The Secret History of Wonder Woman

This chapter covers 1944 through Marston’s death from cancer in 1947. In the spring of 1944, with Wonder Woman remarkably popular, Marston opened an office in midtown Manhattan. He had made a lot of money on the comic and now had more work than he himself could do, so he decided to open the office (called “Marston Art Studio”) and hire an assistant. He had chosen one of his students in a psychology class he taught at the Katharine Gibbs School. Olive Byrne, who graded all his final exams for him, pointed out one exam she thought was exceptional by a student named Joye Hummel.

Marjorie Wilkes Huntley served as something like office manager for the studio and Harry Peter did his drawing there. Sometimes Marston’s children came by as well. Into this group came Hummel, who started out typing Marston’s scripts and ended up writing them. To get in the right mindset about Wonder Woman, Olive gave Hummel Sanger’s book Woman and the New Race, from which Marston had originally gotten many of his ideas.

Meanwhile, Marston reveled in the domestic life at Cherry Orchard. Marston doted on his children, and the household grew with a large collection of pets (cats, dogs, rabbits). He also liked to throw parties and invited everyone involved in producing Wonder Woman. The consensus was he was a superb host. Even Sheldon Mayer, who often disagreed with Marston in the office, was charmed by his parties and disarmed by his children.

Also in 1944, Marston was involved in a bit of an academic dust-up. Seeking the approval of scholars for his work on Wonder Woman, he wrote an article for the journal American Scholar. Called “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics,” it argued that comics were a form of art and that their popularity, in effect, proved this. It was not well received. Two of the New Critics, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, wrote a response in the form of a parody of Marston’s article in a later issue that skewered Marston’s attempts to portray comics as scholarly.

In August, Marston’s life changed forever when on a trip to Boston he contracted polio and lost the use of his legs. After a month in the hospital, he returned home to Cherry Orchard, where he would continue to work on Wonder Woman. Hummel divided her time between the office, where she worked with Peter on weekdays, and Marston’s home in Rye, where she often went on weekends. In 1945, the daily comic strip was canceled; Lepore surmises that Marston simply couldn’t keep up with the demands, although it’s possible there weren’t enough subscribers. Over time, Hummel took on more responsibility for the writing.

Another criticism of Wonder Woman came in the spring of 1945 in the form of an article by Jesuit priest Walter Ong, who later became a famous literary scholar. His concern was political—that Wonder Woman had overtones of fascism, noting that her counterpart Superman even shared a name with Friedrich Nietzsche’s race of super humans. What’s more, Ong stated, Wonder Woman was not the counterweight to male aggression that Marston claimed; she exhibits few of the traits that ordinary women do (especially regarding marriage and motherhood) and “exists entirely by the standards of males, supplying on the score of her womanhood only the sexiness which the herd of males demands” (256).

Lepore notes that Ong’s criticism was a bit late, however. By then Hummel was writing many scripts, and hers were always tamer than Marston’s. Even the scripts still written by Marston were changing: He now put children characters in them, based very closely on his own children. For example, one featured a boy of 13 named Don, whose impulsive and dominant natures were causing him problems. Marston’s own son Donn, also 13 that year, was known in the family for his bad temper. Marston’s scriptwriting would soon end though. He had a cancerous mole removed, and the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. No one in the family told him to avoid him becoming depressed or angry, and he kept working right to the end. He died in early May 1947.

After Marston died, Holloway wanted to take over writing the Wonder Woman comics. She knew his approach and theories behind the character, not only as his wife but as someone who trained in psychology with him at Harvard. Several months after Marston died, Charlie Gaines was killed in an accident and Joye Hummel got married and resigned. The new publisher of DC Comics was Jack Liebowitz, and in January 1948 Holloway wrote to him to plead her case. He turned her down. Instead, he hired Robert Kanigher, who had filled in occasionally in the past. Sheldon Mayer, who’d had disagreements with Marston over the strip, really disliked Kanigher and soon quit.

Comics were still under fire for allegedly being harmful to children. A psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham fought against them resolutely and regularly, writing articles, organizing symposia, and testifying before Congress. In the early 1950s, the Senate formed a committee to look into juvenile delinquency, and Wertham claimed his research showed negative effects of comics on children. Lauretta Bender was also called to testify, but when it was revealed she was paid by DC Comics as part of its editorial advisory board, her integrity was called into question. Wertham took particular issue with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman for their supposed depictions of sexual perversion—i.e., same-sex attraction and sadism.

To prevent further criticism and possible regulation, the comics industry took matters into its own hands, adopting a code much like the Hays Code that governed the film industry. This listed all the things that could not be portrayed, spoken, or implied. A number of comics were canceled, and the Justice Society was dropped. The stories of Wonder Woman written by Kanigher changed the nature of the strip entirely. Her roles included being a babysitter and newspaper advice columnist, and she longed to get married. The feature “Wonder Woman of History” gave way to one called “Marriage a la Mode.” Wonder Woman was changing with the times: many of the women who had worked during the war were pressured to leave their jobs, marry, and settle down. The country was turning inward.

This final chapter explains what happened to the Marston family and Margaret Sanger in later years. Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne moved out of the house in Rye and into New York City, where they both now worked. Then in 1958, when they retired, they moved to Tucson, Arizona to care for Sanger. The children, Lepore explains, grew somewhat apart: “Olive Ann dropped ‘Olive’ from her name; Byrne Holloway Marston dropped ‘Holloway’” (274). Olive Byrne never told her sons that William Marston was their father, but Elizabeth Holloway did. Donn had married Margaret Sanger’s granddaughter (his second cousin) and she wanted to get to the bottom of it. Holloway explained everything on the condition that no one ever speak of it again.

Olive Byrne formally worked for her Aunt Margaret as a secretary for some time but also just helped out as a family member. Sanger grew more concerned with her legacy and sorted out her papers with Byrne’s help, giving some to the Library of Congress and others to Smith College. Increasingly, Sanger tried to remove her sister Ethel’s story from her own. When a film company bought the rights to her autobiography, she wrote to Ethel saying that for dramatic effect Sanger herself would be portrayed as the one who undertook a hunger strike in prison and Ethel would not appear in the story at all. She included a release form for Ethel to sign to confirm that this would be okay with her. Ethel thought it ridiculous and refused to sign; the film was never made. Ethel died in 1955 and Sanger in 1966. Olive and Elizabeth lived together until Olive died in 1990.

In the Epilogue, the author ties up the story of Wonder Woman and her connection to women’s rights by explaining the character’s renaissance in the 1970s during the period known as second-wave feminism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Wonder Woman comic changed considerably from what it had been under Marston’s control. By the late 1960s, she was not even being called Wonder Woman—just Diana Prince, her alter ego. Then the rise of a renewed feminism in the 1960s and 1970s led Wonder Woman to a kind of second career.

The feminist magazine Ms., founded by Gloria Steinem, chose to use Wonder Woman on the cover of its first issue in the summer of 1972. That was a presidential election year, and the heading on the cover said, “Wonder Woman for President.” It was also a year of breakthroughs in women’s rights with Title IX becoming law, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex for any organization receiving federal funds. The Equal Rights Amendment even made a comeback after almost half a century when Congress passed it to await ratification by the states. Then in 1973 Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States.

Just after the inaugural issue of Ms. was released, the magazine put out a compilation of Wonder Woman stories from the 1940s, which created more publicity for both Wonder Woman and the new periodical. This eventually led to a TV movie of Wonder Woman in 1974, followed by a TV series that ran from 1975 to 1979. However, the decade proved to be a turning point in the fight for women’s rights. After Roe came a conservative backlash. The Equal Rights Amendment stalled and was never ratified, and other gains were lost in the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution. Feminists even aided this retrenchment by fighting among themselves. A radical group called Redstockings, for example, accused Steinem of being a CIA agent actually working to bring down the women’s movement.

Marjorie Wilkes Huntley died in 1986, and Olive Byrne four years later. In 1993, Elizabeth Holloway died, aged 100. To the end, they had all maintained the secret of their shared lives, and few knew how connected they were to Margaret Sanger or how connected Sanger’s work was to Wonder Woman.