The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Jill Lepore

First annotation on Mar 16th, 2025. Last on Mar 24th, 2025.

8 quotes

Conclusion

Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism, which hasn't been altogether good for feminism. Superheroes, who are supposed to be better than everyone else, are excellent at clobbering people; they're lousy at fighting for equality.
Wonder Woman's debt is to the fictional feminist utopia and to the struggle for women's rights. Her origins lie in William Moulton Marston's past, and in the lives of the women he loved; they created Wonder Woman, too. Wonder Woman is no ordinary comic-book character because Marston was no ordinary man and his family was no ordinary family. Marston was a polymath. He was an expert in deception: he invented the lie detector test. He led a secret life: he had four children by two women; they lived together under one roof. They were masters of the art of concealment.
Marston was a scholar, a professor, and a scientist; Wonder Woman began on a college campus, in a lecture hall, and in a laboratory. Marston was a lawyer and a filmmaker; Wonder Woman began in a courthouse and a movie theater. The women Marston loved were suffragists, feminists, and birth control advocates. Wonder Woman began in a protest march, a bedroom, and a birth control clinic. The red bustier isn't the half of it. Unknown to the world, Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century, was part of Marston's family.

Chapter 1

History raises questions about the nature of truth. In a lecture Haskins delivered to freshmen, he distinguished the study of the past from the investigation of nature. "The biologist observes plants and animals; the chemist or physicist conducts experiments in his laboratory under conditions which he can control," Haskins said. "The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe." Instead, the historian has got to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it is unreliable.
He refused to stop mourning her. "To leave the dead wholly dead is rude," he pointed out, quite reasonably.
The key to teaching, Palmer believed, is moral imagination, "the ability to put myself in another's place, think his thoughts, and state strongly his convictions even when they are not my own." He "lectured in blank verse and made Greek hedonism a vital, living thing," Marston said
George Herbert Palmer handed out the questions to his class, along with a word of advice: "A scholar approaches a task for the sake of himself, not for that of someone else, as the schoolboy does."

Chapter 3

In an essay called "The Hidden Self," published in 1890, four years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, William James explained that a man has both a public self, the sum of his performances, and a private self, the sum of his passions