>> those of you who are already mes supporting the los angeles public library, our thanks to you. if you'd like to find out more about how the work of the los angeles public library all over the city from resources for veterans, this is -- we're honoring veterans this month to adult literacy programs to children's programs, there's a great way to support the library. and if you do become a member tonight for the first time, we do have a couple of jill's books that we could gift you with, if you want to choose a book from our allowed book shelf. our format is a conversation between jill lepore and alex cohen, and after their conversation they will open to questions. we'll have time for some questions, and we ask that you really do ask a question and that you just ask one per customer. we would appreciate it. and afterwards, jill will be signing her books in the lobby courtesy of our library store. and when you do buy your book on site tonight, that also helps support the lie area, so thank you -- library, so thank you in advance. in 1972 gloria stein m and the founders of ms. magazine picked wonder woman to be on their issue, and gloria steinem recalled how she felt as a child when she encountered that princess who helped america in world war ii. in her new book, "the secret history of wonder woman," jill lepore argues that all along the super heroine has a missing link in feminism, and she unpacks a rave la story -- revelatory chapter of american history. her new book tells about wonder woman's eccentric and inventive creator and the secret life he shared with his wife, sadie elizabeth holloway marson and a younger woman, olive ben, and how their behindment of conventional identity -- abandonment of conventional identity led to wonder woman's creation. jill's book is, as a graphic novelist called it, quote: as racy, as probable and as filled with curious devices as an episode of the comic book itself. jill lepore is one of america's most's seemed essayists -- esteemed essayists. her work frequently explores unmined chapters of american history or what she calls asymmetries of evidence in the historical record. among her many books, one that i'm loving reading right now, "book of ages," the youngest sister of one of our founding fathers, a hard working woman who i'm sure you have never heard of, i hadn't either, and it contains one of my favorite sentences ever, he loved no one longer, she loved no one better. jill is such a wonderful writer. among other books, jill is a veritable wonder woman herself, "the story of america," "the whites of their eyes: the tea party's revolution and the battle over american history." we knew alex cohen was going to be the perfect interviewer for tonight after she sent us a photo of her daughter in her wonder woman outfit. [laughter] and another great quality of alex is shells the author of -- she is the author of "the insider's divide to rollerrer the -- guide to roller derby," and you've also heard from her on "all thinged considered." please join me in welcoming alex and jill lepore. thank you. [applause] >> thank you so much, everyone, for coming out tonight. i have to say i've done a number of these chats at aloud, and i was never as excited as i was when i heard would you like to talk with jill lepore about wonder woman? [laughter] yeah. we're going to do that in just a moment, but my first question, jill, please forgive, is not for you, it's for our audience. how many of you grew up in some way, shape or form be it the comic book, the tv show, the animated tv shows, grew up with wonder woman and thought she was awesome? well, of course. thank you. [laughter] now, here's something interesting i found out today. jill lepore was kind of -- eh -- on wonder woman growing up. i was convinced it was going to be, yeah, i had the lyda carter -- >> i had no cred. >> i had a crush on patrick duffy on the man from atlantis. [laughter] 2k50ur78 do you remember that? he had the little yellow trunks, speedos? [laughter] so that's why. >> yeah. >> i was distracted by the boy. [laughter] >> well, and eventually wound up distracted by another boy, another man, which is how you kind of wound up falling into this wonderful book, "the secret history of wonder woman," a guy named william marson. we just heard a little bit about him but, man, this guy is almost as an amazing a character as wonder woman, but he's real. tell us more about this guy. >> yeah. marson's really endlessly fascinating. there's some kind of almost not an effort in american culture that he doesn't have a hand in in the first half of the 20th century. he pretty much tries everything, and i love watching him over the course of his life move from one endeavor to the next. he once wrote this little essay about his life, the education of henry adams, his was a life of experiments. so he tried everything and failed dazzlingly at each of these things. but he had this very bright start as a young man. he went to harvard and right out of the gate was celebrated as a very great student and became devoted to the new field of experimental psychology, brand new field at the time and decided to stay on at harvard, got a law degree, then got a ph.d. in psychology. by 1923 when he was a very young man, he was widely credited as the inventor of the polygraph. he embarks as a teacher of legal psychology, but then he -- that falls apart for reasons having to do with his strange family life. he then comes to l.a. in 1928. he's hired as a consulting psychologist for universal studios trying to help think about the transition from sound film, from silent films to sound films. he's in hollywood for a few years, and then he ends up in comics. so he goes through science, the law, film making, comic book writing, and in between he's one of america's most celebrated pop psychologists. >> he's a fascinating guy. what i liked especially when you write about the lie detector test was how he really had to insert himself in everything, you know? it wasn't just the lie detector test, it didn't work unless he was administering it. [laughter] >> so during the first world war he, the national research council -- which is formed in the first world war -- has a psychology committee, and mar son convinces the committee chair to investigate whether his important research, done at harvard, could be used to interrogate spies and prisoners of war. but other scientists say, well, it doesn't always seem to work. so he devises a series of tests to demonstrate that it works, and the community keeps saying, well, you need other people to administer the tests, and if it works -- it only ever works when he's administering the tests and he contributed this to the lesser talents of the other psychologists. [laughter] >> he has some very interesting attitudes and ideas about women which, of course, are at the basis of this character, wonder woman. talk a bit about those. >> yeah. there's two sources for those ideas about women, and they come into conflict with one another. that's why the hodgepodge of ideas about women in wonder woman, and they really are in conflict. one source is marston's work as a psychologist. he's training in the 19 teens when jung and freud are still around, and marston has a set of ideas, he writes this important book that is his philosophy. [laughter] that is not meant ironically, i assure you. [laughter] but it's his theory of emotions. and when you read it, you're like this stuff is just crazy. who would have believed that? the reason it's important to pull back from that, if freud had gone nowhere or jung had gone nowhere and you just were to pull the case study on dora off a shelf now and you'd never heard of it before, you'd be like who would have believed this stuff ever? this is nuts. marston has that same quality, but there's a kind of free-wheeling world of psychiatry and psychology in the 19 teens and '20s that he's really caught up in, and he comes to believe that women and men share an experience of emotions in which all emotions come down to four kinds of emotions; dominance, submission, captivation and inducement. which is where all the bondage in wonder woman comes from. [laughter] you'll have heard the words -- can your ears sort of perked up and said, dominance? he actually weaves -- believes that they are essential to our experience of one another emotionally, and in particular the experiences between women and men. so there's this sort of psychological origins of this idea about gender, but also especially about sex. and that leads him in his one big sort of master work on emotions of normal people, it's an argument against the idea that there is abnormal psychology. anything you feel is knew roan is, therefore, normal, and you should learn to love the love parts of yourself, he says. it's an argument for tolerance, and it's an interesting manifesto in that regard. he believed in sexual nonconformity. i guess historians would talk about that as an era of sex radicalism i. so that's one set of ideas that he has, and it comes from his work as a scientist. but then the other is his work and experience on witnessing of the suffrage and early feminists and birth control movements. so just to give you some refreshers about that movement, so marsto to n was born in 1893, he went to college in the fall of 1911 and for all the british suffragists invited to speak on campus, the harvard corporation banned her from speaking on campus because women were not allowed to speak at harvard. but she spoke at a nearby dance hall, and everybody went, and it was this incredibly stirring, rousing speech because she had changed the suffrage movement which had been going on for decades and decades and decades. her followers said we're done just asking, now we're going to really fight. and they were doing things like chaining themselves to the railings outside 10 downing street and getting arrested and going on hunger strikes and being submitted to force feeding, but making sure they were photographed when these things were happening. incredible, incredible tradition of nonviolent and even sometimes violent resistance that she brought to the united states, and marston had front row seats for as did his wife who went to mount holyoke. and the reason marston ended up leaving academia in the 1920s was that in 1925 when he was a professor of psychology at tuft, he fell in love with a senior, olive byrne, and her woman, ethel, was the first woman in the united states to be forcibly fed in prison. her sister was a nurse, and ethel byrne and margaret sanger opened the first birth control clinic in 1916, and they were immediately arrested and sentenced to prison, and ethel byrne went on a hunger strike and nearly died. and she was the first hero of the birth control movement. an incredibly interesting feminist newspaper, the word feminism is used for the very first time. by 1913, everybody's talking about feminism, so at the very time when marston was coming of age as a young person interested in psychology thinking about women and men, he was watching this incredible flowering of political activism on the part of women fighting for the right the to vote, feminists who were fighting for a much bigger set of ideas about equality and birth control activists. and then olive byrne moves into his household in 1925 -- >> even though he already has a wife. >> he's already married. he and his wife and olive byrne come to believe that they should live together as a threesome. they raise their family together. it is a form of sex radicalism. so there are two really different routes for what marston is thinking about women and power. when he creates wonder woman in 1941, her grandmother really is margaret sanger and the women rebels from 1914. >> yeah, it's fascinating. it's interesting to see how feminism manifests itself at home especially with this interesting relationship with two wives. it's kind of like an ed code of -- episode of "big love." [laughter] you realize it allowed her having another woman at home to help raise the kids meant that his first wife could go out and work. it was kind of an interesting form of feminism itself, i felt like, within his own home. >> yeah. i think there are many different ways to read that. the test would be was it okay for the kids, were people actually happy? we might really wonder. and i think there's mixed evidence. the kids all say it actually was kind of great. there were tons of adults around to love them. but marston's wife was not pleased, as the family story goes, when he said, you know, i've fallen in love with this girl, she's ten years younger than you and a student of mind. [laughter] he apparently said to her i've met someone special, and i'd like you to meet her. [laughter] this is, like, not the conversation you really want to have. [laughter] she's ten years younger than you are. [laughter] and, but apparently his wife, you know, when she went for this long walk for six hours and thought it over and came -- [laughter] a long walk. but the thing that was really, i mean, the thing i really worked on in this book because i'm incredibly grateful to the marston family who kept the story a secret for decades and decades and decades. most of what i found out in the archives -- archives of harvard or dc comics -- the family really knew because the family was really cloaked in secrecy. but they were incredibly generous to let me look at diaries and family letters and photo albums that no one had ever really seen before. and you do see a family that is really full of love. there's this wonderful moment later in life when elizabeth holloway is finally pressed to explain to the children how -- who was sleeping with who, and she says there was lovemaking for all. [laughter] >> and this is all before 1960. it's pretty incredible to imagine. now that we know a little more about william marston, but to truly understand the full story, it's important to understand the context of what was going on in comic books at the time for which, i believe, you've got a slide. >> yeah. i just thought you guys might want to see some comics. [laughter] so this is the first drawing of wonder woman by the artist harry g. peter. this is from 1943. but to give -- 1941. but to give you just a refresher course for those of you who are not comics geeks, comic books don't start until about 1933. there are comic strips before that, funnies that are in the newspaper, but they're not grouped together and sold as books that cost about ten cents until 1933. the first comic book super hero is classically thought to be superman who debuts in 1938, in 1939 batman debuts, and wonder woman comes just shortly after in 1941. this is a cover from 1942. but what was important about the relationship among all these superheroes, aside from the fact that they're all members of the -- >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> is that wonder woman is actually the antidote to superman and batman. superman and batman might not have been able to continue if wonder woman hadn't been published. because what happened, imagine the creation of an entirely new art form that only kids are interested in and only kids really understand. say, for instance, texting. [laughter] and their parenteds don't really get it -- parents don't really get it. there's these cheap books that any kid can, and they trade, this whole black market. and the storytelling it's not like a book, it's not like a picture book, it's not like a movie, it's a really interesting art form that's just emerging. and in it a lot of people are killing each other and doing horrible things to one another, and there's tremendous danger and frightful events and terror, and a lot of them are much grislier than superman and batman. but there emerges this incredible wave of anti-comics crusaders who are urging americans to ban and burn comic books. among their critique is the is that superman is a fascist, he's like a stormtrooper. he's from a superior race, he's a demagogue, children are supposed to worship him. this is, you know, looking across the ocean to the war in europe and the rise of far p itch. -- fascism. meanwhile, batman used to carry a gun, and americans were pretty strenuously opposed to the private ownership of firearms in the 1930s. [laughter] the national rifle federation, there was a huge amount of anti-gun sentiment in the united states, and is here's this role model that children are supposed to be looking up to who's actually more powerful and shooting people? so this is why batman's origin story is created in 1939, a few months after the initial issue in which, oh, yes, no, no, no, bruce wayne saw his parents get shot when he was a little kid, he hates guns, he will never use a gun again. but the publisher of comics were worried that comics were going to be shut down by censors, and so what would you do? you would, of course, hire the world's most famous psychologist, the inventer of the lie detector test, the esteemed william marston to be a consulting psychologist and tell you what to do. and he has these great ideas. he says, well, you know, we have this editorial advisory board, he really encourages them to call themselves dc, it had been detective come you can, and use this little -- comics, and use this little logo. marston wanted to brand the comics with an imprint of quality. that's where that branding comes from. but he mainly says, look, the solution to all your problems, he said, girl. [laughter] it's so simple. it's always true. isn't it always? [laughter] [applause] so he just says, you know, the problem with these comic books, it's blood-curdling masculinity. if you have a female superhere, she will embody the principles of love and justice and truth and beauty. she will be opposed to violence, she will stop bullets with her bracelets -- >> wait, wait, and give the background on the bracelets. >> the bracelets marston had given to olive byrne when they sealed the deal. they were her bracelets. i was giving a talk in washington, d.c. last week, and one of olive byrne's granddaughters was there, and afterwards she said i have the bracelets. [laughter] i said, oh, my god! i want to see the bracelets. [laughter] you see them in these pictures in the book, family photos, you see olive byrne she's wearing these bracelets all the time. and she has this lasso, golden lasso, and when you're obsessed to tell the truth -- which is marston's lie detector, obviously -- but she's essentially a pacifist. she comes from this land of women, and she believes in women's equality, and that's what she's come to the united states to fight for. >> now, can we go back a slide for a moment, because once -- it took a little bit of selling, but marston made a great case, finally dc comics said, okay, and the next thing to figure out was who was this woman going to be, and you see some of the early drawings there. can you talk about the evolution of the look, because it's fabulous, and why we never saw her wearing the sandals because, lord knows, you cannot fight crime in heels. >> no, you so could not. so this is this great sketch, and it's from peter, harry g. peter, the artist, and on the bottom right is marston's reply, and they're agreeing that the sandals have to go. they look like a stenographer's, which is true. [laughter] so once the publisher gives marston permission for this experiment, he's going to try this for six months, among the many things he stipulates -- remember, most of the people writing comics are teenagers. marston hires his own artist, this very old guy, harry g. peter. and it's right after captain america has come out, marvel -- which used to be called timely comics -- releases the first issue of captain america in 1940. and if you'll recall he's, basically, wearing an american flag. america's just about to enter the war. there's this real, incredible surge of patriotism. so she clearly has to wear an american flag. she looks like a girl stephen colbert. [laughter] i always think. i could totally see him wearing this. [laughter] not the shoes. >> i think it says the shoes look like a stenographer's. that's a great little note. >> so this is their initial exchange, and the bracelets are really important to marston. now, there are a number of things that happen, and i don't have a slide for this, but one of the real influences on wonder woman's aesthetic aside from she has to look super patriotic, she has to look all-american, athletic and strong, but she has to look a little sexier than this, is i think what the publisher says. and marston at the time had been a writer for esquire magazine. esquire was playboy before there was playboy, and esquire had in the 1940s these gorgeous centerfolds drawn by this brazilian artist, alberto vargas. they're beautiful. i haven't seen that many because the bound volumes of "esquire magazine" at harvard, where i teach -- i went and pulled them off the shelves, and all you see is the razor slice on the spine where the hard regard undergrads have taken the varga girls home. but the varga girls, the high-heeled red boots that she gets instead of the stenographer's delicate shoes come from the fetishy soft porn of esquire. right, so this -- so she gets these. in the very beginning she wears this skirt, they dispense with the skirt almost immediately. there's this fantastic -- the very first episode of the linda carter wonder woman tv show where her mother makes her dress, her outfit for her, and she has the skirt, and she says i don't think i'll be needing this, and she takes it off to reveal her star-spangled upside wear. so we can just -- underwear. so we can just look at these for a minute, too, because another thing to say about wonder woman, i mean, from marston's life, we know much about how suffragists and feminists and early birth control activists were, indeed, members of his family -- somehow we keep going forward here. we've jumped the shark there. [laughter] but you can see in the visual representation of wonder woman that same influence; that is, the influences of suffragism and feminism and the birth control movement. here on the left is a harry g. peter panel of wonder woman doing what always she's doing, which is trying to escape from bonds of chains which marston always said wonder woman has to be chained up because she's an allegory for the emancipated woman. so she has to emancipate herself in every story, so we have to tie her up. and the publisher's like, hmm. >> there's some other reasons that might work. >> having to do with the boots. [laughter] but here on the right is another drawing by harry g. peter which makes thattal gory quite clear. this is for an article that marston wrote for american scholar published by thefy beta capita society. he always said she was a work of scholarship. so anyway, here you can see harry g. peter doing that same work, but making thal gory visible -- you can see the the influence of that iconography, breaking free of -- this is called tearing off the bonds -- that until women gained the right to vote, they were essentially the slaves of men and that we needed to represent women in this fashion and alert the world to the way in which, the condition of being a disenfranchised woman was a condition of slavery. drawing was done by a feminist cartoonist named annie rogers who published as lou rogers because she was told sleeved never get anything -- she'd never get anything published if she didn't have a man's name. the reason i want to point that out is harry g. peter was a staff artist for judge in the 19 teens too. he and lou rogers both contributed to judge's regular pro-suffrage page which was called "the modern woman," that featured a cartoon in the center panel of every page. so harry g. peter was, essentially, a former suffrage cartoonist. he had never worked in comics when marston hired him. he brought to that job the qualification of knowing that women were fighting to vote. even peter's own visual icon ogg any in his own life helps us to see just how much wonder woman is, because i would argue, really the missing link in the history of feminism in the 20th century. >> so while we have. >> slide up -- we have this slide up, we see wonder woman chained up, and she says chained by my bracelets together, by afrodiety's decree, my strength is gone. >> the origin story that marston wrote is that wonder woman lived on paradise item, she was the daughter of -- [inaudible] who came from ancient greece and had brought the amazonian women of greece to paradise island in order to live separately from men, blessed we terrible life in a -- with an eternal life in a world of peace. and that all was wonderful and, of course, it was a paradise because there were no men there. and then a u.s. military intelligence officer named steve trevor is in a dog fight with a nazi spy and a plane flying over paradise island, he crashes to the island, and princess diana finds him, and polity consults the gods and says you must bring this man back to america. the last hope for women's rights. and that's why wonder woman gets her star-spangled costume which her mother makes for her and gets in an invisible plane and flies away. if i remember that story -- because i remember watching that episode of wonder woman, because it's cloris leechman who plays -- remember? [laughter] the great cloris leechman plays polity. it's an incredible role. and i remember that, and i remember reading it even in comics in the '70s. but when i went and reread it in the course of working on this book, wait a minute, i know that story. i was in between watching linda carter and clor race leechman reenact that story when i was a kid. i went to college, and i read feminist utopian fiction in women's studies class, charlotte perkins gilman's novel, "her land," or the novel "angel island." there were all these, a stock -- it's actually a completely hacknied form of feminism from the 1910s in which feminists write about these mythical lands where only women live, and they're free from war. but suddenly some man finds his way there, like a crew of american ship, sailors are ship wrecked on angel eye lammed, and all the women -- island, and all the women are like what are we going to do with these people? if we get too close to them, we're going to have chirp. so, but we're not sure we want that many children. a lot of these fictions are about the problem of birth control. so i had completely forgotten about that. but then, of course, you see when you put those together that marston is just borrowing this plot line from feminist utopian fiction and importing it from the 19 teens into the 1940s when those 8-year-olds down at the drugstore buy -- and they haven't read it either, so -- >> i was going to say, 8-year-olds are probably not familiar with those stories. how did it go over when wonder woman first hit the comic book stands? how much of a success was she? some she was a really big splash right away. she very quickly was second only -- or, i guess, third only to superman and batman. there are a number of obvious measures of her success. she's the only come you can book superhero other than batman and superman to move from comic books to a comic strip. she becomes a comic strip in 1940. that doesn't last, but that mainly has to do with marston getting polio. marston and the publisher had made a deal that she would get six months. so in 1942 they were going to do a poll, a public opinion poll. one of the questions gallup routinely asked starting in 1937 was if a woman were otherwise qualified to be president of the united states, would you vote for her? i love the phrasing of that. anyway, so -- [laughter] they put out this questionnaire to readers, and it says should wonder woman be allowed to join the justice society? >> my favorite, i don't think we have a slide of that, but my favorite was they were very clever, and i think this was marston's idea, that they put wonder woman's photo twice? it was like this subliminal tactic. >> yeah. there's another questionnaire they send out where it's like six different superheroes, and they're saul acing -- they're all saying vote for me to join the justice society. and then there's a ballot. like, which of us should be allowed to join the justice society? wonder woman's head is huge, and the other guys were like these fifth rate losers, little boy blue, the gray ghost. like, these total benchwarmers. [laughter] and then, and then on the ballot itself which you have to cut out of a page of the comic book, there's like another big head of wonder woman. fill in your name here. [laughter] so wonder woman wins all these reader's polls in the "election," so she becomes a member of the justice society. she gets her own comic book in 1942, wonder woman, and there's the big publicity blitz around that which is actually quite interesting because gains has still been under a fair amount of criticism, and he wants to celebrate this thing. he launches with the first issue of wonder woman, a four-page centerfold that's called the wonder woman of history. and there are these feminist biographies, profiles of women of achievement. and he sends out the first issue of wonder woman to women all over the country, notable american women w a cover letter from alice marble who's this women's tennis chat. and she says i would like to take nominations for women of history, who we should include. and the reason we're publishing this comic book for girls is to show them they can do anything, they can achieve whatever they want in athletics and sports and politics and the arts and government, and that's what wonder woman is about, and help us make it the best it can be. obviously, it's a publicity ploy, but it's not the bondage, it's a very different project. it's that other source of wonder woman. so, and those feminists are actually pretty cool. you know, it's stock figures, florence nighting gail, let's katie stanton, amelia earhart, i think, gets in there. but this is a really new thing and a new thing as a form of popular culture. >> i want to fast forward a bit. you mentioned william marston eventually contracts polio, he passes away. wonder woman lives on, but she's not quite the same. talk a little bit about that chapter of her existence. >> yeah. so marston dies in 1947, and the same year he dies, the publisher dies, killed in a boating accident at lake placid. a student of marston's who had wrote a lot of scripts between '44 and '47 -- she's still alive, i interviewed her -- she gets married, and her husband has a child, he's a widower from another marriage, and she decides to stay home with this little girl, so she quits. sheldon mayer, who'd been the editor also quits, he's just really sick of being an editor, so wonder woman is an orphan. and marston's widow writes this incredibly powerful letter to d.c. comics in which she says i have known bill marston since i was 12, i've been a part of all of his work, i helped with the origin ally detector test, we went to law school together, graduate school together, i'm very experienced and competent woman, you should hire me as your new editor, and i will be sure to fine great writers, but the story needs to stay in family hands. which is really interesting when you think about it, it is a family project. and the head of dc come kicks says, no, and hires this guy as both writer and editor, and he really changes -- he hates wonder woman as marston's creation, and he, he sort of strips her of all her powers which is more or less many line with what was going on in the culture at the time. so many women had gone to work in the 1940s when men were away fighting the war, women worked in factories, factories routinely provided childcare for women and paid them pretty well. so when men came home from the war, factories said, you know, you should go home too to the women, but if women didn't want to stop working, they were forced out. the childcare centers were closed, and women's wages were dropped, and you were pressured to go back home. wonder woman kind of retreats too, and the way the new editor writes her in the 1950s she's just this sort of dopey, lovestruck ballerina. i guess. >> sad. >> it's a little sad. >> but with we're going to fast forward a few more decades here. >> yeah. >> along comes the '70s and the became's lib movement -- the women's lip movement starts to gather steam once again, and so does wonder woman. >> yeah. yeah. well, i'm going to look at a couple more slides here. before wonder woman changes from the comic book, she's resurrected by women that loved wonder woman as a child in the 1940s, as girls. so here on the left in 1969, gloria steinem got her start as a writer for new york magazine. and 24-6s a cartoon -- this was a cartoon that, an illustration that appeared in new york magazine in 1969. and it's a little hard to see, but it's wonder woman as a liberated lady. in in this issue she meets the smug liberal -- [laughter] and she's holding him over her head and threatening him, and she's fighting to stop rape and catcalling. this is when, this is at a time when wonder woman, the comic book, has nothing to do with feminism, nothing whatsoever to do with feminism. but women in what is thought of as the second wave of the struggle for women's equality, these women's liberationists have just turned to wonder woman as a kind of icon of their movement. this is from a feminist collective of comic artists that's based in berkeley, california. it's called the women's liberation basement press. and what they do in the first issue of it ain't me, babe, is resurrect all these stock women from comics from the 1930s, olive oyl, sheena, queen of the jungle and wonder woman, and they're marching in this protest of stock comic book plots. in this historian's side, veronica and betty run away together. [laughter] one of my favorite things is a story called "breaking out." [laughter] and then when ms. magazine publishes its first regular issue in 1942, they put wonder woman on the cover. so there's this incredible, fertile moment in the '60s and early '70s when wonder woman really becomes an icon for the women's liberation movement. >> which if, can we button it up there for a moment, if you go back to that wonder woman for president was something that william -- >> yes. i didn't want to overwhelm you with slides, but marston had put a storyline where diana prince becomes president in 1942, and the great cover says wonder woman from president. inside that it ain't me babe comics, lulu is told she can't join a boys' club -- [laughter] and she walks away. i just kind of love lulu. [laughter] just losing it. [laughter] it's my whole picture of feminism from 1970. [laughter] right there. and i also love this, this is from l.a., so i included this. this is the los angeles women's center. this is the regular newsletter called "sister." wonder woman is on the cover wielding a speck lumbar -- [laughter] and with my speck lumbar, i am strong, and i can fight, and she's whacking this guy, and on the inside of this is how to give yourself a vaginal self-exam. [laughter] which i just think is awesome. and this on the right is from the new york review of books, but this appeared in a magazine, margaret sanger leaping off a diaphragm, dressed as wonder woman. [laughter] so if you missed the '70s, doesn't ma take you sad? -- make you sad? they're all basically saying the same thing, which is what lulu is saying. [laughter] but the thing i love about the sanger is, of course, nobody knew anything about the ties between sanger and wonder woman. this is pure coincidence. sanger is an important figure, remains an important figure to second generation, second wave feminists, and their icon is wonder woman so, therefore, they put sanger in a wonder woman costume. even at the time when steinem put wonder woman on the cover of ms. magazine, they had to get permission from elizabeth holloway marston. she'd been living with olive byrne ever since, they were inseparable. so elizabeth holloway hardston lie -- marston so thrilled that all these exciting young women want to celebrate wonder woman. the first episode of ms. is a stand-alone volume of ms. publishes wonder woman, their reproduction of the 1940s comics. they reinfluence this whole generation. she never tells anybody a word about olive byrne. so it's a complete secret. everybody has been kept to secrecy. so even when a ph.d. student at berkeley in 1974 is writing a dissertation and tracks down holloway marston and writes and says i'm trying to figure out stuff about where things came from, what about the bracelets? and holloway marston writes back, oh, those -- a student of dr. marston's used to wear those bracelets. >> and i have to say, one of my favorite parts of this book was reading olive byrne wrote 5u8 these articles about william marston, and she talks about going to visit him as if she has never met the guy. she's married to him and has children by him, and yet when she presents it in these articles, she presents it totally removed, totally third person. so this was a pretty deeply buried -- >> yeah. she's writing for family circle in 1935. she can't say we live in a threesome. [laughter] that would be family triangle magazine. [laughter] so, yeah, no, really -- because the thing about olive byrne, she's my favorite character in the whole story because there's this incredible sadness around these women that fight this fight for birth control a century ago. ethel byrne has two children in quick succession, margaret sanger has three children in quick succession, their mother has died in childbirth after having left 11 or 12 children, they both essentially leave their children to go fight for birth control. so ethel byrne, her mother leaves her when she's 2 years old. when she's born, her father throws her into a snowbank, and she's rescued by margaret sanger. her father's drunk. she has this incredible difficult childhood growing up in catholic orphanages and is rescued again and again by margaret sanger. but she, when marston and his wife say will you join our family and have -- she wants to have children. she's brilliant. she's probably the smartest of all of them. she really wants to have in this family, and she doesn't want her children to grow up with an unconventional family life, because that's what she had. she actually gives her children up for adoption, their not even legally her children after a few years. the family tells the world that she's, like, the housekeeper. and her son, whose name is byrne holloway marston, who's a retired obstetrician -- [laughter] he's lovely. his grandmother was ethel byrne, there's this beautiful thing about carrying on this tradition of caring for women, and he, he, you know, i asked him how he thought about his mother, he said i -- it's like she was jane eyre. holloway's not trying to be sinister in not telling gloria steinem or this ph.d. student from berkeley, it was important to olive byrne that it be kept a family secret. >> i'm going to open up to questions from the audience in just a moment, but i'd like to ask you about this concept of a wonder woman. you look at all of the things the feminists were fighting for in the '70s. they wanted women to be able to work at all jobs and get equal pay and all the rest of it. i would say that we haven't gotten the whole way there, but as they used to say in the virginia slims ads back in the day, we have come a long way, baby, right? and that term of a wonder woman you hear bandied about, louise just said it in the introduction to you tonight, and there's this notion of a wonder woman today as being the woman who does it all. she's got a couple kids, she's got a great job, she works really hard. she coombs dinner -- cooks dinner every night and walks the dog and makes the lunches and still manages to get up -- >> spinning classes. >> there are lots of drug, right? [laughter] it's the pressure. because it's impossible. it's impossible for any of us to be that wonder woman. and yet that image still exists, and we use -- wonder woman is the name we use to describe that kind of person. >> right. >> so what do you think, how far has she come? is it, you know, where is this image and notion of a wonder woman today? >> yeah. that's a great question, and i bet people in the audience will have their own vantages to share about that in the form of a question. [laughter] but, you know, it became a -- it became a big issue in the 1970s when wonder woman was really the icon of liberal feminists, right? for all those reasons are. liberal feminism sort of advocated individual achievement and individual accomplishment. that's an oversimplification, but radical feminists who were working for structural change in the form of collectives and policy changes that would change the structure of society for all women and men. they thought that wonder woman awz a complete catastrophe a complete betrayal of everything feminism stood for. that the only way to actually triumph was to be, to have super powers. whoo kind of equality -- what kind of equal equality is that? women soup heroes are better than everybody else, so if you have to be better than everybody else in fighting for equality. so that's why i think, i think it's an incredibly complicated character. and we can look at one more slide before -- there's this weird sort of pep anyization of -- weapon anyization of wonder woman where every time you think about how cool it is, this sort offal goriccal woman fighting for her independence, it somehow always evolves to, like, this thing. and that is really troubling. she's got to have guns. like, she was a pacifist who was supposed to be opposed to guns. okay, comic book characters are updated all the time, but there's this kind of entropy problem with female icons that they devolve into the pornographic and ultra violent. so as a visual icon there are all kinds of issues around that. i mean, she's really complicated. that said, though, like most things, these things kind of go two different ways. so i am really con tin yawlly struck by talking to women our age who, like, it really meant something to them that there was a tv show on when they were kids where a woman was stronger than the men and where she, like, helped people out. and i told this story recently about -- i have only boys, and although they're quite tolerant of wonder woman because it makes a good present for mom on her birthday when what else are they going to get me? oh, yeah, it's a wonder woman action figure! i have girls in the house all the time because we have friends over all the time. just a few weeks before the book came out, i had some friends over who are foster parents, and i was hacking out at the -- hanging out at the table with this 8-year-old girl, really, really difficult life, and we were looking for stuff in the kitchen. i only have boys' stuff, so she was like, what are we going to play? and i had these original covers of dc comics from the 1930s and ear 40s. we were just spreading them out all over the kitchen table, and i just watched her doing this drinking my coffee. she pulls out each of the ones that are wonder woman and puts them in this separate pile, then she starts ordering them. and then she's asking me a thousand questions, what are the bracelets for, what does she do with the lasso, why does she have thatty yea rah, and he'd asked a few questions about the flash and the green lantern. and then she just looks at me, and she says she's so strong, and she can rescue people. and so i get bummed out about the sort of soft porn nature of these icons and the radical feminist critique has a lot of cred to it, but for an 8-year-old girl to see someone, a woman who can rescue people, that's a great gift. >> and with that -- [applause] thanks, jill he -- lepore. if you have a question, please raise your hand. one of these two lovely ladies with microphones will head your way. >> how do you think it would be different if he hadn't died in 19, what is it, 45? >> '47, yeah. >> how would wonder woman be different today in 2014 if he were, you know, still here? >> oh, that's an interesting question. you know, i don't think really that different. i don't think he would have done it for that much longer, to be honest. he had already begun -- it was kind of too much work for him to handle because she was appearing -- she was so popular, she was in many different comic books. she had her own comic book, a newspaper strip, all star comics, sensation comics, comic cavalcade. she was kind of all over the place, and he had already hired an assistant, and he in the 1940s marston had his old son was a freshman at harvard and would send comic book stories home to him. he was kind of running out of ideas. there were only so many ways to tie people up, although e people are still at that in hollywood screenplays. this is a kind of dudley dorightism that only takes you so far. so i think he'd become a little tired of it and it would have become a farmed-out project. and what happens to the character has to do with changes in women's economic role and the sort of, the culture's willingness to tolerate a woman being so strong. there was a great deal of excitement about that and a need for that during the war. it's really more about the end of the war, ultimately, than it is about marst to on's death. that has a much greater impact on what kinds of stories are possible. >> yes. there is another character in the story that you haven't talked about tonight -- [inaudible] the other woman. sorry, there's this character that's very interesting, enters their life very early on and comes in and out of their life. but she seems to be in all the pictures almost, and have you got anything else to say about her that didn't go into the book, or is there something that you think that you couldn't say as a scholar but that -- >> that i'll say here? we're being filmed for television so -- [laughter] >> how does she get into the story? >> yeah. if you don't tweet about it, i'll tell you anything. [laughter] the question is about this woman named marjorie wilkes huntley who is really, truly fascinating. so she is a kind of a dynamo of a woman but very mysterious. she and marston meet in 918 when he is -- 1918 when he is stationed, i forget what the name of the military site where he's stationed, but she's the librarian at this military camp when he's serving in the first world war. and he's fascinated by her because she has these really interesting ideas about psychic powers. now, it may seem odd that marston was attracted to one who believed she was a psychic, but if you remember, like, william james who's the real founder of psychology, great philosopher and psychologist william james who's also a physician, he believed in, he believed that the dead could speak. it's the afterlife and did all kinds of experiments to field -- to prove that the field of research, one of the last experiments he did involved a seance trying to use the powers of an acultist -- occultist. it was a very powerful idea throughout the 19 teens. and so marston was fascinated by huntley. i don't know what their relationship was. most of the people i interviewed in the family don't think that they were ever lovers. i myself am a little skeptical about that claim. she didn't have children with him, but she also had has a hysterectomy and i don't know why, i don't know if that was medically required or some kind of a choice. there's this really, i think, quite troubling photograph that i found in a family album where the three women are sitting on a bench in the garden in new york which is funny because it's like this leafy suburb of new york city. and where they all live, huntley lives with them throughout the 1930s. she lives in the attic. [laughter] and olive byrne with, who really did not like huntly, would always say there are bats in the belfry. she thought she was nuts. [laughter] there's a picture, and it's from 1933, and elizabeth holloway marston is holding her new baby, her second baby, olive anne, and olive byrne is holding her second son, don -- same age, they're about six months apart -- and marjorie wilkes huntly is holding a little rag doll. laugh and it's funny/creepy. she, because she didn't have children and because she died alone in a nursing home, this actually -- as a historian, the worst thing you want to hear about somebody that you were interested in is that they didn't have children and they died alone in a nursing home because where are the papers? where are the photographs? where is anything? who do you talk to? she, one grandchild from the family said she was pretty certain that huntley had burned all of her papers because they were so radical, and i found other evidence that she had done so. there's a lot of belief in the occult and psychic powers and this love/fear and reading minds in wonder woman comics. most of that comes by way of marjorie wilkes huntley. she worked as a librarian for most of her life. i found, fascinatingly, the most interesting document of huntley's i found was in gloria steinem's papers that are at smith college, and i just poured through them, and the archivist found stuff that might be useful. and she is completely excited about ms. magazine, and she signs her letter marjorie wilkes huntley, ms. . [laughter] >> great. >> if you could say anything to the film makers working on the wonder woman movie right now, what would that be? >> what would you say? [laughter] all right. how many people think there should be more wonder woman in that movie? [applause] oh, it's so limited. >> no, no, can key tell you the latest from -- can i tell you the latest from hollywood? warner brothers is saying it's going to come out in 2017, and i just read today, this was really fascinating, that there is a female director who they approached for this who i guess had directed another comic book film which someone out here probably knows the title of, i can't recall it. and warner brothers hadn't specifically reached out to her yet, but there had been a lot of rumors that, oh, she'd be the perfect fit be, she should do wonder woman. and she said, oh, hell no. i don't want to do, have anything to do with that movie. well, why? she said it's too much pressure. she says no matter what i do, i will never be able to do her enough justice, and they're going to look at it and say, well, that's just one more indication that women can't really direct in hollywood. and i just -- my heart just kind of sank when i read that. >> wow. >> so, yeah. >> so that story really is for the first stand-alone wonder woman movie that is supposed to come out in 2017, but this movie called batman v. superman, dawn of justice, is supposed to come out in 2016. .. why hasn't been a wonder woman movie? what is the problem? and then there are all these interesting counterfactual own explanations that are offered. she has these kind of mythic, this is a mythic back story. that would be difficult. [laughter] like thor. captain america, they just froze him. none of these objections are sustainable. i wrote an article about wonder woman for "the new yorker" called the last amazon. i had really wanted to go watch some of the filming of batman versus superman movie. the set was close in the wouldn't let me in. i did a poor man's version of that reporting job. my plan was he and i were going to go see the filming together and we're going to bring his sister-in-law whose name is margaret sanger marson because margaret sanger's granddaughter married dawn. the families became closer. the children of the next generation. i wanted to bring them to go see superman versus batman and they wouldn't let us in. too bad, it would have been fun. i just had wanted to call attention to that crossgenerational, these were the long stories it carried forward into these people's names. we went to go see captain america 2 pedagogy really thinking about, what happens is, captain america starts in 1940. the way the marvel people don't with the problem is he's just like earnest boy scout and he seems very dated and he wears an american flag. he would be harder to update because apparently the something is everybody has to be moody and depressed. you have to be depressed -- batman is kind of depressed. all the superheroes have to have like even ironman is kind of depressed but they're all suffering from depression. you can't have it captain america needs antidepressants. he's on prozac from the start. they couldn't hear what to do with captain america so they have been frozen in 19 provide eses up in the movie. are those of you who haven't seen it, he wakes up and the whole joke, the jokiness of the captain america movie is anachronism that he engenders. people are asking him, what's good about now versus then? i don't know. no polio is good. or there's a scene where scarlett johansson says, what did you do saturday night? he says, nothing. everyone in my barbershop quartet is debt. [laughter] but it's fun. it's very playful about the anachronism. the big thing about the second captain america movie is he's very pro-american but in the second captain america move he discovers what amounts to the nsa surveillance scheme and you can add american and he wants to fight the nsa. it's a really complicated thing for him as a frozen world war ii boy scout, how would a person and 2011 think about the nsa surveillance program. it's kind of interesting. if you were to do that thing into the article, i say this more economically i found, if you were to read it to come in the article because i'm sitting there talking about this, what would happen if they frozen wonder woman in 1941 and she wakes up in, and it's 2014. she's like, okay, equal rights than it was introduced in 1923. that's not funny. it's just not funny. i'm laughing but not a lot. that's one thing you couldn't do if you were writing the story, right? one thing that comic book people tell me that they have done is that comic books have changed it back story, so to get rid of the whole amazonian back story and wonder woman is now the sun, the daughter of zeus, which it just makes no sense whatsoever. like she is a character whose origins come from feminism of the progressive era and feminist utopian fiction. she's not a percy jackson character. [laughter] >> as solar and a son who married into the, book industry about a quarter of a century ago, the part of the story i found, i find interesting and i haven't been able to find enough information about is what the marston family got versus what the of the families got in terms of greater strides which, because he was an older man who obviously knew something about intellectual property was a whole lot better than the teenage boys who created superman. what did you learn about this? >> so for people who didn't marry into the comic book industry and are not lawyers, siegel and shuster created superman and there has been a series of lawsuits pretty much like the jarvis of american history. a series of lawsuits going into the seventh decade at this point because they were paid very scantily, and their heirs have sued the entity that became d.c. comics, now pc entertainment. i don't think those suits have been finally resolved. marston wrote his own contract in 1941. i have not seen the contract. it lies outside the scope of my interests and is a private legal document. d.c. comics and the marston family had very good relations, and that i think has been really important to both of them over the years. i think that elizabeth holloway martian was a bit of a challenge to them. members of her family talk about, one of her granddaughters said that it had become, marston's what it should've been there, the guys at d.c. comics would hide under their desks. she's also an attorney and should practice for a lot longer than marston had so she did very -- she took very good care of that estate. don who married margaret sanger's granddaughter, who is also older and he had to the estate. the estate was handled by marston until his death and by his would was an attorney. she died at the age of 100 the long before she died, her adopted son, don, took over the estate. i don't know anything about the family arrangements nor is it any of my business, but certainly it has not been an adversarial acrimony situation, so far as i know, but i don't really know. >> this may be a stupid question, but what is the justice society? [laughter] >> no, it's not a stupid question. the justice society is a league of superheroes that was formed by all-american comics, which was, which the comic book company that games owned, formed in 1940, and with its own comment book called all-star comics. it was way to take superheroes that existed in other comic books, maybe had their own comic books and maybe they were, made guest appearances, and to try them out in their own comic book and see if they had any staying power. or to reward superheroes that a big following by bringing them in. it was just a gimmick, but they are a little bit like the league of nations. they are modeled on these international cooperative bodies. superman and batman are kind of honorary members, and wonder woman is elected as a member in 1942. stories involving th the justice league or publish an all-star comics are not written by the guys who write the books that those characters regularly appear in. they are written by gardner fox, most of the marston had no control over what happened to wonder woman when she entered the justice aside and she was in those stores. gardner fox was not as interested in wonder woman many towns and decided the role of the only thing a member of the justice society would be that she should be a secretary. >> so the question was one should wonder woman did and batman versus superman dawn of justice? let us hope that she is not the secretary. thanks very much. 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