Outside her comic-book fanbase, the 40s cartoon character Wonder Woman is surely more appreciated by the lay person, when known at all, as a fancy-dress opportunity. Whatever her un-secret history, it has failed to distinguish her, in many a memory, from her rivals Bat, Cat and Super Woman. Hint: the others generally wear more clothes.
All credit to Jill Lepore, then, for simultaneously rescuing Wonder Woman from indifference, establishing her as an expression of first-wave feminism and introducing her creator, who must be one of the more repellent individuals ever to call himself a feminist. We owe Wonder Woman to the psychologist William Moulton Marston, who is normally associated with an early lie-detecting machine. J Edgar Hoover called him “a phony”. Lepore prefers “no ordinary man”.
What a sadness that Marston, who emerges in this account as a handsome, deceitful and startlingly creepy huckster, whose weirdness cost him his academic career, will never be played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The latter’s performance as a charlatan in The Master is one that Lepore’s eye-opening account of her lie-detecting liar and his times repeatedly brings to mind. The only pity is that any space that might have been devoted to Marston’s fellow exponents of free love, or to further details about the New Women he ardently admired, has to be devoted instead to the tiresome exploits and yet more tedious classical antecedents (“After Hippolyte defeated Hercules he stole her magic girdle”, etc) of Marston’s fantasy woman.
He was born in Massachusetts in 1893, into a family once rich and eccentric enough to have built its own castle. Unusually and – one might initially think – impressively, this clever young man was drawn towards the early US women’s movement and married a passionate feminist, his fellow student and a “whip-smart tomboy”, Elizabeth “Sadie” Holloway. US feminism, Lepore says, was “everywhere” by 1913, when it meant, as it does not always today (remember who modelled those “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts) “full participation in politics, work and the arts, on the grounds that women were in every way equal to men”. Also prevalent then, still unresolved now, was feminist anxiety about reconciling careers with childbearing. One of the movement’s most celebrated names, the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, was a family connection of Marston. Woman, she argued, “had chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal”.
Marston used to get particularly exercised, on behalf of Woman, at the thought of all those chains and Her struggle to break out of them. In fact, if the appeal of feminism, for him, was not wholly erotic, its promise of the ultimate bondage fantasy, a future matriarchy, made for a lovely fit with some of Marston’s consuming interests. As a scholar, he advanced a bizarre theory of four “primary emotions”: dominance, compliance, inducement and submission. In private, he explored their practical applications. Although, as with much of Marston’s uninhibited but diligently concealed private life, Lepore can only surmise what went on, the psychologist, his wife and two regular lovers were among attenders at a select, S&M-oriented sex cult, where he could develop his expertise in “captivation”. To the consternation of some comic readers, escape from physical constraints later became the central, relentlessly repeated scene in Marston’s Wonder Woman stories, the nature of her inordinate chains, ties, shackles and bindings being scrupulously specified. “The secret of woman’s allure,” he told a comic-book colleague, after people started to talk, is that “women enjoy submission – being bound”.
Earlier, after all, he had made a scholarly study of sadistic initiation ceremonies, involving beatings, at a top women’s college; the subsequent rumours may have cost him his career. At any rate, not long after his breakthrough “systolic” lie-detecting test, Marston became academically unemployable. For a time, as a jobbing psychologist, he advised Universal Studios on how to make films more “true to life”. Or more true to his, anyway, through the provision of “submission and domination and captivation”. He dabbled in writing but lived off Holloway, whose earnings supported an establishment including his student turned lover Olive Byrne and a third woman, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, an occasional presence in the wonderful family photographs Lepore has unearthed. Marston, the dominant male, flopped about in his undies, drinking all day. His erotic book, Venus with Us, bombed. Another, about the lie detector, featured outrageous lies. By the time his collective came up with Wonder Woman, Marston had been investigated by the FBI for lying in Gillette advertisements about his lie-detecting results.
The flakier aspects of Marston, in particular his relationships with women, raise tricky questions about his creation’s ultimate contribution to women’s rights. She was conceived, Marston said, to “combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolised by men”. Which had to cast him in a virtuous light. She was also designed, at his suggestion, to look like a pin-up girl. When Gloria Steinem, reading Wonder Woman stories, was “amazed by the strength of their feminist message”, she did not know about Marston’s peculiar interest in Wonder Woman’s bondage experiences. At home, the great feminist would subject his household to what Lepore calls, without elaboration, “terrifying” rages. Were it not for Lepore, he would still be taking credit for his lovers’ contributions. He arranged with his overworked wife for lover number two, the A-student Byrne, to fulfil the not very Wonder Woman-like duties of live-in nursemaid. After Byrne herself had two children with him, she was described to inquisitive outsiders as “the housekeeper”; her children were told their real father was dead.
While she argues for Wonder Woman’s place in feminist history, Lepore makes allowances for her creator and his set-up. “The four children tell very different stories about their family, the way children in any family do,” Lepore comments. “And the ways of mothers and fathers remain, to every child, mysterious.”
But what makes Marston’s story such terrific reading is precisely that nothing Lepore has uncovered about his family arrangements or sexual tastes was commonplace. Wonder Woman was written by a man driven by what one partner called “fanaticisms” and it shows. But there’s no question that Marston said feminist-sounding things. A century before Emma Watson’s speech, and the UN’s HeForShe campaign , his outward commitment to women’s emancipation was exemplary. Which is something to bear in mind next time Miliband or Clegg pose in a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt.
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is published by Scribe (RRP £20). Click here to buy it for £16
