THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN - JILL LEPORE

 

More the history of Wonder Woman's creator and the history of the women's movement in the US. William Moulton Marston was a psychologist who is credited with designing and testing the first lie detector with some limited success. An academic, and an early achiever in the medicine of the mind, he was, like H.G.Wells, a proponent of the rights of women and their right to share his bed.

The women's movement is covered because of Marstons relationships with the women involved early in the search for equality with men and particularly the right to use birth control. One of them coincidentally had an affair with Wells for some years.

As to Wonder Woman, Marston conceived the idea of a female Superhero and  used the strip as a vehicle to show how women were being held back, chained up and punished because they were women in a time when being a wife was the ultimate prize. Throwing off the chains in each strip was a demonstration of woman achieving freedom.

Marston himself had a rocky road in academia and continued to be fired from university positions because of his radical views on women's lib and his personal life, which offended those who knew about it. Wonder Woman and her fight to remove the shackles of domesticity also reflected badly on him. He was fascinated by the idea of women locked in chains or otherwise immobilsed to the point where it must have been a fetish.

The book ends just as Lynda Carter gets name-checked and doesn't cover that TV series at all. A great read.