Jill Lepore, _The Secret History of Wonder Woman_

WONDER WOMAN HERSELF does not enter this story of her origin until the last of the book's three parts, on page 181, because the book is mainly about the creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, Ph.D., an only-in-America original if there ever was one. Sometimes he seems like a character who slipped out of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance or Melville's Confidence Man.

Marston got a doctorate in psychology from Harvard in the 1920s, when the discipline was still relatively young, and was in on the development of the lie detector. Someone else, though, held the patent for the version of the device that eventually went into wide use, and Marston's academic career stumbled. He strikes me as the person who arrives with a stack of credentials and comes across as a human dynamo at a job interview, but turns out in time to be not all that competent, and who before you know it has become a genuine pain in the tush.

By the end of the 1930s, Marston had exhausted not only his academic opportunities, but some in Washington and Hollywood as well, and was not generating any income for his young and growing family...which, Lepore learned, was growing in an unconventional way, for Marston had persuaded his wife to let into the household Olive Byrne, a student with whom Marston had begun an affair at his last academic post.  Besides the three of them, there were four children, two born to Elizabeth Holloway Marston and two to Olive Byrne.

As if that were not interesting enough, Lepore also turned up the information that Olive Byrne was the niece of Margaret Sanger, the famous contraception activist. The Marston household was thus connected to the one of the more powerful currents of feminism of the time, the Greenwich Village radicalism of John Reed, the New Masses, Sacco and Vanzetti, etc. And yes, sure enough, it does turn out that Wonder Woman had an expressly feminist agenda. Marston was also, apparently, a bit into bondage, but we all have our foibles, no?

The takeaway: even though we have gotten used to thinking of American feminism as coming in waves, with interim periods in which it falls dormant, Wonder Woman goes to show that in the "trough" periods between waves American feminism does not go dormant, but goes underground, circulating secretly, occasionally erupting in a geyser in unexpected venues like comic books.

The fight for women's right hasn't come in waves, Lepore writes. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women's liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women's rights has been a river, wending.