Wonder

by Amanda

So you’ve probably already seen the headlines about this movie that came out in June, but some quick stats:

• first female-directed live-action film to have a $100 million+ budget
• biggest opening of all time for a female director, grossed $103.3 million in its domestic box office debut
• highest-grossing superhero origin film of all time, passing 2002’s Spider-Man

Apparently it was also the most popular Halloween costume this year…yes, I did it, but I’d been working on mine since the spring and combined elements of the old and new costume versions, so there. I see it was popular even with men! This is The Property Brothers Jonathan & Drew Scott on Kelly Ripa & Ryan Seacrest’s show Oct 31. (Didn’t catch who the two men on the right are)

AND we already get to see her again on the big screen when Justice League comes out this Friday, November 17!

Wonder Woman joined the League’s forerunner – the “Justice Society of America” – during her first year, 1941, but only as their secretary who mostly had to stay behind while they went off on adventures.

In 1944 she accomplished the feat of getting her own newspaper comic strip,

joining Superman and Batman as the only comic heroes in that category.

I found a compilation of her early comic books in the Arlington Library, and here are some of the things I found most interesting.

1.The glorified language in the descriptions on the opening pages

Like the crash of thunder from the sky comes the Wonder Woman, to save the world from the hatred and wars of men in a man-made world! And what a woman! A woman with the eternal beauty of Aphrodite and the wisdom of Athena – yet whose lovely form hides the agility of Mercury and the steel sinews of a Hercules! (January 1942)

Into this tortured, upside-down world of men, torn by hatreds, war, and destruction, comes Wonder Woman, a powerful being of light and happiness! …Wonder Woman brings to America a new hope for salvation from old world evils, conquest, and aggression. (February 1942)

“Glorious in her Amazon strength and glamorous beauty, Wonder Woman flashed upon the American horizon like a gorgeous tropical sunrise…she brings to America woman’s eternal gifts – love and wisdom! Defying the vicious intrigues of evil enemies and laughing gaily at all danger, Wonder Woman leads the invincible youth of America against the threatening forces of treachery, death, and destruction.” (March 1942)

She is determined to outwit the enemies of America and frustrate their insidious plans!(April 1942)

The courage and wit of a beautiful woman pitted against the cool, calm villainy of axis plans! Here again is a picture of Wonder Woman struggling violently against the forces of evil…and winning! (Summer issue 1942)

Wonder Woman leads the youth of America in a glorious crusade against viciousness and ruthless aggression. Gorgeous and unpredictable, this amazing Amazon maiden darts from the clear blue sky to help save America – the last stronghold of freedom and democracy! (June 1942)

This marvelous Amazon maiden flashes across the American horizon like a dazzling comet, lighting the dark dismal depths of human despair! Righting wrongs, defending America from the enemies of democracy, and fighting fearlessly for downtrodden women and children, in a man-made world, Wonder Woman wins all hearts and leads the youth of America to victory over evil! (July 1942)

If you go to Washington and meet Diana Prince, be-spectacled and demure Army nurse and secretary to Chief of Military Intelligence, you will never realize that you have shaken hands with Wonder Woman, the invincible enemy of injustice! …The Amazon princess comes to save American from disaster and further the cause of justice, democracy, and peace in this upset world of men! (August 1942)

Wonder Woman brings the invincible power of perfect womanhood to the supreme task of defending democracy and transforming evil to justice and happiness!” (September 1942)

Wonder Woman gladly gave up her heritage of perfect happiness in a world ruled by women to help bring Steve back to American and help him fight the battles of his great nation against greed, hatred, and foreign conquest…Wonder Woman spreads light and laughter in a rainbow path of happiness across the darkened lives of millions of Americans who long to free this world from evil and set love and justice in its place. (October 1942)

Wonder Woman again thwarts the machinations of these destroyers of civilization and brings to her beloved land, America, the glory and triumph of Paradise Island, where Amazon maidens enjoy peace, happiness, and eternal youth! (December 1942)

2. The creative exclamations

besides the usual “Gee Willikers!” “Jumping Blue Blazes!” or “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” we also get:

“Clawing catfish!”

“Great Caesar’s Ghost!”

“Tottering Tomcats!”

“Ye Gods and Little Fishballs!”

 

3. The World War II patriotism

In addition to the mentions of axis and allies and the battle for freedom and democracy  in the quotes above, there are ads for war bonds

repeated use of the expression “Keep ’em flying!”

…even Bald Eagles!

4. Treatment of gender stereotypes

Most of the time overturned, many times mocked, but occasionally maintained. One example of the latter is the line, “when Wonder Woman learns that Steve has a big spy case on the West Coast, she exercises a woman’s privilege and changes her mind.”

Yet look at the graffiti on the Holiday College girls’ car! “Blondes prefer gentlemen” and “This car is paid for. Is yours?”

Making fools of her captors while she infiltrates a criminal site:

 

So where in the world did this unprecedented super-heroine come from?!

Right, Themyscira…But I mean whose mind created her?

I saw enough fascinating tidbits about William Moulton Marston after I saw the movie in June that I checked out The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, staff writer for The New Yorker and a professor of history at Harvard. She published it in 2015 after DC’s announcement that Wonder Woman would hit the big screen in Batman vs. Superman.

From her 2014 article for Smithsonian Magazine:

Wonder Woman’s secret history isn’t written on parchment. Instead, it lies buried in boxes and cabinets and drawers, in thousands of documents, housed in libraries, archives and collections spread all over the United States, including the private papers of creator Marston—papers that, before I saw them, had never before been seen by anyone outside of Marston’s family.

Yeahhhhh, so I’m tired of these exposes about the “never-before-heard history,” but it actually is a truly  fascinating story.

Ranker’s Wonder Woman Trivia list says “The real life of the man who created Wonder Woman is worthy of a movie by itself.”

Well, we didn’t have to wait long because the Toronto Film Festival in Sept 2017 screened “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.” See http://marston.movie or IMDb page here.  If the title character, Luke Evans, looks familiar, he played Gaston in the recent remake of Beauty and the Beast and Bard, who slays the dragon Smaug, in The Hobbit movie trilogy. 

Here’s my summary of the key elements of Marston’s background.

A) He came of age during the Suffrage Movement and early Feminism, and held unorthodox views on love

In high school in the first decade of the 1900s, he presided over a debate about whether woman should have the right to vote. His philosophy teacher at Harvard was faculty sponsor for the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage. In 1911, during his freshman year, he saw Britain’s militant feminist Emmeline Pankhurst speak in Cambridge after she was banned from speaking at Harvard.

Marston was greatly influenced by Margaret Sanger’s 1920 book Woman and the New Race.  He said in 1945, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”

Sanger’s “Woman Rebel” feminist monthly stated in its 1914 manifesto:

Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.

Because I believe that woman’s freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her. Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.

In 1937, four years before Wonder Woman’s debut, Marston held a two-hour press conference at the Harvard Club of New York, declaring his belief in the inevitability of a matriarchy:

Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love, that man has…And as they develop as much ability for worldly success as they already have ability for love, they will clearly come to rule business and the Nation and the world…The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy – a nation of amazons in the psychological rather than the physical sense.

The Washington Post titled their article covering the event: “Neglected Amazons to Rule Men in 1,000 Years, says Psychologist.”

In a 1942 press release revealing his identity as Wonder Woman’s author, Marston said his hope in creating her was “to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men.”

Several years later he cited “the one outstanding benefit to humanity from the first World War was the great increase in the strength of women – physical, economic, mental…women definitely emerged from a false, harem-like protection and began taking over men’s work.”

While Jill’s book connects the symbolism of chains in suffragette protests to Marston’s heavy use of chains in the Wonder Woman comics,

having her bracelets chained by a man is her one weakness…and here’s where things start to get kinky.

Marston had a central theory of dominance and submission which complicates his brand of feminism. He also believed in “love binding.”

In 1929 he said it is a psychological law that “‘woman possesses the superior love power,’ that love always vanquishes force, that ‘passion is predominantly a male emotion, and that submission in love belongs to the man and not to the woman.”

 

…it is a false emotion which shows man as the leader and dictator in a love affair. Woman should be shown as the leader every time. She controls and directs the love affair. Maybe she uses her supposed submission to a cave man to get more of a grip on him ultimately. But the picture should show cave man appeal operates on as a challenge to that woman to captivate that pretty tough bird!

B) He was a psychologist who invented the basic lie detector test

As a Harvard undergraduate, Marston conducted experiments with Hugo Munsterberg in the Psychological Laboratory that were designed to detect physical manifestations of deception, primarily blood pressure changes.

This photo is from 1921, the year Marston finished his PhD (also from Harvard), and was distributed to newspapers along with a press release titled “Machine Detects Liars, Traps Crooks.”

Unfortunately, one of Marston’s rivals, Leonarde Keeler, patented the Polygraph machine in 1931 and began selling them to police departments nation-wide.

In response, Marston published “The Lie Detector Test” in 1938, claiming “There never has existed, nor ever will exist, a machine that detects liars – it is a scientific test in the hands of an expert which does the lie detecting.” As he was fond of saying, “I’m the lie detector!”

Hoover’s FBI charged one of its agents with reviewing the piece. The report described it as “egotistical,” with the “sole purpose of establishing that Doctor Marston was the first to use the blood pressure test in the detection of deception.”

C) He lived as part of “a threesome who harmoniously raised four children together“

In 1915, Marston married his college sweetheart Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, who similarly became an attorney and psychologist. She not only shared credit for most of Marston’s experiments and publications, but was also the family’s breadwinner.

Then, in 1925, while teaching at Tufts University, Marston fell in love with his student Olive Byrne…coincidentally the niece of groundbreaking feminist Margaret Sanger! Olive’s mother, Ethel Byrne, was jailed with her sister Margaret in 1917 for the illegal distribution of contraception. She went on a hunger strike and nearly died.

Marston told his wife that Byrne would live with them, or he would leave her. They went on to form a family, and even after Marston died in 1947, Elizabeth and Olive continued to live together until Olive’s death forty years later.

On the day Marston and Byrne called their anniversary (Nov 21, 1928), he  gave her a pair of wide silver bracelets, which she wore constantly.

Look familiar?

When Elizabeth Holloway Marston was asked about the famous bracelets in 1974 by a Berkely student doing a PhD dissertation on Wonder Woman, she said “A student of Dr. Marston’s wore on each wrist heavy, broad silver bracelets, one African and the other Mexican. They attracted his attention as symbols of love binding so that he adopted them for the Wonder Woman strip.” Jill Lepore points out the irony, because at that time the student (Olive Byrne) had been living with Holloway for 48 years!

Between 1928 and 1933, each of Marston’s women had two of his children. Adding to the confusion, one was named Olive Ann, and one Byrne. Holloway went right back to work while Olive Byrne stayed home and raised the children. She went by “Olive Richard” and told her sons, who were adopted by their father and step-mother, about their imaginary departed father. Marston told “census-takers and anyone else who asked” that she was his widowed sister-in-law.

Marston contracted polio in 1944, barely three years after the creation of Wonder Woman, and died in 1947. Wonder Woman’s new writer did not share the same feminist ideals.

Yahoo’s Entertainment Writer explains in 10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Wonder Woman:

After World War II, women who had been in the workforce resumed their roles as homemakers, and Wonder Woman’s politically progressive storylines became unfashionable. Instead of fighting for justice, she tried babysitting a dinosaur, becoming a fashion model, and writing a “lonely hearts” column. Even “Wonder Women of History” was replaced with a feature called “Marriage A La Mode,” which detailed the customs and traditions of matrimony. In the 1960s, Wonder Woman gave up her superpowers entirely to be with love interest Steve Trevor, permanently transforming into her human alter-ego Diana Prince.

Wonder Woman’s renaissance began in the 1970s, when she appeared on the first-ever cover of Ms. Magazine under the headline “Wonder Woman for President.” The editors of the feminist publication wanted to pay tribute to the Wonder Woman they remembered from their childhoods, who fought wartime dictators, protested unfair labor conditions at home, and would always break the (literal) shackles put on her by men. But the comics were slow to pick up the feminist pace…

Well, the 1970s “renaissance” included some far out costume changes!

DC Comics archivist and librarian Benjamin LeClear says “The mod years have some great looks for her, but no real fixed costume…She had a white jumpsuit with a W on it, but she wore all kinds of glamorous clothes in that period.”

I don’t know enough about the modern comic series to do justice to the evolution of Diana Prince from then to now, but if you’ve made it down this far, congratulations! And mark your calendar for December 13, 2019 when Wonder Woman 2 (with Director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot) is scheduled for release!