Jill Lepore on the Secret History of Wonder Woman

Along the way she reveals the secret life of her highly influential creator and the real heroines who inspired him. Ultimately, her exploration tells the story of women’s experience in the 20th century as it has never been told before — from the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s to the troubled place of feminism a century later.

Commanding a vast and wildly passionate following, Wonder Woman has never been out of print in seven decades. She appeared in 1941, a liberated and powerful female superhero at a time when women’s role models were stiflingly conservative. Her creator was American psychologist William Moulton Marston, who was inspired by legends of the warrior princesses of the Amazon and by early feminists, starting with the famous suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.

Marston was also influenced by the women in his own life, including Sadie Holloway, the spirited young British girl who would later become his wife. Through extensive research for her recent book The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Lepore paints a compelling portrait of Marston, revealing him to have been talented and charismatic, but also deeply conflicted. He wrote a column celebrating conventional family life — but practised extraordinary sexual nonconformity, with his wife and mistress under the same roof. The inventor of the lie detector, he lived a life of secrets — which he then spilled on the pages of the Wonder Woman comics he wrote.

Lepore argues that Wonder Woman is the missing link in understanding the struggle for women’s rights across the 20th century.

Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize; and The Mansion of Happiness, which was short-listed for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. 

Sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.