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3.74 AVERAGE
3.74 AVERAGE
A disappointment. Although the scope is impressive and the subjects incredibly interesting--seeking to cover not just Wonder Woman comics but the unorthodox private life of her creator and the early history of the 20th century women's rights movement itself--the writing is choppy, flat, and about as sophisticated as a 5th grader's English essay. It might have been better with a heavier editor's pen; the author has an infuriating habit of using three sentences when one would have been more elegant and precise. There are great b&w photos and illustrations throughout and a center collection of color works that combine to give a good overview of Marston, Holloway, and Wonder Woman, but the meat of this doorstop is sadly dried out and ultimately indigestible.
I know I gave it a crappy review but seriously "It was ok". Closer to a neutral 2.5 stars than a measly 2 stars.
The book is more of a history of William Marston - his early life and college career, his influence with the lie detector, the two women he "lived" with, and then we get his influence on Wonder Woman. Marston was definitely a progressive in the women's rights movement and would probably be considered slightly progressive in the sexual sense in today's standards.
VERY well researched. A little too much. Maybe Lepore could have edited some of the information out so the book didnt come across like a dissertation.
I would say this book is a must-read if you're at all interested in the women's suffrage and the equality movement (there's a lot of mentions of Ethyl Byrne and Margaret Sanger). But at the end of the day it's dry and boring. Oy vey.
The book is more of a history of William Marston - his early life and college career, his influence with the lie detector, the two women he "lived" with, and then we get his influence on Wonder Woman. Marston was definitely a progressive in the women's rights movement and would probably be considered slightly progressive in the sexual sense in today's standards.
VERY well researched. A little too much. Maybe Lepore could have edited some of the information out so the book didnt come across like a dissertation.
I would say this book is a must-read if you're at all interested in the women's suffrage and the equality movement (there's a lot of mentions of Ethyl Byrne and Margaret Sanger). But at the end of the day it's dry and boring. Oy vey.
In the Introduction to Jodi Picoult's [b:Wonder Woman, Vol. 2: Love and Murder|1142008|Wonder Woman, Vol. 2 Love and Murder|Jodi Picoult|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1292061034s/1142008.jpg|1129347] it is said that there has never been a classic Wonder Woman story, the way Batman has [b:Batman: The Killing Joke|96358|Batman The Killing Joke|Alan Moore|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1346331835s/96358.jpg|551787], [b:Batman: The Long Halloween|106069|Batman The Long Halloween|Jeph Loeb|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1350137101s/106069.jpg|680248], and [b:Batman: The Dark Knight Returns|59960|Batman The Dark Knight Returns|Frank Miller|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327892039s/59960.jpg|1104159], and Superman has ... some good stories, somewhere, probably I guess. Love and Murder definitely isn't a classic (although it's good until the idiotic Amazons Attack! storyline kicks in), but The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore could stake a good claim to classic status. Even if I will admit to a personal bias in favour of the history of comic books over their actual content, the creation of Wonder Woman, tied up (often literally) with the women's suffrage movement, the campaign for birth control, and twentieth-century feminism in general is a fascinating story. How much of it can genuinely be described as "secret" I am less certain,* but Lepore combines elements from numerous sources, largely the archives of the Marston family, to tell a story spanning more than half a century.
The book is full of fascinating facts about twentieth century comic books and feminism, which may or may not have been "secrets", such as:
1. Olive Byrne, the lover/companion of William Moulton Marston and Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist.
2. Margaret Sanger had a 'decades long' affair with H.G. Wells.
3. Six years after its foundation by Sanger in 1921, the American Birth Control League was found to be disproportionately composed of Republicans and Rotarians. Sanger was forced to resign as league president, as the membership was not interested in feminism but population control.
4. In the early 1920s, the department of Psychology at Columbia University decided to solve the problem of oversubscribed graduate student programs by encouraging women to drop out, a process so successful that it continues in many university departments to this day.
5. Betty Boop ran for president of the USA in 1932. There was much discussion about when a woman would run for President or Vice-President of the US in the 1930s; it was usually assumed that the latter would be successful first, within a decade, with the former taking about twenty years. Marston predicted that it would take the US a thousand years to become a matriarchy. In a Gallup poll of 1937, 33 percent of Americans said that they would vote for a woman for president. It looks like we'll get to see how far America has come since then in November.
6. It may not have actually been Holloway, Marston's wife, who insisted that he create a female superhero - she claimed to have always been too busy to have anything to do with Wonder Woman. Her son, however, insists that it was her idea to make "a female Superman".
7. Wonder Woman's red, white, and blue costume was inspired by the recent release of Captain America, who also wears an American flag (although Wonder Woman also wears as little as the creators could get away with).
8. The original Wonder Woman comics had a four-page spread called "The Wonder Women of History" - mini biographies of impressive historical women. As if to prove the hypothesis that the 1950s were the worst possible decade, in 1950 this feature was replaced by a series about weddings called "Marriage a la Mode". "The Wonder Women of History" should definitely be resurrected if it isn't currently in use.
9. Marston predicted 'male rights' activists in a 1943 Wonder Woman comic, where a Professor Manly founds the Man's World Party in the year 3000. He rigs the election and wins, but once he's discovered his candidate (Steve Trevor) is deposed and Diana becomes President. In this and other early Wonder Woman comics, Steve Trevor sounds like a right wanker.
10. Despite the bondage themes of early Wonder Woman comics, Marston's son Byrne was pretty certain that there was no bondage in their house - and that his mothers would never have let Marston get away with it.
11. Complaints that comic books are all about hyper-masculine white American men date back at least to the 1940s. In his book [b:Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth|429918|Seduction of the Innocent The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth|Fredric Wertham|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1335201533s/429918.jpg|418902] Dr Frederick Wertham even includes interviews with young Black girls complaining about the depiction of people of colour and how White kids think that all Black kids are like that. Unfortunately, the book was much more successful in propagating its horrific homophobia than its points about racism in early comics.
12. In the 1970s, Samuel R. Delany was hired to write a six-part "Women's Lib" storyline for Wonder Woman, in which she would battle a different male chauvinist each issue, building up to a defence of an abortion clinic. This last storyline was dropped, and only the first issue was published.
Lepore also reveals how tense the relationship between William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne could be. This difficulty seems like a disappointment for the modern reader, as one really hopes that one of the most famous polyamorous relationships of the twentieth century was idyllic - especially as Holloway and Byrne remained together long after Marston's death. However, it seems as if Marston might actually have been the problem. Much like the polyamory of Percy Bysshe Shelley about a century earlier, the men who wanted to be in such relationships don't seem to have quite grasped the immense social and biological difficulties facing women in that position, particularly the lack of birth control.** Sanger, of course, was working to overcome that obstacle - a perspective which many overlook due to her association with racist eugenicists, the only people with money who wanted to fund contraception. As Lou Rogers illustrated in Sanger's Birth Control Review in 1923, contraception was necessary to free women from the shackles of unwanted babies/pregnancies. Women's liberation depended (depends?) on reproductive freedom, completely denied to the Shelley's; Holloway, however, had an ingenious way to fulfil her desire for children and maintain her career: Olive Byrne, her husband's lover, could raise her children for her. Her triumph here, and elsewhere, is much more interesting than the life of the egomaniacal Marston. I found myself wishing for more of a biography of her and Byrne than of Marston's creation, Wonder Woman. But the 'threesome' is really strained when the financial burden of the family is placed entirely on one individual, as it was placed on Holloway throughout much of the 1930s.
While there is much that is fascinating in this book there is also much that I found frustrating. This frustration comes perhaps from the emphasis on Wonder Woman rather than on the human beings who created and inspired her - there is very little included about the lives of Byrne and Holloway which does not relate to Wonder Woman. Throughout much of the history Lepore ties events in the lives of Marston et al to some plot point in the early Wonder Woman comics. At first, this practice feels like an attempt to shoe-horn the eponymous superhero into the history; later on it feels more relevant, at times largely because Lepore seems more confident in the connection. The most egregious example, on pp. 107-08, is when Lepore describes an event in Boston in 1929 at which Margaret Sanger was booked to speak but was banned by authorities from doing so. Instead, Sanger appeared on stage, gagged, while a historian from Harvard. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., read her statement. Lepore adds: "Wonder Woman is gagged by villains all the time, too. But in the end, she always has her say." The attempt seems to be to tie the events of these early Wonder Woman stories to the historical events which inspired them. At times, this is successful. But the history is interesting enough without these asides, and the Wonder Woman stories aren't well enough known to really warrant such references. It's as often distracting as it is illuminating.
That being said, the final part of the history, when Marston creates and is writing Wonder Woman, is by far the most interesting and engaging. Her the literary analysis and historical storytelling come together and Lepore tells the story very effectively. Especially in the later stages, it feels a little rushed, and I felt that there was scope for a post-Marston biography of Wonder Woman up to the present day, too. It is also worth emphasising that the first two parts of the history deal with early twentieth-century feminism in an exciting and interesting way - it is only the asides to the Wonder Woman stories that they inspired which annoyed me.
Indeed, it is especially important, I feel, to reflect on Wonder Woman's beginnings in that feminism with the direction the character has taken in recent years - especially the awful decision to make Diana the daughter of Zeus instead of a woman created from clay by a woman and raised only by women. I don't have a lot of hope that her film will respect these origins, but now that her "secret history" has been revealed, perhaps I can be optimistic. Maybe she'll have returned to America to defend an abortion clinic from a bunch of thugs...?
* Lepore essentially explains why this history can be described as "secret" on pp. 293-96, right at the very end of the history. I felt that much of this last chapter could have been an introduction and the last chapter concerned a little more with the legacy of Wonder Woman, but then again I am not an editor.
** On Percy Bysshe Shelley, see Gordon, C. 2015 Romantic Outlaws.
The book is full of fascinating facts about twentieth century comic books and feminism, which may or may not have been "secrets", such as:
1. Olive Byrne, the lover/companion of William Moulton Marston and Elizabeth Holloway Marston, was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist.
2. Margaret Sanger had a 'decades long' affair with H.G. Wells.
3. Six years after its foundation by Sanger in 1921, the American Birth Control League was found to be disproportionately composed of Republicans and Rotarians. Sanger was forced to resign as league president, as the membership was not interested in feminism but population control.
4. In the early 1920s, the department of Psychology at Columbia University decided to solve the problem of oversubscribed graduate student programs by encouraging women to drop out, a process so successful that it continues in many university departments to this day.
5. Betty Boop ran for president of the USA in 1932. There was much discussion about when a woman would run for President or Vice-President of the US in the 1930s; it was usually assumed that the latter would be successful first, within a decade, with the former taking about twenty years. Marston predicted that it would take the US a thousand years to become a matriarchy. In a Gallup poll of 1937, 33 percent of Americans said that they would vote for a woman for president. It looks like we'll get to see how far America has come since then in November.
6. It may not have actually been Holloway, Marston's wife, who insisted that he create a female superhero - she claimed to have always been too busy to have anything to do with Wonder Woman. Her son, however, insists that it was her idea to make "a female Superman".
7. Wonder Woman's red, white, and blue costume was inspired by the recent release of Captain America, who also wears an American flag (although Wonder Woman also wears as little as the creators could get away with).
8. The original Wonder Woman comics had a four-page spread called "The Wonder Women of History" - mini biographies of impressive historical women. As if to prove the hypothesis that the 1950s were the worst possible decade, in 1950 this feature was replaced by a series about weddings called "Marriage a la Mode". "The Wonder Women of History" should definitely be resurrected if it isn't currently in use.
9. Marston predicted 'male rights' activists in a 1943 Wonder Woman comic, where a Professor Manly founds the Man's World Party in the year 3000. He rigs the election and wins, but once he's discovered his candidate (Steve Trevor) is deposed and Diana becomes President. In this and other early Wonder Woman comics, Steve Trevor sounds like a right wanker.
10. Despite the bondage themes of early Wonder Woman comics, Marston's son Byrne was pretty certain that there was no bondage in their house - and that his mothers would never have let Marston get away with it.
11. Complaints that comic books are all about hyper-masculine white American men date back at least to the 1940s. In his book [b:Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth|429918|Seduction of the Innocent The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth|Fredric Wertham|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1335201533s/429918.jpg|418902] Dr Frederick Wertham even includes interviews with young Black girls complaining about the depiction of people of colour and how White kids think that all Black kids are like that. Unfortunately, the book was much more successful in propagating its horrific homophobia than its points about racism in early comics.
12. In the 1970s, Samuel R. Delany was hired to write a six-part "Women's Lib" storyline for Wonder Woman, in which she would battle a different male chauvinist each issue, building up to a defence of an abortion clinic. This last storyline was dropped, and only the first issue was published.
Lepore also reveals how tense the relationship between William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne could be. This difficulty seems like a disappointment for the modern reader, as one really hopes that one of the most famous polyamorous relationships of the twentieth century was idyllic - especially as Holloway and Byrne remained together long after Marston's death. However, it seems as if Marston might actually have been the problem. Much like the polyamory of Percy Bysshe Shelley about a century earlier, the men who wanted to be in such relationships don't seem to have quite grasped the immense social and biological difficulties facing women in that position, particularly the lack of birth control.** Sanger, of course, was working to overcome that obstacle - a perspective which many overlook due to her association with racist eugenicists, the only people with money who wanted to fund contraception. As Lou Rogers illustrated in Sanger's Birth Control Review in 1923, contraception was necessary to free women from the shackles of unwanted babies/pregnancies. Women's liberation depended (depends?) on reproductive freedom, completely denied to the Shelley's; Holloway, however, had an ingenious way to fulfil her desire for children and maintain her career: Olive Byrne, her husband's lover, could raise her children for her. Her triumph here, and elsewhere, is much more interesting than the life of the egomaniacal Marston. I found myself wishing for more of a biography of her and Byrne than of Marston's creation, Wonder Woman. But the 'threesome' is really strained when the financial burden of the family is placed entirely on one individual, as it was placed on Holloway throughout much of the 1930s.
While there is much that is fascinating in this book there is also much that I found frustrating. This frustration comes perhaps from the emphasis on Wonder Woman rather than on the human beings who created and inspired her - there is very little included about the lives of Byrne and Holloway which does not relate to Wonder Woman. Throughout much of the history Lepore ties events in the lives of Marston et al to some plot point in the early Wonder Woman comics. At first, this practice feels like an attempt to shoe-horn the eponymous superhero into the history; later on it feels more relevant, at times largely because Lepore seems more confident in the connection. The most egregious example, on pp. 107-08, is when Lepore describes an event in Boston in 1929 at which Margaret Sanger was booked to speak but was banned by authorities from doing so. Instead, Sanger appeared on stage, gagged, while a historian from Harvard. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., read her statement. Lepore adds: "Wonder Woman is gagged by villains all the time, too. But in the end, she always has her say." The attempt seems to be to tie the events of these early Wonder Woman stories to the historical events which inspired them. At times, this is successful. But the history is interesting enough without these asides, and the Wonder Woman stories aren't well enough known to really warrant such references. It's as often distracting as it is illuminating.
That being said, the final part of the history, when Marston creates and is writing Wonder Woman, is by far the most interesting and engaging. Her the literary analysis and historical storytelling come together and Lepore tells the story very effectively. Especially in the later stages, it feels a little rushed, and I felt that there was scope for a post-Marston biography of Wonder Woman up to the present day, too. It is also worth emphasising that the first two parts of the history deal with early twentieth-century feminism in an exciting and interesting way - it is only the asides to the Wonder Woman stories that they inspired which annoyed me.
Indeed, it is especially important, I feel, to reflect on Wonder Woman's beginnings in that feminism with the direction the character has taken in recent years - especially the awful decision to make Diana the daughter of Zeus instead of a woman created from clay by a woman and raised only by women. I don't have a lot of hope that her film will respect these origins, but now that her "secret history" has been revealed, perhaps I can be optimistic. Maybe she'll have returned to America to defend an abortion clinic from a bunch of thugs...?
* Lepore essentially explains why this history can be described as "secret" on pp. 293-96, right at the very end of the history. I felt that much of this last chapter could have been an introduction and the last chapter concerned a little more with the legacy of Wonder Woman, but then again I am not an editor.
** On Percy Bysshe Shelley, see Gordon, C. 2015 Romantic Outlaws.
I'm not sure what to think of this book or Wonder Woman. Her history was deeply rooted within Margaret Sanger's family particularly that of her niece Olive and her associated for lack of a better word with the creator of Wonder Women. I won't discourage anyone from reading this for themselves I just don't think I can admire Wonder Woman as I once did.
I really enjoyed the history of the people behind WW, as well as the feminist history throughout the ages. I did find some of the WW specifics dragged on, and maybe it’s just that I found that less interesting than the personal and family drama and history.
This book was incredible to read. Not only did I learn a lot about Wonder Woman, I also read about some of my favorite pieces of history through this text. It was well written and constructed. I would definitely recommend if you're interested in "modern" history.
Honestly I listened to about 2/3 of this book and then skimmed through to the end. The creator of Wonder Woman lived an interesting wife. He had a three-way marriage, invented the lie detector, and was obsessed with the science of sex. It was interesting for a while but a little too detailed for me.
Well researched for sure, but the ending felt rushed. Very little beyond the 1970s and there's just one chapter dedicated to what happened after the feminist movement of the '70s. I felt there could have been a discussion on what WW could be like in the 21st century - and perhaps how her history could fit into a WW of the future.
WMM may have created WW on paper, but the woman he surrounded himself with were the real Wonder Women. And what a message that would have been in 1940s. I almost feel that the message hasn't changed much and woman still have a long way to go. I wonder what the suffragists of the early 20th century would think of women now? In many ways, the quest for equality continues.
I've seen quite a few of the DC movies, read the comics and watched TV programmes like the Justice League and WW is still very inconsistent. In one, she might be calm people person, the one with the highest EQ (the contrast to high IQ with no people skills Batman). In another, she's the war monger feminist who is "down with men" (as she was in "JL:The New Frontier").
I just hope the B vs S movie coming out in 2016, the future WW feature film and the JL movie yet to be made get her right. Make her smart, strong and give her some emotion, without turning her into the damsel in distress. After all, feminists can rescue themselves, thank you very much. :)
WMM may have created WW on paper, but the woman he surrounded himself with were the real Wonder Women. And what a message that would have been in 1940s. I almost feel that the message hasn't changed much and woman still have a long way to go. I wonder what the suffragists of the early 20th century would think of women now? In many ways, the quest for equality continues.
I've seen quite a few of the DC movies, read the comics and watched TV programmes like the Justice League and WW is still very inconsistent. In one, she might be calm people person, the one with the highest EQ (the contrast to high IQ with no people skills Batman). In another, she's the war monger feminist who is "down with men" (as she was in "JL:The New Frontier").
I just hope the B vs S movie coming out in 2016, the future WW feature film and the JL movie yet to be made get her right. Make her smart, strong and give her some emotion, without turning her into the damsel in distress. After all, feminists can rescue themselves, thank you very much. :)
informative
inspiring
slow-paced