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 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.
