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The Secret History of Wonder Woman
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 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.
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