This holiday season, one of the few bright spots for families unable to go to theaters—and even those who did—was Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984. An ambitious and vibrantly colored celebration of heroism in all its forms, including those that don’t end in fistfights, it’s a superhero movie that’s won as many fans as detractors. But while basking in the new spectacle is well and good, it’s also worth considering how it came to be. For even in this HBO Max tentpole, one can still see how the feminist movement of the early 20th century is grafted into the very DNA of the Wonder Woman character, her origin, and even her most contentious iconography… something that rarely gets acknowledged in the broader comic fan community.
The character of Wonder Woman was created by Dr. William Moulton Marston in 1941. A psychologist with an eclectic career, Marston went from inventing the lie detector test while still an undergraduate at Harvard in 1914 to being essentially blacklisted from academia by the age of 33. But of course his most enduring legacy came afterward; it came when he engineered a superheroine intentionally designed to be a great role model for girls and boys.
As Marston famously said, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.” However, the actual political and sociological influences on Marston and the women who helped him create Diana are often overlooked, even as the character has come to dominate pop culture.
Despite their absence, Olive held her mother and aunt’s politics in high regard. And those ideals would reverberate in Wonder Woman comics too. They were thoughts informed by the circle of New York intellectuals and early 20th century socialists Margaret and Ethel interacted with in Greenwich Village. Among their contemporaries were Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman, and a very notable Lou Rogers.
Lou was actually named Annie Lucasta Rogers, but because she was told she couldn’t get work as a woman cartoonist, she initially submitted her work as “Lou” via the mail. Her historic drawings of women being able to finally break off the shackles of patriarchy by using the right to vote are echoed throughout Marston’s Wonder Woman comics, just as much as the author’s own fascination with male and female domination and submission.
In one classic Marston story, a dopey Steve whines, “Angel, when are we going to be married?” Diana coolly fires back, “When evil and injustice vanish from the Earth!”
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Men trying to chain Diana or rob her of her powers by either bounding her bracelets together or removing them was also a common occurrence in ‘40s Wonder Woman comics, particularly those authored by Marston. In one memorable Marston story, a man unaware that Diana Prince is Wonder Woman even chains her to a stove so she cannot leave the kitchen. Diana retorts with a smirk, “How thrilling! I see you’re chaining me to the cookstove. What a perfect caveman idea!”
The writers of these stories were also contemporaries and even sometimes neighbors of Olive’s mother, Ethel. And just as Olive helped introduce a worshipful admiration for her aunt Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood to the Marstons, with whom she built an unorthodox home, so too did she seemingly inform (along with Holloway Marston’s love for antiquity) what became the Wonder Woman origin story, which was recently given new life by Jenkins and Gal Gadot in 2017’s Wonder Woman.
There is of course the question of whether the new movies fully embrace these legacies. Lepore, for one, is skeptical, writing in 2020 that “Patty Jenkins seems to be interested in history… But she’s apparently not at all interested in the history of women: it’s got no place in either of her two ‘Wonder Woman’ films, even though they both take place during major inflection points in that history.”
However, the hard-won victories of that history, and how Marston seeded the ideals of its first wave into his comics, is still inextricably linked to Gadot’s Wonder Woman. We see it when she stands with a near divinity over Chris Pine on a beach in the 2017 movie, unaware and undisturbed by the preconceived limits a patriarchal society would place on her; and we see it when Wonder Woman can defeat villainy and greed in Wonder Woman 1984 without having to throw a single punch.
