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THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN
By: Jill Lepore
Knopf
November 2014
On Sale: October 28, 2014
432 pages
ISBN: 0385354045
EAN: 9780385354042
Kindle: B00K4C3QPK
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of one of the worldβs most iconic superheroes hides within it a fascinating family storyβand 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 Womanβs 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 truthβhe invented the lie detector testβlived 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 womenβs rightsβa chain of events that begins with the womenβs suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
 Media BuzzColbert Report - October 30, 2014
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