The Secret History of Wonder Woman Page 2

  What checked Marston’s hand as he held the vial was the study of existence itself. There was one course he loved: Philosophy A: Ancient Philosophy. It was taught by George Herbert Palmer, the frail, weak-eyed, sixty-nine-year-old Alford Professor of Philosophy and chairman of Harvard’s Philosophy Department. Palmer had thin, long white hair, bushy black eyebrows, blue eyes, and a walrus mustache. He lived at 11 Quincy Street, where he pined for his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been president of Wellesley College, an advocate for female education, and a suffragist. She’d died in 1902. He refused to stop mourning her. “To leave the dead wholly dead is rude,” he pointed out, quite reasonably.14

  Early in his career, Palmer had made a luminous translation of the Odyssey—its aim, he said, was to reveal “that the story, unlike a bare record of fact, is throughout, like poetry, illuminated with an underglow of joy”—but his chief contribution to the advancement of philosophy was having convinced William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana to join what became known as “the Great Department”: Harvard’s faculty of philosophy.15

  The key to teaching, Palmer believed, is moral imagination, “the ability to put myself in another’s place, think his thoughts, and state strongly his convictions even when they are not my own.” He “lectured in blank verse and made Greek hedonism a vital, living thing,” Marston said.16

  In the fall of 1911, Philosophy A began with a history of philosophy itself. “According to Aristotle,” Palmer told his class, as Marston sat, rapt, “the rise of philosophy has three influential causes: freedom, leisure, and wonder.” For weeks, he raved about the Greeks: they, to Palmer, were geniuses of dialectics and rhetoric. After Thanksgiving, he lectured on Plato’s Republic; by December, he was expounding on how man was “a rational being in a sensuous physical body,” underscoring, as he often did, that by “man,” he meant men and women both. He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. “Girls are also human beings,” he told them, “a point often overlooked!!”17

  The equality of women was chief among Palmer’s intellectual and political commitments, and it was a way, too, that he remembered his wife. George Herbert Palmer, who saved Marston’s life, was faculty sponsor of the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage.

  The American suffrage movement dates to 1848, when the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York (a story later told in Wonder Woman), where delegates adopted a “Declaration of Sentiments,” written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Its demands included women’s “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”18

  From “Wonder Women of History: Susan B. Anthony,” Wonder Woman #5 (June–July 1943) (illustration credit 1.5)

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, American suffragists grew militant. They’d been inspired by the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst. In 1903, Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Its motto was “Deeds, not words.” Pankhurst went to prison for trying to deliver a petition to the House of Commons. Suffragists shackled themselves to the iron fence outside 10 Downing Street. “The condition of our sex is so deplorable that it is our duty to break the law in order to call attention to the reasons why we do what we do,” Pankhurst insisted.19 “The incident of the Suffragettes who chained themselves with iron chains to the railings of Downing Street is a good ironical allegory of most modern martyrdom,” G. K. Chesterton observed, predicting that the tactic would fail.20 He was wrong.

  British suffragists chained to the railings outside 10 Downing Street. From the Illustrated London News, 1908 (illustration credit 1.6)

  The Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage was formed in the spring of 1910 by John Reed, then a senior, and by a Harvard Law School student who’d been converted to the cause by Max Eastman, a philosophy graduate student at Columbia University who’d helped found a Men’s League for Woman Suffrage in New York. In the fall of 1911, the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage announced a lecture series. The first lecture, to be held on October 31, was to be given by Florence Kelley, who’d fought for a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, and an end to child labor. The announcement caused a ruckus: women were not allowed to speak at Harvard. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the university’s president, said he feared “a mob of women trooping around the Yard.” The league submitted a petition to the Harvard Corporation, which ruled that Kelley could speak, but only if the lecture was closed to anyone outside the university.21 The league obliged. In her lecture, Kelley insisted that the conditions of the working poor could not be addressed without granting women the right to vote.22 The corporation, anxious that the university not be seen to be endorsing women’s rights, demanded that the league bring, as its next guest, a speaker opposed to woman suffrage.23 Instead, the league announced that its next guest would be, of all people, Emmeline Pankhurst.

  Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested outside Buckingham Palace (illustration credit 1.7)

  She was slated to speak in Sanders Theatre, the largest and most prestigious hall on campus (it seats one thousand people). Terrified, the corporation issued a ruling barring Pankhurst from speaking anywhere on campus, noting that, its earlier exception for Kelley notwithstanding, “the college halls should not be open to lectures by women.”24

  “Is Harvard Afraid of Mrs. Pankhurst?” asked the editors of the Detroit Free Press. (The answer was yes.) The news made headlines all over the United States. Most papers took the side of the suffrage league. “The question of universal suffrage is now in the public eye as never before in our history,” the Atlanta Constitution observed. “It is a subject for legitimate debate, one upon which the young and formative mind demands, and is entitled to, information.” The New York Times’ editorial board was all but alone in endorsing the corporation’s decision, on the grounds that “the curriculum of Harvard does not include woman suffrage.”25

  In Cambridge, suffrage was all anyone talked about. “The undergraduate body is split into two camps, the ‘sufs’ and the ‘antis,’ ” the New York Times reported. “In class room, lecture hall, college yard, and Harvard Union, suffrage, and the action of the corporation, is the principal topic of conversation.”26

  The corporation had ruled that Pankhurst couldn’t speak on campus; it couldn’t stop her from speaking in Cambridge. The league announced that it had arranged for Pankhurst to speak in Brattle Hall, a dance hall at 40 Brattle Street, just a block from Harvard Yard. The editor of the New York Evening Post, a prominent alumnus, urged as many students as possible to attend “for the double purpose of thus making amends for the University’s lamentable blunder and of hearing one of the ablest orators of the day.” Pankhurst’s lecture, held on the afternoon of December 6, was open only to Harvard and Radcliffe students; admission required a ticket. It was mobbed: fifteen hundred students showed up in a hall designed to hold not more than five hundred. They scrambled up the walls and tried to climb in through the windows.27

  Pankhurst proved as severe as ever. “The most ignorant young man, who knows nothing of the needs of women, thinks himself a competent legislator, because he is a man,” Pankhurst told the crowd, eyeing the Harvard men. “This aristocratic attitude is a mistake.”28

  Marston was fascinated; he was thrilled; he was distracted. With a revolution taking place on his very doorstep, he could not bring himself to care about Professor Haskins’s Middle Ages. “It was mid-year examination time when I reached my final decision to stop existing,” he explained. Then he thought that maybe he ought to take his exams, “to see how badly I was doing.”29

  On the day of the exam in Philosophy A, George Herbert Palmer handed out the questions to his class, along with a word of advice: “A scholar approaches a task for the sa
ke of himself, not for that of someone else, as the schoolboy does.”30

  Marston took that to heart. He aced the exam. Palmer, who almost never gave A’s, gave one to Marston.31

  Eighteen-year-old William Moulton Marston did not, then, swallow that vial of cyanide. But he never forgot it. And he never forgot Emmeline Pankhurst and her shackles, either. Three decades later, when Marston created a female comic-book superhero who fights for women’s rights (“Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman! She’s turning this man’s world topsy-turvy!”), her only weakness is that she loses all her strength if a man binds her in chains. And the first villain she faces is a chemist rumored to be developing a cyanide bomb. His name is Dr. Poison.32

  Dr. Poison. From “Dr. Poison,” Sensation Comics #2 (February 1942) (illustration credit 1.8)

  THE AMAZONIAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

  SADIE ELIZABETH HOLLOWAY, who liked to pretend she was a boy, was the first girl in four generations of Holloways. She was named after her grandmothers. She was born on the Isle of Man in 1893, the same year that William Moulton Marston was born, an ocean away. Her grandfather, an Englishman named Joseph Goss, was the captain of Queen Victoria’s yacht; one day, when the king of Spain fell overboard, Goss saved him, for which he was knighted; ever after, he was known as Don José de Gaunza. Her mother, Daisy, married an American bank clerk named William George Washington Holloway. When Sadie was five, the Holloways moved to America. Summers, she went home. She never lost her Manx accent. She was fierce and she was picky. Mostly, she was fearless.

  She had a little brother; she liked to boss him around. In Massachusetts, the Holloways lived at first in a boardinghouse on Beacon Hill and then in a seaside cottage in Revere before settling in Cliftondale, in a house on Morton Avenue, where they installed indoor plumbing and replaced all the windows with stained glass. Sadie had an orange tabby cat named Sandy Alexander MacTabish. She and her best friend, Pearl, put on plays together. Sadie always played all the parts for boys because she had clothes that could pass for pants: “I was the only one who had pajamas.”

  From “Introducing Wonder Woman,” All-Star Comics #8 (December 1941–January 1942) (illustration credit 2.1)

  On Morton Avenue, the Holloways lived across the street from a flower shop. It smelled of jasmine. An Irish family lived two doors away. “Once the two boys in the family got my brother down and were pummeling him,” Sadie said, in a story she liked to tell. “I jumped on their backs and banged their heads on the pavement.” But what she remembered most about growing up on Morton Avenue was the day those boys’ mother accidentally killed herself after piercing a wire through her cervix, hoping to lose a baby she could not afford to keep.1

  Wonder Woman came not from the Isle of Man but from the isle of woman. “In the days of ancient Greece, many centuries ago, we Amazons were the foremost nation in the world,” Hippolyte explains to her daughter, Princess Diana, in the first Wonder Woman story Marston ever wrote. “In Amazonia, women ruled and all was well.” Alas, that didn’t last. After Hippolyte defeated Hercules, the strongest man in the world, he stole her magic girdle, which had been given to her by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Without it, Hippolyte lost all her power and the Amazons became the slaves of men, bound in chains. They escaped only after pledging to live apart from men forever. They sailed across the ocean until they found an uncharted place they named Paradise Island. There they lived, blessed with eternal life, for centuries—until, one day, Captain Steve Trevor, a U.S. Army officer, crashed his plane onto the island.

  “A man!” Princess Diana cries when she finds him. “A man on Paradise Island!”

  She carries him in her arms like a baby. She falls in love with him. Hippolyte consults the gods.

  “You must deliver him back to America, to help fight the forces of hate and oppression,” Aphrodite advises.

  “You must send with him your strongest and wisest Amazon,” says Athena, the goddess of war, to “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”

  The strongest and wisest of the Amazons turns out, of course, to be Hippolyte’s daughter, who then flies Trevor, in her invisible plane, to the United States, “to help him wage the battle for freedom, democracy, and womankind!”2 She brings him to an army hospital. After he recovers, she joins him at the headquarters of U.S. military intelligence, where Princess Diana disguises herself as Diana Prince, a prim, bespectacled secretary. She takes dictation in Greek, which, more than once, nearly gives her away. “That’s not shorthand!” another secretary cries. “It’s not Gregg, nor Pitman, nor any other system.” Diana: “It’s—er—Amazonian!”3

  Wonder Woman, newspaper strip, August 16, 1944 (illustration credit 2.2)

  Sadie Elizabeth Holloway met William Moulton Marston when they were both in the eighth grade, at a grammar school in Cliftondale. Later, the Holloways moved to Dorchester, south of Boston. At Dorchester High School, Sadie studied Greek. For her sixteenth birthday, her mother gave her a copy of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. “A girl’s education should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the same as a boy’s,” Ruskin advised.4 When Sadie graduated from high school, she went to Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, the first women’s college in the United States.

  Female education was, as yet, a novelty. Until the end of the eighteenth century, girls had not typically been taught even how to write. In the new nation, ideas about educating girls began to change; in a republic, women had to know enough of the world to raise sons who could be virtuous citizens. Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837. Plenty of critics were on hand to warn its students not to get carried away with any fancy ideas about equality. On July 4, 1851, during a celebration marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, C. Hartwell, from a nearby boys’ theological seminary, read to the assembled Mount Holyoke girls a parody he’d written of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1848 “Declaration of Sentiments.” He called it an “Amazonian Declaration of Independence.”

  “We hold these truths to be intuitive and indisputable, that all men and women are created free and equal,” Hartwell read aloud, finding that very funny.5

  Suffragists, though, didn’t think Amazons were preposterous; they thought they were amazing. From the time of Homer, an Amazon had meant a member of a mythic ancient Greek race of women warriors who lived apart from men. By the end of the nineteenth century, some suffragists, following the work of male anthropologists, had come to believe that a land of Amazons—an ancient matriarchy that predated the rise of patriarchy—had, in fact, once existed.6 “The period of woman’s supremacy lasted through many centuries—undisputed, accepted as natural and proper wherever it existed, and was called the matriarchate, or mother-age,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton explained in 1891.7

  American girls started going to college in significant numbers only at the end of the nineteenth century. Many, like Sadie Holloway, went to women’s colleges, one of the “Seven Sisters” founded before 1889: Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley. (Wonder Woman founds an all-girls school, too: Wonder Woman College.) Others went to coeducational schools. In 1910, 4 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one went to college; by 1920, that number had risen to 8 percent, 40 percent of which were women.8

  From “The Adventure of the Life Vitamin,” Wonder Woman #7 (Winter 1943) (illustration credit 2.3)

  By the time Sadie Holloway packed her bags for Mount Holyoke, in 1911, an “Amazon” meant any woman rebel—which, to a lot of people, meant any girl who left home and went to college. “New Women,” they were called, and they meant to be as free as men: Amazons, all.

  Sadie Elizabeth Holloway as a student at Mount Holyoke in 1915 (illustration credit 2.4)

  Sadie Holloway had wide-set blue eyes and stood five feet flat. She was stern and stoic and tight-lipped. At Mount Holyoke, she tied her long, dark, wavy hair on top of her head, like a Gibson girl. She wore lacy white dresses
that fell to her ankles; she rolled the sleeves up past her elbows. She joined the debating society, the Philosophy Club, the Baked Bean Club, the choir. She worked for the student magazine, the Mount Holyoke. She was bold; she was unflinching: she played field hockey.9

  The right to an education was as hard fought a battle as the right to vote; the first had to be achieved before the second could be won. “The time will come when some of us will look back upon the arguments against the granting of the suffrage to women with as much incredulity as that with which we now read those against their education,” said Mary Woolley, the president of Mount Holyoke, in a speech she gave at the National American Woman Suffrage convention in Baltimore in 1906.10

  Woolley was a tireless supporter of women’s rights. Inez Haynes Gillmore, a Radcliffe graduate, had founded the College Equal Suffrage League in 1900, the first college suffrage league. In 1908, Woolley had a hand in making that campaign a nationwide effort, helping to found the National College Equal Suffrage League.11 A Mount Holyoke chapter of the Equal Suffrage League began meeting in the spring of 1911, the semester before Holloway arrived on campus. Not every woman’s college was a hotbed of suffragism, but Mount Holyoke was. The faculty was nothing but “rank women suffragists,” one student said. By 1914, when a Mount Holyoke student submitted a paper for English 1 called “Reasons for Opposition to the Further Extension of the Suffrage,” her professor applauded her effort—“a clear presentation of one side of the question”—and then argued with her in the margins. In the spring of Holloway’s junior year, the Mount Holyoke reported that the Equal Suffrage League had wanted to sponsor a debate on the subject of suffrage and that an archaeology professor had agreed to argue in favor of granting women the vote but “no one was willing to speak for the opposition.” By the time Holloway graduated, in 1915, nearly half the student body belonged to the Equal Suffrage League.12