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Jill Lepore’s The Secret Life of Wonder Woman isn’t about Wonder Woman, so much as it is about the way that she became not just the perfect realisation of the lives and passions of the incredible group of people who were involved in the lives of her creators, but the crystalisation of the early suffragist, feminist, and to some degree socialist views of a generation of women and men who fought for women’s rights. Where Wonder Woman is Amazonian royalty, her creators were influenced by some of the fiercest voices for women,’s equality, suffrage, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom that existed during the early years of the 1900s. Where Wonder Woman fought for truth, one of her creators spent much of his professional life studying how to determine truth from deception in criminal cases, and determine the reliability of testimony in court.
Four people may be said to have taken a hand in creating the crucible in which Wonder Woman, the symbol of female power - who wears bracelets of iron to remind her and all Amazons that giving oneself into the power of a man means giving oneself into slavery - was shaped.
These four people, three women and one man, lived their own secret lives, and it was from their common experiences, beliefs, and philosophies that the idea of Wonder Woman took form. The feminist hero was a collaborative effort between William Moulton Marston and his three partners, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley, all feminists, suffragists and free love radicals like himself - a polyamorous family collective.
Marsdon was a professor of philosophy and psychology, the two fields not being seen as particularly different at the time, who focused on the psychology and physiology of emotion, observation, and deception in his research. He was, with much input from his long-time partner and colleague, the inventor of the lie detector machine.
Something else he shared with his partner Elizabeth Holloway was a lifelong commitment to feminism, whom he met when they were both in grade school. Neither seems to have ever thought seriously about a future without the other, though both were often to be found in circles that approved of female emancipation and free love. Holloway, like Marsden, spent much of her early adult life in study, beginning her university education at Mount Holyoke, a hotbed of feminism and suffragette agitation, and earning both an MA from Radcyffe and a law degree.
Olive Byrne, who lived with the family in the role of nanny to the Marsdon children - hers and Holloway’s - was the one with the strongest ties to radical feminism. Her mother, Ethyl Byrne, sister of Margaret Sanger, was a suffragist, birth control advocate and socialist, who nearly died in prison in a well publicised hunger strike. Even when Sanger compromised with eugenicists and conservatives to get her arguments for birth control mainstreamed, Byrne remained a free love radical socialist, and Olive had much of her uncompromising spirit. Olive met Marsdon, several years her senior, when she took a course in experimental psychology with him at Tutfs, where she was majoring in English. She later became his research assistant and at some point his lover.
Marjorie Huntley was perhaps the most open-minded of the household, and more of an intermittent member of the household, the eccentric aunt who wanders off but keeps her home base with the rest of the family. Through Huntley’s radical and mystical ideas and connections, Marsdon, Holoway and Byrne became involved in a new age mix of feminism, bondage, free love and theosophy, a cult of female superiority through submission, that is frankly not particularly coherent in its principles and may have been a way for the four people involved to give themselves justification for the kind of relationships and family they wanted despite its extreme variance from not just convention, but some of the more established radical ways of organising sexual relationships currently being explored.
Marston wanted his wife and his lovers - all of them strong, intelligent women not easily manipulated - without having to work hard at it, and he wanted relationships where he could explore his interest in domination and submission. Holloway wanted Marston, but she also wanted to be both professional woman and mother in a world where one woman doing both was hard to imagine. Byrne wanted Marston, and after a childhood of insecurity, with mothers and aunts protesting and organising, being in prison, politically active, and dropping Olive off wherever someone could take care of her, wanted a committed family, and Huntley wanted lovers she could live out her unusual beliefs and bondage fantasies with. Some evidence from the letters and personal remembrances of surviving family members suggests that most if not all of them were at least open to the idea of bisexuality. With Marsdon as the nexus, they created an intentional family.
Despite his credentials, intelligence and charisma, Marsdon was the sort of person who was constantly getting involved in situations that seemed at best not well thought-out or unreasonably self-promoting and at worst vaguely unethical. Instead of rising in the ranks of academia, he slowly dropped, and soon was unable to keep a professional appointment. He tried and failed in a number of business ventures. Ultimately, he proved utterly incapable of supporting his family in any normal occupation. The household of three, sometimes four adults, and four children, was primarily supported by Holloway, with occasional lecturing fees from Marston and some money from Byrne’s writing as a regular contributor to Family Circle. The family made up its own amusements, many of which involved writing and drawing of comics - then in their infancy - by the children.
As Lepore describes the household at this point, “The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, ‘It’s best to ignore him.’ “
In 1938, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack Burns, who had been working in pulp publishing (and tried but failed to get Marsden an ‘in’ to pulp fiction writing), started a comics line that featured strong women like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Amazonia of the North in his new product, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Superman and Batman had become icons for Maxwell Charles Gaines’ comic lines, but no one else was writing female heroes. As comics became more popular, the also received criticism for their violence and sexuality and its effect on children. After Olive Byrne wrote one of her ‘ask the psychiatrist’ articles for Family Circle in which Marsden was strongly approving of comics as long as they never showed successful murder or torture - trust bondage enthusiast Marsden to approve of stories of women tied up but rescued before anything bad can happen - Gaines hired him as a consultant. And Marsden convinced Gaines to introduce a new superhero - and thus, after development work in the Marsden household and the DC comics offices, Wonder Woman was born. Marsden wrote the story, and handed it over with the warning that none of the feminism was to be altered. It wasn’t, though there was opposition from many corners during the comic’s early years. Wonder Woman was a popular success, but its enemies were powerful, and there were many people, including some of those who later worked for Gaines at DC Comics after Marston contracted polio and became less able to be involved in the production of the comic, who rejected not just the comics in general, with their violence and crime, but Wonder Woman’s obvious feminism and rejection of traditional female roles.
And what about the bondage? At one level, they were using a visual language of woman in chains familiar to anyone who had lived through the era of women’s suffrage and extending it to include all women’s struggles. They were also putting into images their own family mythologies about the need for women to submit in order to gain full superiority. And they were playing out their family dynamics in public.
The Marsden family was a unique environment from which a genre-changing comic emerged, but there’s no hiding the strange dynamics and ethical choices here - and I’m not talking about either polyamory or bondage. First, there’s the obsession with lie detection, which strikes me as a consequence of the hidden lives and connections among these four people. Then, there’s the overwhelming focus on self promotion, and promotion of Marsden’s projects. And the utter lack of professional ethics. Holloway advances Marsden’s chances to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica without disclosing their relationship; Olive praises his psychiatric gifts and his projects without disclosure either, and even - before it’s known that he created Wonder Woman - solicits his advice to concerned parents about comic for their kids. Their authorial interrelationships are intricate, covert, and unethical.
And, yet, for all their flaws, these four people encapsulated a generation’s need for change, for freedom, for women’s independence and created a feminist icon that still resonates today, despite all attempts to diminish it.
Four people may be said to have taken a hand in creating the crucible in which Wonder Woman, the symbol of female power - who wears bracelets of iron to remind her and all Amazons that giving oneself into the power of a man means giving oneself into slavery - was shaped.
These four people, three women and one man, lived their own secret lives, and it was from their common experiences, beliefs, and philosophies that the idea of Wonder Woman took form. The feminist hero was a collaborative effort between William Moulton Marston and his three partners, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley, all feminists, suffragists and free love radicals like himself - a polyamorous family collective.
Marsdon was a professor of philosophy and psychology, the two fields not being seen as particularly different at the time, who focused on the psychology and physiology of emotion, observation, and deception in his research. He was, with much input from his long-time partner and colleague, the inventor of the lie detector machine.
Something else he shared with his partner Elizabeth Holloway was a lifelong commitment to feminism, whom he met when they were both in grade school. Neither seems to have ever thought seriously about a future without the other, though both were often to be found in circles that approved of female emancipation and free love. Holloway, like Marsden, spent much of her early adult life in study, beginning her university education at Mount Holyoke, a hotbed of feminism and suffragette agitation, and earning both an MA from Radcyffe and a law degree.
Olive Byrne, who lived with the family in the role of nanny to the Marsdon children - hers and Holloway’s - was the one with the strongest ties to radical feminism. Her mother, Ethyl Byrne, sister of Margaret Sanger, was a suffragist, birth control advocate and socialist, who nearly died in prison in a well publicised hunger strike. Even when Sanger compromised with eugenicists and conservatives to get her arguments for birth control mainstreamed, Byrne remained a free love radical socialist, and Olive had much of her uncompromising spirit. Olive met Marsdon, several years her senior, when she took a course in experimental psychology with him at Tutfs, where she was majoring in English. She later became his research assistant and at some point his lover.
Marjorie Huntley was perhaps the most open-minded of the household, and more of an intermittent member of the household, the eccentric aunt who wanders off but keeps her home base with the rest of the family. Through Huntley’s radical and mystical ideas and connections, Marsdon, Holoway and Byrne became involved in a new age mix of feminism, bondage, free love and theosophy, a cult of female superiority through submission, that is frankly not particularly coherent in its principles and may have been a way for the four people involved to give themselves justification for the kind of relationships and family they wanted despite its extreme variance from not just convention, but some of the more established radical ways of organising sexual relationships currently being explored.
Marston wanted his wife and his lovers - all of them strong, intelligent women not easily manipulated - without having to work hard at it, and he wanted relationships where he could explore his interest in domination and submission. Holloway wanted Marston, but she also wanted to be both professional woman and mother in a world where one woman doing both was hard to imagine. Byrne wanted Marston, and after a childhood of insecurity, with mothers and aunts protesting and organising, being in prison, politically active, and dropping Olive off wherever someone could take care of her, wanted a committed family, and Huntley wanted lovers she could live out her unusual beliefs and bondage fantasies with. Some evidence from the letters and personal remembrances of surviving family members suggests that most if not all of them were at least open to the idea of bisexuality. With Marsdon as the nexus, they created an intentional family.
Despite his credentials, intelligence and charisma, Marsdon was the sort of person who was constantly getting involved in situations that seemed at best not well thought-out or unreasonably self-promoting and at worst vaguely unethical. Instead of rising in the ranks of academia, he slowly dropped, and soon was unable to keep a professional appointment. He tried and failed in a number of business ventures. Ultimately, he proved utterly incapable of supporting his family in any normal occupation. The household of three, sometimes four adults, and four children, was primarily supported by Holloway, with occasional lecturing fees from Marston and some money from Byrne’s writing as a regular contributor to Family Circle. The family made up its own amusements, many of which involved writing and drawing of comics - then in their infancy - by the children.
As Lepore describes the household at this point, “The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, ‘It’s best to ignore him.’ “
In 1938, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack Burns, who had been working in pulp publishing (and tried but failed to get Marsden an ‘in’ to pulp fiction writing), started a comics line that featured strong women like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Amazonia of the North in his new product, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Superman and Batman had become icons for Maxwell Charles Gaines’ comic lines, but no one else was writing female heroes. As comics became more popular, the also received criticism for their violence and sexuality and its effect on children. After Olive Byrne wrote one of her ‘ask the psychiatrist’ articles for Family Circle in which Marsden was strongly approving of comics as long as they never showed successful murder or torture - trust bondage enthusiast Marsden to approve of stories of women tied up but rescued before anything bad can happen - Gaines hired him as a consultant. And Marsden convinced Gaines to introduce a new superhero - and thus, after development work in the Marsden household and the DC comics offices, Wonder Woman was born. Marsden wrote the story, and handed it over with the warning that none of the feminism was to be altered. It wasn’t, though there was opposition from many corners during the comic’s early years. Wonder Woman was a popular success, but its enemies were powerful, and there were many people, including some of those who later worked for Gaines at DC Comics after Marston contracted polio and became less able to be involved in the production of the comic, who rejected not just the comics in general, with their violence and crime, but Wonder Woman’s obvious feminism and rejection of traditional female roles.
And what about the bondage? At one level, they were using a visual language of woman in chains familiar to anyone who had lived through the era of women’s suffrage and extending it to include all women’s struggles. They were also putting into images their own family mythologies about the need for women to submit in order to gain full superiority. And they were playing out their family dynamics in public.
The Marsden family was a unique environment from which a genre-changing comic emerged, but there’s no hiding the strange dynamics and ethical choices here - and I’m not talking about either polyamory or bondage. First, there’s the obsession with lie detection, which strikes me as a consequence of the hidden lives and connections among these four people. Then, there’s the overwhelming focus on self promotion, and promotion of Marsden’s projects. And the utter lack of professional ethics. Holloway advances Marsden’s chances to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica without disclosing their relationship; Olive praises his psychiatric gifts and his projects without disclosure either, and even - before it’s known that he created Wonder Woman - solicits his advice to concerned parents about comic for their kids. Their authorial interrelationships are intricate, covert, and unethical.
And, yet, for all their flaws, these four people encapsulated a generation’s need for change, for freedom, for women’s independence and created a feminist icon that still resonates today, despite all attempts to diminish it.
