“She is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!” History professor and journalist Jill Lepore takes the 1941 rubric introducing the tiara-wearing superhero as a challenge: she meticulously unpicks Wonder Woman’s origins to reveal there’s more to her backstory than an Amazonian creation myth.
Lepore focuses on the icon’s unsettling progenitor William Moulton Marston, a Harvard graduate, psychologist and showman who allowed his idiosyncratic preoccupations – lie-detectors, human sexuality – to erode his academic credibility. He lived with his wife and two mistresses: one, Olive Byrne, was niece of the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, knotting Wonder Woman tightly into a fascinating milieu of free-thinkers and feminists. Lepore suggests Marston’s own feminism was a kind of fetish – his obsession with chained women wasn’t entirely metaphorical – but she’s sensitive to the utopian ideals and murkier personal compulsions that drove his imagination. Underneath the intriguing social history, this is a story of human flaws and foibles, with Wonder Woman, in all her bustiered-and-booted glory, standing as testament to the pitfalls and pleasures of chasing a dream.
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