The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill LeporeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Jill Lepore does a more than decent job of gleaning what she can about the man who created Wonder Woman, but by her own admission there is a lot that was lost (purposefully by the women in his life). This history mainly delves into Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, who is full of complexities. He is a psychiatrist and lawyer, but not very successful at either. He pushes his invention, the lie detector, but doesn't seem to get the credit for it. He lobbies for women's rights but thinks women like submission. He has three women in his life, but isn't particularly successful or attractive or even all that charismatic (based on his inability to hold down a job). Wonder Woman too seems rather conflicted--a woman with other worldly powers but who gets bound up by men and whose weakness is a man named Steve. There is a lot about women suffrage because one of his "wives" was related Margaret Sanger. But I was surprised that there wasn't more history of the spin-off show or what Wonder Woman has come to mean in today's world (though there is a little of this). It surely was interesting, even if the limited information Lepore was working with leaves lots of questions. Lots of illustrations in this too means you'll want to read instead of listen.
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in 1911, an “Amazon” meant any woman rebel—which, to a lot of people, meant any girl who left home and went to college.
“Professor Hugo Munsterberg says that women are not fit for jury duty because they are unwilling to listen to argument and cannot be brought to change their opinion on any subject.”
experiments Münsterberg and Marston conducted together in the Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall and on their students at Radcliffe were designed to detect deception.
Münsterberg visited Orchard in the state penitentiary in Boise.
For seven hours, over two days, he subjected Orchard to nearly one hundred deception tests.
Before Münsterberg began his tests, he was sure Orchard was lying. By the time he was done, he’d become convinced that Orchard was telling the truth.
To write movies, he had to turn lies into truths: he had to learn how to tell a story that wasn’t true but that, on film, would seem to be.
He invented the lie detector test.
Hardly a magazine was sold, in 1925 and 1926, that didn’t feature an article that asked, “Can a Woman Run a Home and a Job, Too?”
The Equal Rights Amendment—“ Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States”—had been introduced into Congress in 1923, but Tyson found it woefully naïve; it failed to offer any remedy for, or even any illumination of, the structural challenges of combining motherhood and work.
Hays Code. It prohibited films from depicting anything that would “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” including nudity, childbirth, and homosexuality.
Most heartache Marston diagnosed as the product of deceit. “In a majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love or marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people,” he explained. “Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.”
not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. 14
“Comic books can probably be best understood if they are looked upon as an expression of the folklore of this age,” they explained.
She wasn’t meant to be a superwoman; she was meant to be an everywoman.
This is, of course, not a healthy sex directed toward marriage and family life, but an anti-social sex, sex made as alluring as possible while its normal term in marriage is barred by the ground rules from the start.”
