A review by robertrivasplata
The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

adventurous emotional funny informative inspiring mysterious slow-paced

4.5

Like the title says, this is a history of the genesis of comic book superhero Wonder Woman, focusing mostly on the life, family, & times of her main creator William Moulton Marston. Marston created Wonder Woman towards the end of his life, & she was his major professional achievement, coming after years of attempts to make a name for himself as an academic, pop psychologist, & lie detection expert. I was almost impressed at Marston's relentless self promotion, & also his wife(s') relentless promotion of him, often in some pretty deceptive ways. I can tell Lepore was at least somewhat amused by Olive Byrne's ongoing bit where she interviews famous psychologist W.M. Marston, while never disclosing that she's known him for years, let alone kinda married to him. Not sure if this is a trick she learned from Marston himself, who was certainly not below having his students to represent a defendant in a murder trial for the purposes of calling him as an expert witness to promote his lie-detector. The Secret History of Wonder Woman ncludes a lot about the history & milieu of the feminist & suffragist movement of the early 20th century, tying Marston's philosophy (for which Wonder Woman was his vehicle) with that of those early feminists, especially Margaret Sanger & her sister Ethel Byrne, who just happened to be the aunt & mother of his mistress/2nd wife, Olive. If it sounds confusing, it's because I was sometimes confused. My main complaint with this book is that it should have included a family tree/dramatis personae chart. Some of the captions in the color plate section do a decent concise job of explaining some of these family relationships, so I was not completely without a paddle. Also includes a fair amount about the state of the field of psychiatry in the United States during the early 20th century. 

The old photos & comics featured as illustrations are amazing. As always, I'm struck by how odd the 1930s-40s comics' style is. It's hard to articulate, but I feel like the look is epitomized in the faces in the courtroom scene on pgs 76-77, & in the way Wonder Woman is running onto the daily comics page on pg 244. 

Not sure I buy the Marston family's claims that the bondage fantasies featured in the early Wonder Woman comics were not enacted in reality by William, Elizabeth, & Olive, or that Elizabeth & Olive didn't have a sexual relationship of their own after William's death. The lengths the family went to cover up the fact of William, Elizabeth, & Olive's throuple (sometimes tetruple) indicates that the kids are probably not reliable narrators in that regard. 

The endnotes are not completely vital to understanding this book, but they do illuminate the kinds of (& how much) research Lepore did. The amount of research that went into just reconstructing Marston's Harvard University career is amazing. & I'm kind of blown away that the Harvard University Archives contain students' class notes going back at to least 1911! The list of abbreviated names at the beginning of the notes is really helpful for keeping the various dramatis personae straight.