 16, folder 2.
25. Bender’s 1954 Senate testimony, p. 156.