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    The Secret History of Wonder Woman
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    The Secret History of Wonder Woman
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    The Secret History of Wonder Woman
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Secret History of Wonder Woman

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of one of the world's most iconic superheroes hides within it a fascinating family story-and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism

    Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history.

    Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator. Beginning in his undergraduate years at Harvard, Marston was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned from speaking on campus in 1911, when Marston was a freshman. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1930s, Marston and Byrne wrote a regular column for Family Circle celebrating conventional family life, even as they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth-he invented the lie detector test-lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.

    The Secret History of Wonder Woman     is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women's rights-a chain of events that begins with the women's suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 28, 2014
    ISBN9780553551341
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Secret History of Wonder Woman

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    • 3/5
      Now that I'm back from my travels, I'm excited to really dive into Nonfiction November starting with my first nonfiction review of the month. I wish I could tell you I was equally enthusiastic about the book, especially since it covered a lot of interesting topics.  The Secret History of Wonder Woman doesn't only cover the origins of the comic. It also includes a history of feminism, a biography of the comic's creator, and biographies of the many women in his unorthodox love life. Unfortunately, the mish-mash of topics didn't entirely work for me.

      I haven't read many comics, so I loved learning about Wonder Woman  and I appreciated the many comics which were included so I could follow the discussion. I also enjoyed learning about the origins and evolution of feminism. The biographies of not only the creator of the comic, but of his wife and his lover, were a bit much though. These biographies were important for their influence on the creation of the comic, but the author often jumped into them abruptly enough that I felt disoriented. There were quite a few times while reading this book that I found what I was reading interesting, but I wasn't sure why I was reading it.

      Despite sometimes feeling lost, I always had fun reading this book. The material was fascinating, this was an easy read, and I enjoyed the author's sense of humor. Because of the organizational issues, I suspect there are better books if you're mostly interested in the history of feminism. If you're particularly interested in Wonder Woman or comics in general though, I think this unique, behind-the-scenes look at the comic could be a great read for you.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
    • 4/5
      I knew the creator of Wonder Woman had an unconventional sex life, but I had no idea he was a rather bombastic psychologist who invented the blood pressure lie detector test. (Not to be confused with the polygraph, which is still used today despite being pseudoscience.) I also was not aware of his connection to Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement of the 1910s. Everything in his life fed into the creation of this iconic heroine. This is the wonderful sort of history book where you think you're going to learn one thing (the history of a specific comic book character) and end up learning about so many unexpected things related to it. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      Highly readable, full of jaw-dropping admissions about the scandalous life of William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman and the lie detector test. Scandalous because Marston was a polygamist, who managed with his two wives and four children to keep the secret throughout their lifetimes. But for all the salacious details about one man's life, it is really the story of the fight for equal rights starting with the suffrage movement in the early 1900s. It is also the story of Margaret Sanger, who was the aunt of one of Marston's wives. While Marston was a polygamist, he was also a feminist, who embued Wonder Woman in the 1940s with the attributes of a liberated female. This book has to be read to appreciate the cyclical nature of progress toward equal rights.
    • 5/5
      This is less a history of Wonder Woman and much more a history of her creator and the nexus of influences that led to her creation. I really enjoyed this book--William Moulton Marston's secret poly family, kinkster influences, his work as a psychologist and inventor of the lie detector test, and heavy early feminist ideologies were fascinating. I appreciate that the author gives a lot of background and context to the women in Marston's life--his 'secret' wife Olive was the niece of Margaret Sanger, and Lepore devotes a lot of time to Sanger's life and influences on the Marston household. I was expecting more content recapping early Wonder Woman storylines, but found myself more fascinated by the women in Marston's life and the contexts of the comic itself. Very interesting portrait of not just a man, but a family and of a moment in history. I like that Lepore's prose was unsentimental about Marston, too. He may have been ahead of his time in terms of feminism but he was also possessed of an enormous ego and had a lot of lingering sexist ideas. That said, the work he did still fascinates us today, and Wonder Woman as an unabashed feminist icon has an even greater place in my current personal pantheon. I recommend this book--I found it fascinating and very engaging.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating and in-depth bio of William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman (definitely) and the lie detector (tentatively, if not publicly embraced); for those looking more for Wonder Woman, her creation & details don't even enter the book save as illos until halfway through the book and after the color art insert.

      WMM was hardly a paragon as he liked to portray himself, though his thoughts on feminism & women's equality were definitely ahead of his time.

      Well worth reading for fans of comics history, women's history, or the history of psychology.
    • 2/5
      VERY disappointing.
    • 4/5
      Overall, this is a well-researched book on the history of the creator of Wonder Woman, his crazy-ass family and the very deep feminist theory that undergirds most of the early comics.

      The only knock on the book is that it is by no means a complete history of Wonder Woman. It might better have been titled, "The Secret History of Wonder Woman's Creation," or, most accurately, "Wonder Woman and Feminism: The Early Years."

      You'll learn about William Marston, the inventor of an early version of the lie-detector test/failed psychologist/failed moviemaker/failed entrepreneur who used his lifelong obsession with women to craft the early tales of the Amazonian Wonder Woman. You'll learn about his wife. And his other wife. And his other other kind-of wife.

      You'll be confused by what scholarship/writing should be attributed to whom between the primary threesome. You'll be bewildered by the lengths of the deception that the unofficial wife went to keep Marston's progenitorship a secret from her children. And you'll be slightly weirded out by how closely Margaret Sanger weaves in to all of it.

      The book focuses heavily on the early comics (up until Marston's death), then sort of writes off the entire 50 other years with a "the people who came directly after Marston were chauvinist pigs" which, while not inaccurate, is not exactly meeting the mantle of "history."

      That being said, this book is essential for truly understanding Wonder Woman, her origins and her standing/place in the culture at large.
    • 3/5
      The story of Wonder Women begins as a creation of William Moulton Marston, a something of a quack psychologist previously known for inventing the lie detector test. Marston worked closely with his wife Elizabeth Hollaway and Olive Byrne who lived with them in a long-term relationship (and continued living with Holloway after Martson's death). Through Byrne they were also connected to her aunt Margaret Sanger who looms large in this book and the history of Wonder Woman. Lepore shows how the triad's interests in feminism and unconventional sexuality are expressed through Wonder Woman comics which contains themes of ruling with feminine love and bondage and submission. Lepore relates an interesting history of Marston, Hollaway, Byrne, Sanger, and others in the women's rights movements of the 20th century, and Wonder Woman's unexpected role in the center of it all.
    • 4/5
      From the back cover: "Wonder Woman, created in 1941, on the brink of World War II, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, she lasted the longest and commanded the most vast and wildly passionate following. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike others, she also has a secret history."This is a fascinating look at the truly bizarre origins of Wonder Woman, the creative genius of the Marstons, a most complicated and unconventional family (one man and three women!). If you want to know where the idea for WW's bracelets came from, why she gets tied up so many times, or why her ability to use her lasso to get the truth mirrored her inventor's life, you have to read this book! So many of the storylines and characters are thinly veiled realities of their lives. Additionally, this is wonderful history of the struggle for women's rights, including hunger strikes, the founding of Planned Parenthood and the birth of The Pill. Recommended. 4.0
    • 3/5
      I giggled at how much Lepore hates Marston. Relatively speaking, he seemed like a nice enough guy, at least for someone with a big enough ego for someone else to write a book about. Marston and his personality were just as big a piece of the puzzle of Wonder Woman as Olive Byrne. And, it should be noted, this history really isn't all that secret to people the love comics. Or so the people that love comics tell me.
    • 4/5
      It turns out the guy who created Wonder Woman was a polyamorous bondage fetishist who invented the lie detector. Needless to say, he was a tad eccentric. Women's suffrage and Margaret Sanger played a major role in the rise of this comic book as well. This is a great social history. Parts of the story bog down when they could have been excitingly told. That's why it isn't a 4. This book reminded me about the little bios of heroic women that were in each comic. Those really taught me a lot when I was a little girl. I hope something like that is around for youngsters today.
    • 5/5
      A truly bizarre and fascinating story about one of the greatest super heroes and the man who created her.
    • 5/5
      I was never a reader of the comics as a kid, so I probably would have passed this title up if not for a strong recommendation from Jim. And so I'm not sure the title does the story justice, because it is really the story of the women's rights struggle from the beginning of the 20th century onward.William M. Marsden, Wonder Woman's creator and the inventor of the first lie detector, was an odd mixture of intellect and P.T. Barnum, a man unable to hold a job but very able to build an unconventional family life with devoted women who seem both his intellectual equals and his practical superiors. Their collective story is intimately related to such feminists as Margaret Sanger and Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as significant events of the century. Marsen is in many ways an unlikely champion of women's rights, but Lepore uses him as the center post around which to swirl the history of feminism, birth control, comic books, bogus science and primitive psychological research. And although he died comparatively young, the women in his family, bound up with Wonder Woman and feminism, lived on through most of the century and bore witness to the accomplishment of at least some of their dreams.I'd give it five stars, but must subtract a little for repetition now and then. It's still an excellent social history of the U.S. in the 20th century. The print edition has many photos and Wonder Woman strips and drawings; I listened to the audio read by the author, which held my full attention.
    • 3/5
      Well researched, extremely well cited, however I think it is incorrectly titled. Anyone who has ever read a single Wonder Woman comic knows Wonder Woman was written by a feminist - it's obvious. The title implies there is some new, secret story of Wonder Woman's origins that we didn't already know - there isn't. A better title might be "The Feminist Origins or Wonder Woman" or "Why Wonder Woman is full of Feminist Propaganda" - depending on your position toward the Feminist Agenda.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating look at the bizarre creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, and intricate ties the enduring comic has to suffragists, feminism, and the women's rights movement. A remarkable work of history by a first-rate historian who can tell a compelling story.
    • 4/5
      The history of the comic book character Wonder Woman is just a part of a story that includes the early Birth Control Movement, the marriage and mistresses of the comic character's author William Marston, the resistance to comic books as a bad influence on the youth of the country, conflicts within the Womans' Lib Movement and much more. The author Jill Lepore manages to add so much to this story that it does become unfocused at time, but it is all fascinating and well worth a read.
    • 4/5
      The Secret History of Wonder Woman is filled with secrets and steeped in the traditions of feminism starting with Margaret Sanger and her quest to legalize birth control.Dr. William Moulton Marston was not an ordinary man, even by early twentieth century standards. His lifestyle (two wives, a third woman, and four children all under one roof) was odd, and his insistence on equal rights for women was decades ahead of the times. One of his wives and mother of two children was Margaret Sanger's niece.As wild as Marston and his household was, the history of Wonder Woman herself reveals some of the most staunch feminists in the world. The struggle to get her published and kept published is quite interesting. Along with Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman has remained the longest running superhero in comic history.
    • 3/5
      Readable. I learned some of the history that preceded the women's movement to gain the vote and equal opportunity by reading this book. However, the creator of the original Wonder Woman comics was a man who although he loved women, seemed to keep them in their spots in his life. One woman lover took care of the four children he fathered between her and his lawful wife. His wife earned the income to keep the "family" solvent. Upstairs, another woman sometimes stayed. Marston, the writer of WW, was ahead of his time in his belief in women, however, he depicted WW in chains or ropes from which she wondrously escaped unharmed. One wonders what the sex-life of the family was like! The OLLI book club discussed this making it seem more interesting than it was originally to me.
    • 3/5
      Though meticulously researched, The Secret History of Wonder Woman suffers from the occasional inaccuracy, and, though providing unique insight, focuses exclusively on the biography of Marston and the Women's Rights Movement, all while reducing the character's rich publication history to a few paragraphs in an epilogue. Still, it is a must-read for feminists, biography-lovers, and comic book fans.
    • 4/5
      Who knew Margaret Sanger was one of the inspirations for Wonder Woman? Lepore traces the origins of Wonder Woman in the women's movement during the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Much of her account traces the life and career of Willliam Moulton Marston and the women in his life, Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne. Byrne was Sanger's niece and met Marston as a student, worked for him and live in a menage with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway. Lepore treats the Marston family arrangements straightforwardly, as she does the very overt themes of bondage and submission in the Wonder Woman stories scripted by Marston. This is a fascinating book that revealed aspects of American history and culture I had not known previously.
    • 4/5
      This isn't a general history of the character of Wonder Woman, or the publishing of her comics. It's instead a fascinating story about how Wonder Woman was created, and why. It mainly concerns the personal histories of her creators, and how the beliefs and philosophies of those creators were the driving force behind WW's origin and first few years of her publication.

      The first half of the book has less to do with Wonder Woman herself, and much more about the lives and passions of William Moulton Marston ("Charles Moulton", the acknowledged creator of WW), his wife Elizabeth Holloway, and their live-in lover and co-parent, Olive Byrne. There was also a fourth member of their inner sexual circle, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, who was much less a member of the "family" than the former three.

      William Moulton Marston was an original inventor of what's commonly known as a "lie detector" (a blood pressure-based system), a law graduate, and a professor of philosophy and psychology. Elizabeth Holloway held nearly the same educational degrees her husband did, excepting the Ph.D (which she forgoed to support Marston's career). Olive Byrne was an exceptionally intelligent and educated woman herself - and had the distinction of being the daughter and niece of the two founders of Planned Parenthood (known then as the Birth Control Federation of America) - Edith Byrne and her sister, the better-known Margaret Sanger. Both Holloway and Byrne did much of the work and writing behind Wonder Woman - Leport's research seems to indicate that it is very difficult to tell often who wrote what.

      Although the character and the comic changed drastically after Marston's death from polio in 1947, the character of Wonder Woman, and the stories she appeared in, were from the start intended to support and promote the creators' idea of feminism and female equality. In no small part, those early years were also dedicated to the sexual ideals of Marston, Holloway, and Byrne, especially Marston's interest in dominance and submission.

      The influence of the early suffragette movement, the emergence and fight for birth control, and the connection between Margaret Sanger and the people behind Wonder Woman has been largely unknown until recently. Largely, this is because Olive Byrne wished privacy, and forbade Marston and Holloway from even telling Byrne's two children that their biological father was Marston (although both women raised all four of their children together, and they continued to live together for the rest of their lives, decades after Marston's death - and even though Marston legally adopted the two children he had with Byrne).

      Absolutely fascinating - and illuminating. Many kudos to author Jill Leport for her (dare I say Amazonian?) feat of original research.
    • 5/5
      Truly the origin story to end all origin stories. This is a fascinating and wide-ranging tale that in lesser hands would've struggled to tie all its topics together (including the early suffragist movement, the creation of the polygraph, and the debate about the morality of comic books). But Lepore lucidly and entertainingly weaves all of these themes into a coherent narrative while also providing insights into the lives of William Moulton Marston, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, and Olive Byrne, the three characters most involved in the birth of Wonder Woman. Given their commitment to feminist principles and Marston's self-promotion as the inventor of the lie detector test, there are a lot of ironies involved in the trio's highly unorthodox and very closeted living arrangements, which Lepore subtly highlights with excerpts from Byrne's Family Circle interviews with Marston (during which they pretend to be total strangers). I will definitely never look at Wonder Woman the same way again (even without Marston's fetishistic emphasis on chains and bonds -- ick!)
    • 4/5
      A great read, well researched, and entertaining. A very intimate look at the creator of the lie detector and Wonder Woman with an unusual view on feminism. I do wish that the author had gone into more depth of the current state of Wonder Woman, but stopping with the renaissance of Wonder Women with the rise of the Women's Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s makes sense with regard to reasonable page length and the deaths of those involved in the creation.
    • 5/5
      "For a long time, no one paid much attention to the fact that the creator of Wonder Woman was also the inventory of the lie detector ... mainly because the people interested in the history of comic books are not the same people interested in the history of the polygraph. (And very few people in either group are also interested in the history of feminism.)" I guess I'm in that select group. Rarely are books so tailor made for me, feeding not just my lifelong fascination with Wonder Woman, but by making extensive and nearly exhaustive use of primary sources to research its story - and then documenting it all in deliciously detailed footnotes - Jill Lepore's book also appeals to my interest in the role archives can play in revealing subtle truths about who we were, what we said, and what we did. A true pleasure to read from beginning to end.
    • 4/5
      Jill Lepore's recent essays have taken offbeat topics (often related to popular culture) and used them to explore deeper themes in American history. Here, she builds a similar approach into a longer narrative, tracing a hidden path from the ideology and popular culture of the suffragists to the pop culture icon that influenced a slew of first wave feminists: the superhero Wonder Woman. That path consisted of the household of William Moulton Marston and his wife Elizabeth Holloway and mistress Olive Byrne, of whom this book is essentially a group biography. The key links are that Byrne, inspiration for Wonder Woman's armbands, was the niece of suffragist Margaret Sanger; and the first artist who inked the comic was a political cartoonist from the suffragist era.Lepore conducted remarkable research to bring this story to light. But stripped down to the bare essentials, her findings would not have sustained a book-length treatment. What really holds Lepore's story together is the smart way she pairs illustrations from the early 1900s with panels from later Wonder Woman comics. By the time a reader reaches the linchpin of her written argument, it is obvious that the Wonder Woman comics directly borrow suffragist tropes, especially in their emphasis on captivity and release from bondage. At the same time, the bondage theme reflects Marston's highly idiosyncratic theories of human sexuality. What ultimately makes the book so compelling is its ambiguity. Marston announces publicly that when it comes to love, women hold power over men, and will come to rule the world. At the same time, Marston lives with four children by two women, and a third mistress, all under one roof. One women works full time to support the household, and one works full time caring for the children, while Marston pursues his interests. Is he a hypocrite? Or is household somehow consistent with the values Marston claimed to espouse? I finished the book feeling empathy for Marston's children, and hoping they've had rewarding lives - perhaps out of respect for the living (and more specifically, her sources), Lepore doesn't share much about the children's lives after they reached adulthood and married.
    • 4/5
      A well-researched and fascinating account of the unconventional lives of those involved with the creation of the Wonder Woman comics.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating book and a reminder of how much I like reading history books, particularly those with ties to modern issues. The people involved in Wonder Woman that this book focuses on were interesting and complex. While reading I thought a lot about the overlap between movements and ideologies that go into something as ingrained in our culture as Wonder Woman. Different ideas about feminism, class, race, sexuality, and politics mean that while the writers of this iconic character proclaimed themselves feminists they often still produced stories filled with sexism. And opponents of comics, while sometimes in the right about such things as the racism present in the medium, might be going after the stories for bigoted reasons of their own. I feel like fans of modern comics might not be as interested in this book, but it still worth checking out especially if you have an interest in the origins and evolution of feminism.
    • 4/5
      Wonder Woman has been a comic series, a TV show and a couple of movies. However, the history behind this character is stranger than anything that could be dreamed up in the mind of a novelist. Conceived by William Moulton Marston (coincidentally the inventor of the lie detector), a Harvard educated psychologist and self-proclaimed champion of women’s rights who had a very peculiar personal life of his own. Marston was married to Sadie Holloway, a graduate of Mount Holyoke college, but also lived in a menage a trois with Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, the crusader for women’s reproductive rights. He had children with both women and somehow managed to keep this outré living arrangement secret from the rest of the outside world.LePore explores this living dynamic, Marston’s strange theories on the empowerment of women, along with his other psychological theories and spins an engaging and highly readable tale.
    • 3/5
      I think the author's work is strongest when creating the social context and intellectual history Marston, Holloway, Byrne, and their comic. I think it's weakest when she's trying to connect the inner workings of their individual psychologies, lifestyle, and the comic. She has only circumstantial evidence for any personal bondage fetish connection from the creators to the comic: She says that Huntley was into "love binding"; Holloway mentions Olive Byrne's bracelets as being symbolic of "love binding" in a letter; She describes their brief involvement in a weird little cultish group; She says that the kids say they saw nothing like that going on, but then again, they hid the true nature of their family group from the kids. The family arrangement seems much more like a plural marriage; perhaps the relationship between the women went beyond that of "sister wives". This history also serves as history of feminism, and also problematizes the ideal vs. the actual in the way people live their lives. I read this at the same time as Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow: there was a lot of intersection between the two, not surprisingly.
    • 4/5
      43. The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Audio) by Jill Lepore, read by the authorpublished: 2014format: Overdrive audiobook, 9:05 (~250 pages)acquired: Librarylistened: Aug 17-24 & Oct 19-23rating: 3½Trying to review I’m tied-up between all the information that comes out of this book, the crazy interplay that kind of led to Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s flawed presentation. The story of Wonder Woman involves lie detector tests, a complex and contradictory evolution of feminism, comic books, the birth control movement, polygamy, promotion and failure, WWII and, of course, fetish. Wonder Woman is a wonderful World War II creation, and feminist hero created in window in time where the world was accepting and whose prime creator, Willam Marston, passed away, just before that window closed, when in the late 1940’s the revival of conservative American culture hammered in a major set-back to the feminist movement. His character, the Amazon Dianna Prince, became a secretary. She is feminist as fetish, with everything that phrase implies. Lepore sums up the concept as “draw a woman who’s as powerful as Superman, as sexy as Miss Fury, as scantily clad as Sheena the jungle queen, and as patriotic as Captain America.” Gloria Steinem would rave about Marston’s Wonder Woman comics and the message they sent. She, Wonder Woman, was there to make a point that women were powerful, independent, and capable of everything we humans are capable of. She conquered her villains, regardless of the various ways she found herself tied-up or chained or otherwise challenged. Bondage is a theme...She had a long road. Marston lived with his wife and another woman and fathered children with both. The other woman, Olive Bryne, was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the leader in birth control movement that was associated with suffragette movement, and is considered a founder of what became Planned Parenthood. Olive, who has a tough childhood, grew up in this environment and her bracelets became Wonder Woman’s. Marston was always a feminist, as was his legal wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston. Wonder Women includes aspects of all three of these women and others Marston associated with, and in a big way she is a suffragette. I think it’s safe to say that Wonder Woman as she was and is could have come out of no other era. I’m droning on, but there is a lot more to this story, including the sterile Comic Code and it’s legal origins in the battle between psychologists who saw comics as harmless and helpful to children, and those who saw them as racist, corrupting young women and driving men to homosexuality (Batman and Robin), among other things. (They were, of course, actually racist - even if the authors and illustrators likely didn't even think about that.) Lepore should have written a fun fascinating book. She did all the research and interviews and has all the information laid out. But she somehow failed to find the right narrative drive. The book is a tough dull read that wanders around, only occasionally bringing the reader in. And the readers are very willing, we want in. It’s a great story.Lepore reads the book on audio herself. I prefer books this way and appreciate that she did this. But potential listeners should note that she has a tough screechy voice with limited range. So, listening takes some tolerance. Recommended to those who are patient with the imperfect presentation of great information.