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The Secret History Of Wonder Woman (2014)

by Jill Lepore(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0385354045 (ISBN13: 9780385354042)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: I wondered what LePore could say about the history of Wonder Woman that Les Daniels did not cover in his book "Wonder Woman: The Complete History" (art directed by the genius Chip Kidd). The answer is: the same, only in more detail and with a thick coat of feminist/cultural history that may or may not always be appropriate. The titles are actually telling the truth. LePore sticks to the history, whereas Daniels' pushes ahead to more recent events with the Amazon. Still, the news hook with the LePore book is all about Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, a blowhard charlatan who could not hold a job but could convince two professional women to support him and raise his children. Seriously, while the clan involved in the creation of Wonder Women led interesting l... moreives, no one was a murderer or child molester, so good on them for finding a familial relationship that worked for them (Three parents! Two spouses! Who wouldn't at least think about it??). One of Marston's spouses was the niece of Margaret Sanger, so the birth control pioneer gets dragged into this story. Yes, LePore is saying that the comic was created in an atmosphere that was very interested in promoting the rights of women. However, while the Sanger and Marston families did have ties, the Marston side was much more interested in promoting them than the Sangers were, seeing as Marston failed at practically everything he did -- except create one of the most famous superheroes of all time.LePore also tries to get us worked up about how much Wonder Woman was in chains, or how little she was clothed, noting that various censor groups came down on Marston for these features. Actually, all the chains=BONDAGE! rhetoric does is remind us that people have always had fetishes that they have been unsuccessful in covering up, and that others have always clutched their pearls and predicted doom, and so on and so on. I would go with Daniels' book before LePore's, as Daniels's book is essentially a pictorial history that also talks about Marston's kinky blowhard-ness, while LePore is trying to make a graduate thesis out of a fun and strange intersection of history, commerce, and art.
review 2: Not a comics reader or particular aficionado (though, side note: my mom went to high school with Lynda Carter) but the shrouded origins of Wonder Woman are too fascinating even for a dabbler like myself to ignore.It's almost shocking that, almost a century later, Lepore is the first to connect the dots between Marston, Sanger, and the amazonian. But if anything, Ms. Lepore doesn't make enough of WW's creation as intentional propaganda- or of what the "alternative" lifestyle of Marston & family, and Marston's career of dubious scholarship and self-promotion, may imply by connection... particularly to the public face of feminism and the leadership of family friend and 20th century titan, eugenicist (and arguably, racist) Margaret Sanger. But I suppose then the book would run afoul of accepted wisdom.It's never made sense to me that a paragon of femininity should be defined by physical dominance and a willful suppression of fertility and motherhood. If superheroes are, ultimately, fascist fantasies, Wonder Woman may be the most American superhero of all. less

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