The Secret History of Wonder Woman
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Within the origin of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of feminism in the twentieth-century.
“Everything you might want in a page-turner…skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most “serious” feminist history—fun.” —Entertainment Weekly
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston.
The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. Even while celebrating conventional family life in a regular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.
Includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.
“Everything you might want in a page-turner…skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most “serious” feminist history—fun.” —Entertainment Weekly
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston.
The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. Even while celebrating conventional family life in a regular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.
Includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.
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Community Reviews
The historian Jill Lepore’s 2014 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, is a biography of the creator of Wonder Woman, the psychologist William Moulton Marston, and his three wives: Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Wilkes Huntley. I read the book on the Kindle. It is worth noting that for Lepore, Marjorie Wikes Huntley, a librarian, remained “mysterious” (307). I read that Lepore was unsure what to make of William Moulton Marston. She writes, “he sometimes seemed so silly, his experiments so nutty, his showmanship so delightfully ridiculous. But then he sometimes seemed so creepy, his appetites so cruel, his recklessness so dangerous” (299). The Secret History of Woman uses the life of Marston and his wives to cover many different topics. The book reminded me of Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, in which Bill Bryson uses the lives of Charles Lindberg and a few other American figures from the 1920s to explore different aspects of American culture at the time. One of the themes of The Secret History of Wonder Woman is the status of Wonder Woman as a character parallels the history of American Feminism. Marston was heavily influenced by the American Feminism of the 1910s when he created Wonder Woman in the 1940s. After World War II, Wonder Woman became very domesticated in Wonder Woman’s stories; the character returned in the early 1970s. I have read several of Lepore’s articles in the New Yorker magazine and enjoyed reading her articles. I have enjoyed Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot’s version of Wonder Woman, so I am curious to read The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Lepore's book was readable, and I enjoyed reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman.
Who would have imagined that the comic book loved by millions of girls and boys was the creation of such an interesting collection of intimately connected individuals! This story will blow your mind!
A fabulous exploration of the rise of feminism in the United States told through the lens of one of America's most macho endeavors: the super hero comic book.
This was a very well researched effort to make sense of something that perhaps doesn't merit the attention. The book follows Wm Marston and Elizabeth Holloway through an incredibly fraught academic and family life. They are intellectuals in the 1920s, in graduate programs in psychology, hobnobbing with lots of big names in academia. They marry and rather quickly, Marston insists upon life as a menage a trois, with a student of his. He is fired from position after position, rapidly moving down the academic ladder. Ultimately he begins drawing a cartoon. Wonder Woman is born. Lots more controversy ensues and it, too, is carefully documented. I just couldn't make myself care about this one.
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