The Secret History of Wonder Woman

The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a nonfiction book by Jill Lepore, published in 2014. It falls into the categories of history, comics, women’s studies, and biography, and won the American History Book Prize from the New York Historical Society. Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. This guide was written from the hardcover first edition.

Summary

The first section, called “Veritas,” includes nine chapters that introduce William Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Holloway. The early chapters describe their respective childhoods and education as well as their exposure to the women’s rights movement while in college. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the early years of their marriage: their law school years (he at Harvard, she at Boston University) and Marston’s work during World War I. The next chapter describes the Marstons’ graduate work in psychology after the war. In Chapters 8 and 9, Lepore delves into Marston’s work applying lie detection to the field of law. While teaching at American University, he becomes involved in a murder trial, attempting unsuccessfully to introduce his lie-detecting methods and their results as evidence in court.

In the second section, titled “Family Circle,” the author details the Marstons’ careers and unconventional family life from the late 1920s to the 1940s. In addition, she explores the birth control movement, started by Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, and its connection to the Marstons. The first four chapters of the section go into some depth about the former by describing the lives of Sanger, Byrne, and Byrne’s daughter Olive. Chapters 14-16 cover how Olive Byrne met William Marston at Tufts University (where she was a student and he a professor of psychology), explaining that she became his research assistant and, eventually, lover. She enrolled in the graduate program in psychology at Columbia University and continued to be Marston’s assistant while living with him and Holloway.

Chapter 17 details Marston’s time in Hollywood, working for Universal Studios in 1929. By then, Marston and Holloway had a son, and Byrne had quit her graduate studies to take care of the baby; all four moved out to California. The remaining four chapters in this section describe the life Marston, Holloway, and Byrne had during the 1930s, setting up a household and raising four children together. Two of the children were Holloway’s and two Byrne’s; Marston was the father of all four. Byrne looked after the children while Holloway worked full-time. Marston dabbled in several areas but had little income during this time. In 1932, he wrote a novel called Venus with Us that incorporated some of his psychological theories about emotions and love. He returned to his work on lie detection when Charles Lindbergh’s young son was kidnapped and killed, trying to offer his services during the trial. Capitalizing on the publicity, he wrote another book, this one about lie-detector testing. Byrne also did some writing during this period, publishing articles in the parenting magazine Family Circle.

The third section of the book is entitled “Paradise Island” and focuses on the Wonder Woman comic strip. Comics exploded in popularity during the years of World War II, and their influence on children was debated. Byrne interviewed Marston about this for Family Circle (she often consulted with him as an expert psychologist without ever noting that they not only knew each other but were living together). Chapter 22 details how this interview led to Marston getting hired by comics publisher Charlie Gaines. The next two chapters examine how Marston and the artists decided what Wonder Woman would look like as well as some of the continuing controversy surrounding comics and their influence on young minds.

In Chapters 25 and 26, Lepore analyzes some of the Wonder Woman story lines, showing how they were rooted in the fight for women’s rights and other progressive causes, and discusses the feature “Wonder Women of History” in the Wonder Woman comic books, which profiled different heroes in women’s history. Next Lepore examines bondage and its various meanings as depicted in Wonder Woman stories. Chapter 28 starts by introducing Joye Hummel, whom Marston hired in early 1944 to help write Wonder Woman when the comic was at the height of its popularity and ends with Marston’s illnesses and death in 1947. The final two chapters describe what happened to both the Wonder Woman comic and Marston’s family in later years. The Epilogue relates the period of resurgence Wonder Woman had in the 1970s and situates the character in the feminist movement and women’s history.

Throughout the text, Lepore explores the themes of women’s rights and feminism, especially how they were tied to the Wonder Woman comic; truth versus lies, juxtaposing Marston’s work on lie detection with the web of deceptions he wove in his own life; and bondage, both as imagery in the oppression of women and in the context of sexual relationships.