William Moulton Marston, World War II and the Rise of a Superheroine (1941-1959) Rebecca Katherine Carifio Bates College, [email protected]
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Bates College SCARAB Honors Theses Capstone Projects Spring 5-2015 Wonder Woman Revealed: William Moulton Marston, World War II and the Rise of a Superheroine (1941-1959) Rebecca Katherine Carifio Bates College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Carifio, Rebecca Katherine, "Wonder Woman Revealed: William Moulton Marston, World War II and the Rise of a Superheroine (1941-1959)" (2015). Honors Theses. 144. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/144 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Capstone Projects at SCARAB. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of SCARAB. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Wonder Woman Revealed Fall$ William Moulton Marston, World War II and the Rise of a 08# Superheroine (1941 – 1959) -- An Honors Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History Bates College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts by Rebecca Katherine Carifio Lewiston, Maine March 30, 2015 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... 3 Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1 ...................................................................................................................................... 19 Part I: World War II – A Disturbance in the Force ..................................................................... 21 Part II: Pop Culture Goes to War ............................................................................................... 25 Chapter 2 ...................................................................................................................................... 40 Part I: Dr. Psycho's Psychology ................................................................................................ 41 Part II: Who Run the World– Girls ............................................................................................. 51 Part III: How to Create a "Super" Popular Comic Book Hero .................................................... 56 Chapter 3 ...................................................................................................................................... 62 Part I: It's Always a Popularity Contest ...................................................................................... 65 Part II: Wonder Woman – Feminist? ......................................................................................... 68 Part III: A Little Tied Up at the Moment ..................................................................................... 81 Part IV: Wonder Woman Without Marston ................................................................................ 88 Chapter 4 ...................................................................................................................................... 95 Part I: Not-So Wonder Women .................................................................................................. 97 Part II: Panic! at Comic Book Store ......................................................................................... 103 Part III: Wonder Woman Meets Her Match .............................................................................. 107 Epilogue ..................................................................................................................................... 120 Part I: Super Girl to Cover Girl ................................................................................................. 121 Part II: Cover Girl to Movie Star ............................................................................................... 123 Appendix 1 ................................................................................................................................. 126 Appendix 2 ................................................................................................................................. 132 Appendix 3 ................................................................................................................................. 145 Appendix 4 ................................................................................................................................. 170 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 182 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of those without whom this thesis would have not been possible. First, I would like to thank Bates College and its donors for providing me with the opportunity and freedom to pursue a project of this caliber. I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Claudia Calhoun, for her levelheaded words of wisdom and her extraordinary support throughout this yearlong process. I will always be grateful for her willingness to take on the annoyingly persistent student who knocked down her door. I would also like to thank Professor Aimée Bessire and Professor Caroline Shaw for their guidance in the beginning stages of my thesis, and I would like to extend my gratitude to my academic advisor, Professor Michael Jones, for keeping me on track these last three years. A heartfelt thanks to all of my friends for their love and encouragement. For four years, you saw potential in me even when I did not. For all the times that they made me laugh or commiserated with me, I am truly grateful; those are the moments that kept me sane throughout this process. A special thanks to Nyle Rioux, my honors thesis guru, for always picking up the phone when I called in a panic about the smallest details. I would like to thank my parents for advice over countless phone calls and their unwavering belief in me. I appreciate that they did not question me when I spent their tuition dollars reading comic books and did not bother me when thesis papers and books slowly spread to take over the entire house over winter break. They are forever my rocks. Lastly, I would like to thank Wonder Woman for being my muse for this thesis. I am but one of the many young women out there that she has inspired. Many thanks to you all. I feel like I can never say it enough. 3 Abstract Wonder Woman, the most recognizable female superheroine of all time, was created in 1941, on the eve of American involvement in World War II. How did Wonder Woman become popular at this time, 20 years before the feminist movement embraced her as an icon of women’s power? This thesis argues that Wonder Woman’s popularity can be attributed to the comics’ internalization of contradictions of wartime feminine identity in popular culture, which spanned from the temporarily empowered Rosie the Riveter to ultra-feminine pin-up girls. The character also reflects the paradoxes of her creator’s philosophies: Dr. William Moulton Marston, a Harvard- trained ‘pop’ psychologist and polyamorous genius/charlatan, believed that women should rule the world because they were innately more loving, more nurturing, and more capable of luring men into willing submission through sexual domination – ideas that managed to be simultaneously unbelievably strange and completely stereotypical. I argue that Wonder Woman’s popularity was the result of the perfect combination of familiarity and novelty within the gender politics of World War II, which is further demonstrated by her deterioration into a boring shell of her former radical self after the war and Marston’s death. 4 “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.” – William Moulton Marston in a letter to Coulton Waugh, 1945 5 Introduction Wonder Woman: A Not-So Fairytale Princess ONCE UPON A TIME, when the world was in the midst of the second global conflict of the twentieth century, there lived a man named William Moulton Marston who brought to life, on the pages of comic books, a powerful and alluring Amazon princess who left the all-female utopia of Paradise Island to save America – not only from the obvious external threats of Hitler and his cronies, but also from the internal threat of “blood-curdling masculinity”1 that prevailed in superhero comics. “Beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swift as Mercury and strong as Hercules,”2 she was unlike anything the country had ever seen, but then again, so was her creator. Mr. Marston, the man behind the princess, was an incredibly smart man – a Harvard- educated psychologist, professor and (alleged) inventor of the lie detector.3 The details of his life, however, are unexpectedly salacious. He was a feminist, but not just any feminist – a female supremacist who believed that women were actually more biologically suited to rule the world by ############################################################# 1 Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 207. 2 William Moulton Marston and H. G. Peter, "Wonder Woman No. 2," in Wonder Woman Archives (New York: DC Comics, 1942), 93. 3 Jill Lepore, "The Last Amazon," The New Yorker, Sept. 22, 2014. 6 sexually dominating men.4 And as if that wasn’t sensational enough,