Harvard historian Jill Lepore claims in her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, that Wonder Woman is the “missing link in a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later.”
The hero and her alter ego, Diana Prince, were the products of the tumultuous women’s rights movements of the early 20th century. Here are 10 essential elements to understanding the history and legacy of Wonder Woman and the family from which she sprung.
Wonder Woman first appeared in Sensation Comics #1 in December 1941.
Since that issue arrived 73 years ago, Wonder Woman has been in constant publication, making her the third longest running superhero in history, behind Superman (introduced June 1938) and Batman (introduced May 1939).
Wonder Woman’s creator had a secret identity.
Superheroes always have secret identities. So too did the man behind Wonder Woman. His name upon publication was Charles Moulton, but that was a pseudonym. It was after two years of popularity and success that the author revealed his identity: then-famous psychologist William Moulton Marston, who also invented the lie detector test.
William Moulton Marston was, as Jill Lepore tells it, an “awesomely cocky” psychologist and huckster from Massachusetts. He was also committed to the feminist causes he grew up around.
By 1941, Marston’s image of the iconic feminist of the future was already a throwback to his youth. He saw the celebrated British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst speak in Harvard Square (she was banned from speaking at Harvard University) in 1911, and from then on imagined the future of civilization as one destined for female rule.
Actually, the whole Marston family had a secret identity.
The Marston family was an unconventional home, full of radical politics and feminism. Marston lived with multiple women, including his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, a highly educated psychologist, and another lifelong partner, a writer named Olive Byrne, who was the niece of birth control activist Margaret Sanger. He had four children, two by each of the women, and they all grew up oblivious to the polyamorous nature of their parents’ relationships.
Marston, Holloway, and Byrne all contributed to Wonder Woman’s creation, a character that Marston explicitly designed to show the necessity of equality and advancement of women’s rights.
Wonder Woman was an Amazon molded from clay, but she was birthed out of feminism.
Princess Diana of Themyscira, or Diana Prince (Wonder Woman’s alter ego), comes from the land of the Amazons. In Greek mythology, the Amazons are an immortal race of beauties that live apart from men. In the origin story of Wonder Woman, Diana is daughter of the queen of the Amazons. She’s from Paradise Island (Paradise is the land where nomer men live), where Queen Hyppolita carves her daughter out of clay. She has nomer father.