Diana Prince fans, represent! My heart will always be with the “controversial” womyn’s-libber WW of my teenage years, primed by fuzzy memories of reprints of the 1940s Nazi-fighting WW. But Wonder Woman’s history, and her creator’s, is a lot stranger than I ever knew. Historian Jill LePore, in the New Yorker, on “Wonder Woman’s Secret Past“:
… The much cited difficulties regarding putting Wonder Woman on film—Wonder Woman isn’t big enough, and neither are Gal Gadot’s breasts—aren’t chiefly about Wonder Woman, or comic books, or superheroes, or movies. They’re about politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hardboiled detective. Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly…
Wonder Woman’s origin story comes straight out of feminist utopian fiction. In the nineteenth century, suffragists, following the work of anthropologists, believed that something like the Amazons of Greek myth had once existed, a matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy. “The period of woman’s supremacy lasted through many centuries,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1891. In the nineteen-tens, this idea became a staple of feminist thought. The word “feminism,” hardly ever used in the United States before 1910, was everywhere by 1913. The suffrage movement had been founded on a set of ideas about women’s supposed moral superiority. Feminism rested on the principle of equality. Suffrage was a single, elusive political goal. Feminism’s demand for equality was far broader. “All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained. They shared an obsession with Amazons…
In 1917, when motion pictures were still a novelty and the United States had only just entered the First World War, Sanger starred in a silent film called “Birth Control”; it was banned. A century of warfare, feminism, and cinema later, superhero movies—adaptations and updates of mid-twentieth-century comic books whose plots revolve around anxieties about mad scientists, organized crime, tyrannical super-states, alien invaders, misunderstood mutants, and world-ending weapons—are the super-blockbusters of the last superpower left standing. No one knows how Wonder Woman will fare onscreen: there’s hardly ever been a big-budget superhero movie starring a female superhero. But more of the mystery lies in the fact that Wonder Woman’s origins have been, for so long, so unknown. It isn’t only that Wonder Woman’s backstory is taken from feminist utopian fiction. It’s that, in creating Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston was profoundly influenced by early-twentieth-century suffragists, feminists, and birth-control advocates and that, shockingly, Wonder Woman was inspired by Margaret Sanger, who, hidden from the world, was a member of Marston’s family…
Marston was also what we’d now call a polyamorist:
In 1915, Marston married Elizabeth Holloway, who’d just graduated from Mount Holyoke, where she studied Greek, read Sappho, and became a feminist. Her hero was Mary Woolley, who lived for fifty-five years with Jeannette Marks, an English professor and an ardent suffragist. “Feminism is not a prejudice,” Woolley explained. “It is a principle.”…
… [I]n 1925, he fell in love with one of his students: [Sanger’s sister and co-protestor] Ethel Byrne’s daughter Olive…
In 1926, Olive Byrne, then twenty-two, moved in with Marston and Holloway; they lived as a threesome, “with love making for all,” as Holloway later said. Olive Byrne is the mother of two of Marston’s four children; the children had three parents. “Both Mommies and poor old Dad” is how Marston put it…
While their relationship was never officially public (“The whys and wherefores of the family arrangements were never discussed with the kids—ever,” [son] Pete says.”), it was open enough to eventually destroy Marston’s academic career in psychology. Holloway provided the growing family with a steady income working for an insurance agency; Byrne took care of the children and the household, supplemented by writing for magazines; Marston bounced from short-term teaching assignments to projects in most of the available pop-cult media (public lectures, the last of the vaudeville circuit, silent movies). And then…
In 1940, M. C. Gaines, who published Superman, read an article in Family Circle by Olive Byrne. She’d been worried by reading in the papers that comic books were dangerous, and that Superman was a Fascist. “With terrible visions of Hitlerian justice in mind,” she wrote in Family Circle, “I went to Dr. Marston.”…
Gaines decided to hire Marston as a consultant. Marston convinced Gaines that what he needed, to counter the critics, was a female superhero. The idea was for her to become a member of the Justice Society of America, a league of superheroes that held its first meeting in All-Star Comics No. 3, in the winter of 1940: “Each of them is a hero in his own right, but when the Justice Society calls, they are only members, sworn to uphold honor and justice!” Wonder Woman’s début appeared in December, 1941, in All-Star Comics No. 8. On the eve of the Second World War, she flew her invisible plane to the United States to fight for peace, justice, and women’s rights. To hide her identity, she disguised herself as a secretary named Diana Prince and took a job working for U.S. Military Intelligence… Drawn by an artist named Harry G. Peter, who, in the nineteen-tens, had drawn suffrage cartoons, she looked like a pinup girl. She’s Eleanor Roosevelt; she’s Betty Grable. Mostly, she’s Margaret Sanger…
Much, much more at the link….including eighty-three-year old Byrne Holloway Marston’s suggestion for today’s big-screen Wonder Woman.
lamh36
I’ve said it before that Wonder Woman is my fav superhero…period. She’s is and will always be my first. I used to sleep in my WW underoos everyday I could and had more than one pair so that I wouldn’t have to wait until wash day to wear them.
Lynda Carter’s version of Wonder Woman is still to this day what I see when I imagine Wonder Woman in my mind. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t and still am skeptical of the woman they chose to play Wonder Woman. in the new Superman movies.
I’ve been waiting a long time to see WW on the big screen, and so this woman has ALOT to live up to, and I’ll just admit, she’s already got some strikes in my book already.
Mnemosyne
For the interested, I fixed the problem video on my post about Trouble in Paradise (1933) — enjoy!
Also, my procedure this morning couldn’t have gone better, and even the prep wasn’t as bad as I feared. Thanks again to everyone who gave me advice — it definitely calmed me down and helped me prepare better for it.
stinger
Representing! I still have a set of tall WW iced tea glasses that I got in the ’70s. Thanks for this post!
Violet
@Mnemosyne: Was coming here to check on you. So glad it went well. I’ve been on parent duty so haven’t had the chance to check the site. Were the drugs they gave you good? My friend reported they were so good she could see why Michael Jackson wanted more.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
As usual, the drugs just made me sleepy, so I didn’t notice much. It really was falling asleep in one room and waking up in another.
The one issue that popped up is that I have naturally low blood pressure and they were worried it wouldn’t get into “normal” range so they could give me drugs. It eventually got up to 93-over-something and they went ahead. I guess I should have taken my ADHD meds this morning after all!
Violet
@Mnemosyne: Do your ADHD meds affect your blood pressure?
divF
I started reading comic books in the late 1950’s – we were stationed in Germany, no TV, parents had to give us something. By the time we got back ot the states in 1960, I was hooked on DC comics, particularly the Justice League / Justice Society story arc in the early 1960’s. For that there were two female superheros – WW and Black Canary.
@lamh36: I’m with you – Lynda Carter as WW stood out amongst all the cheesy action hero TV shows in the 1970’s (Six Million Dollar Man, Charlie’s Angels). She’ll be tough to displace in my imagination.
kindness
Hope it’s better than the 70’s TV series.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
Any stimulant affects blood pressure, so for me they just boost me to the middle of the normal range instead of being at the low end.
Violet
@Mnemosyne: Interesting! Probably just as well you didn’t take them, though. If you’d told them you took them they would likely have freaked out and not let you do the procedure.
Gene108
One quibble I have with Wonder Woman being exclusively hard to in film is that Superman is actually really hard to do in movies.
Outside of the first two Christopher Reeves Superman movies (which I do not think have aged well) there really have not been any that stood out as as excellent, as compared to Batman movies and the recent Marvel comics adaptions, including the Tobey McGuire Spidey films,
To borrow a table top gaming concept, Superman is so ridiculously overpowered that he breaks the genre of super heroes in film. Trying to craft normal human weaknesses, so the audience can sympathize with him, is had to do for a nearly indestructible space alien with super strength, speed, vision, hearing, etc.
Studios keep trying to churn out Superman films, but they are usually mediocre, because of the main character.
another Holocene human
The trippy 40s WW was awesome. Most other comic book versions have sucked except for Perez and Jimenez, two gay guys, lol. WW’s real origins freak today’s DC out. They prefer creepy authoritarian bs like the Bat Family. They actually destroyed WW’s island and people a few years back, for being man hating feminazis or something.
DC is evil and makes money off licensingWW’s image so they will never, ever allow control to revert back to the family.
Fascinating article, though. Despite reading up about Marston in comics forums there’s a lot there I didn’t know.
another Holocene human
The best character in original WW is Etta Candy. “If your man is depressed, just give him candy! ”
WW may be a semi divine warrior princess but Etta is an red blooded All-American broad–represent!
Red Tornado from 40s DC was awesome too. That was before DC embraced the dark side in the 50s and had a decade of just awful stuff. They came back in the 60s by embracing the space man mania, also they had succeeded in using the courts and legislature to crush most of their rivals in the market, and they had the good sense to hire Jack Kirby on some stuff.
RSA
I think it’s hard to look convincingly superheroic in a brightly colored bathing suit (man or woman).
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
@Gene108: I don’t think that “Superman/Wonder Woman are too powerful to film” is a valid argument if you look at wider media. Superman has had one better-than-average TV show (LOIS AND CLARK) and one of…varying quality (SMALLVILLE — and in fairness, later seasons of LOIS AND CLARK were rough at best). Wondy, of course, had the iconic 70;’s series, as well — but also in fairness, she was pretty low-powered compared to how she’s portrayed today.
But the trick, if there is one, is that stories about either character are about the Character, not their powers. Like, well, any story. We care about Batman stories in large part not simply because he’s skilled, but because the drive and pathos in the background of his tale makes him a tragic figure in the best Greek tradition — it carries into his character, and into hooks to write against, in a way that Diana and Superman’s backgrounds do not.
This is a huge part of what makes Superman tough to write — both he and Diana are, ultimately, highly optimistic and positive figures. Superman’s origins force writers to generally disconnect him from his Krypton past; having Jor-El running around in a “Brave and the Bold” style-team up with Lois Lane (arguably the best part of MAN OF STEEL) was perhaps the most play that character has had in Superman ever, and it still doesn’t break the lack of overt tragedy in Superman’s origins. Clark grieves for what is lost, but he didn’t see his birth parents die in front of him, didn’t have that shock that makes Batman’s story oddly relatable. And when, in the movie, Pa Kent dies? Well, I agree with everyone it made no sense — but more critically in Clark’s tales, it always happens when he’s either on the cusp of, or in, adulthood, and after years of love and affection.
Same with Diana — not to turn this into a novel, but growing up damm-near perfect in a literal Utopia isn’t exactly the most potent storytelling hooks for a character. You have to turn into how she reacts to the world she finds herself in — which is the point of the article, that you really can’t. Or you shape flaws into who she is, and write to have her confront and manage those flaws. She’s been written to be a bit too aggressive, a bit too naive — I vastly prefer the former to the latter, as a Diana that’s too powerful “for her own good”, and struggles with the (literal or otherwise) impact of not just her power, but her presence, seems to make for some of the best stories about her.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to write a book, but there’s more to successfully writing superheros than power levels.
C.V. Danes
I can definitely picture Jennifer Lawrence as Wonder Woman. Gal Gadot not so much.
Craig
I think some perspective is in order. The war in Iraq went “badly.” But I really don’t see how you can look back over the struggle for women’s rights from the late 19th Century to today and say, “Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly…” Ups and downs, yes. Setbacks and disappointments, sure. Disagreements about what it’s all about, yeah. But “badly?” That just shows a real lack of historical sensibility–and in what purports to be a historical analysis, I find that a pretty serious flaw.
Slugger
I believe that one should live in the now, not in the past. However, Lynda Carter can not be surpassed by anyone alive today. Same goes for Catherine Bach, Barbara Feldon, Barbara Eden, and many others. To be young, full of testosterone, and see one of them on the screen was truly great.
WereBear
I just remember the incessant whining about the new, blond!, James Bond, before the movie came out.
After the movie? Totally different story.
Someguy
@Craig: I really don’t see how you can look back over the struggle for women’s rights from the late 19th Century to today and say, “Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly…” Ups and downs, yes. Setbacks and disappointments, sure. Disagreements about what it’s all about, yeah. But “badly?”
Well, if you’re measuring it by a faliure to return to a world dominated by powerful amazon hunter gatherer matriarchs, then yeah, it’s an abject failure. Although I will note that Yukon Barbie has tried out for the role recently.