The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore review – the man behind the superhero

The history professor meticulously unpicks Wonder Woman’s origins to reveal there’s more to her back story than an Amazonian creation myth

“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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