I reviewed Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman over at the Atlantic a little bit back. I had one serious issue with it which seemed like it was probably not of much interest for a mainstream venue. But I thought I’d point it out here.
That issue is…the title, and in many ways the thesis of the book, are misleading. Lepore presents the Marston family history of polyamory, and therefore the connection between Wonder Woman creator William Marston and his lover Olive Byrne’s aunt Margaret Sanger, as unknown. If this was the first book you’d ever read about Marston and Wonder Woman, I think you’d come away with the impression that Lepore is the first one to reveal that Marston and his wife Elizabeth lived in a polyamorous relationship with another woman (Olive Byrne).
This is most obvious at the very end of the book. Lepore says, “The veil of secrecy kept by the family over Wonder Woman’s past proved impossible to lift.” She then cites writers in 1972 and 1974 who apparently didn’t know about the polyamory (Joanne Edgar and Karen Walowit.) She writes “The secrecy had consequences” and argues that there was a distortion because of this in the understanding of feminism. Margaret Sanger in the 1910s through Wonder Woman in the 1940s through WW fan Gloria Steinem in the 1970s were all connected. Because people didn’t know about the Marston/Sanger connection, they saw feminism as waves rather than as a continuous whole.
The problem with that thesis is that people have in fact known about the Marston/Sanger connection for around 15 years (or at least, that was the best guess of folks on the Comix-Scholars list serve, where these matters were recently discussed.) Marston’s polyamory was written about as early as the late 90s, and it was certainly widely known after Les Daniels wrote about it in the Complete Wonder Woman at the beginning of the 2000s. Lepore could easily have said that; Les Daniels is mentioned in her notes, and this would be the place in her narrative to acknowledge him and earlier researchers. But she doesn’t. As a result, readers are likely to believe that they’re the first ones who are learning about these “secrets.”
This isn’t to say that Lepore discovered nothing. She had access to tons of archives no one else has seen, and she has numerous jaw-dropping revelations — that the Marston polyamorous relationship appears to have included another woman (Marjorie Huntley), that Marston, Elizabeth,and Olive participated in New Age feminist sex parties, that Olive and Elizabeth were bisexual (a point that seemed fairly obvious, but has been disputed.) The book is important for anyone who cares about the early Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s work is in many regards ground-breaking. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the book’s thesis seems to rest on the revelation of the one secret Lepore didn’t discover.
As a result of this confusion, the book ends up being unnecessarily ungenerous to the numerous scholars who’ve written about the Marston Wonder Woman over the last 15 to 20 years. But more than that, I don’t think it’s ideal to frame the story of Marston and his family in terms of secrets. The closet is among other things a relationship with, or lever for, power. By urging the reader to adopt the position of the knower or the revealer, Lepore makes the story of Wonder Woman about the reader’s and the author’s rush of discovery — about the revelation of truths that the Marston family wanted to hide. The point of the story becomes not what Marston and Elizabeth and Olive made of their lives and politics and sexualities, but what secrets the book can uncover. Lepore doesn’t really contextualize that in terms of the history of gay identities or marginalized sexual identities, or of the closet; she doesn’t present the secrets as part of a history of practices that have both protected and trapped queer people, nor does she discuss Marston’s work as itself engaged with, or part of a tradition of, queer theory. I think that ends up positioning the Marstons as objectified others for the book’s readers, which again sits uneasily with the history of the closet and of the marginalization of queer people and alternative sexualities, whether lesbian or polyamorous.
Not that that’s the only takeaway from the book, certainly. And I do think Lepore is right that the history she uncovers, even if it isn’t a secret exactly, demonstrates that feminist history is more varied than people tend to think. Most obviously, the Marstons show that sex-positive and queer feminisms were around long before the third wave. Hopefully Lepore’s book will make that fact better known, and the next folks to write about Marston and his meaning can take it as more common knowledge, rather than as a revelation.
Update: Peter Sattler has a great follow-up to this post here. Jeet Heer also has a bunch of thoughtful comments below; so scroll down and then click over to Peter’s post if you want to continue the conversation (I’ve closed comments here to keep the conversation easier to follow over there.)
______
If you’re interested in reading me babble on more about Wonder Woman, I have a book coming out shortly. Lots of info and links about that here.
I haven’t read the book, so this is a genuine question: Does Lepore actually argue that the secrecy surrounding the life of Wonder Woman’s creator caused or contributed to the wave theory of feminism? That is, does she make the case that had Wonder Woman been recognized as a queer figure we’d have made a seamless transition into what we now think of as the 3rd wave? If so, that seems like the sort of mistake that would make a second year history student blush.
Regardless, it seems like the argument she’s making isn’t designed to rock the worlds of academic feminists/queer theorists or comics scholars, but to sell a popular history. If most readers finish the book with a better understanding of feminism and Wonder Woman, then I suspect its done more good than harm.
Hey Nate. She doesn’t talk about the third wave, actually. It’s not entirely clear that she knows that the way wave is usually used is to separate second and third wave? It’s hard to tell because she doesn’t contextualize her claim in any way in terms of other theorists. She also doesn’t talk at all about queerness, or seem to recognize WW in that context. The claim is about the connection between Sanger and Marston, and the 1910s and the 1970s. So…your thumbnail version is considerably more sophisticated than the version she actually puts forward, I think.
I think you’re right that her gestures at theory are more pro forma than a serious engagement. And selling a popular history is fine. However, I do think that the lack of theoretical engagement leaves her somewhat helplessly reproducing tropes around the closet. So that would be the downside.
Weird. So it sounds as though she’s claiming to uncover not only the secret history of Wonder Woman, but also a secret history of the feminist movement in the United States… Is this right? If so, I’ve got a secret history of superheroes and Judaism to sell!
Yes, sort of. Again, it’s difficult to know how serious she is about this stuff, or how exactly readers are supposed to take it.
It seems especially odd because…I’m pretty sure Margaret Sanger wasn’t forgotten. Like, Gloria Steinem would have appreciated Margaret Sanger if only she’d known that Sanger was the aunt of the lover of the guy who created Wonder Woman? I’m pretty sure Gloria Steinem knew who Margaret Sanger was already.
I wonder if Steinem has read the Lepore book.
Hi Noah, I agree of course that there is a huge problem with Lepore not acknowledging earlier scholars. The book would have been much better if she traced the way the “secret” became public knowledge. Les Daniels was himself building on the work of earlier scholars, particularly Geoffrey C. Bunn (who as far as I can figure out is the real trailblazer in all this).
Having said that, I think you’re missing the point of calling this a “Secret History” because you willfully refuse to recognize that Lepore has written a historical narrative rather than a discursive analysis. It’s a secret history because the book unfolds as the intertwined life stories of Marston, Holloway and Byrne and it was certainly a secret for the vast majority of their lives from most people (including the children born into the family). To this day, there is dispute among those who most intimately knew the trio as to the exact relationship between Holloway and Byrne. So some secrets abide.
If someone wrote a book called “The Secret of George Herriman” it would be absurd to say, “What secret? We’ve known he had African-American ancestors since the early 1970s.” The reason it would be absurd is that it WAS a secret during Herriman’s lifetime and being a secret shaped his life (and his work). Of course, a hypothetical book called “The Secret of George Herriman” should also discuss how his secret came out after his death and acknowledge earlier scholars — which is what Lepore should have done.
The idea that Lepore — who teaches at Harvard, is the author of many acclaimed academic books, and has written pretty extensively on women’s history even before this book — wouldn’t know the difference between Second Wave and Third Wave feminism is really something. It’s like writing that Henry Louis Gates probably hasn’t heard of passing or that Amartya Sen doesn’t know that Hindi is an Indo-European language.
Ultimately, you have to just accept that Lepore has a different sent of research interests than you — she’s interested in tracing the path from First and Second Wave feminism (because she’s a historian she’s willing to leave the story of third wave feminism to others), she wants to see how the closet worked in everyday life and doesn’t care about queer theory as a tool of analysis.
The fact that she has a very different approach than you do should actually please you since it means your writing on Wonder Woman doesn’t really overlap with her work. As I said before, I look forward to your book, which I think will be of wide interest to more theoretical inclined scholars who might, like you, find Lepore’s historical approach not to their taste.
I guess if I had to bet I’d say that Lepore knows what third wave feminism is. The book doesn’t give much evidence that she does though. I’m not much on arguing from authority; the fact that Lepore went to Harvard and has written acclaimed books in the past doesn’t necessarily mean she handled this topic well.
I’d also say that, at least as far as I could tell, she doesn’t actually care that much about how the closet worked in everyday life. She doesn’t use the words “the closet” or seem to have much sense of its place in queer history, nor of Marston and his family as bearers of a marginalized sexual identity. She talks a little about how Marston may have had his career damaged by his polyamory, but she doesn’t really talk at all about how homosexuality was perceived by society at large, or what the consequences of lesbianism might have been for Olive or Elizabeth. As such, their secretiveness comes across as repressed, or excessive, or even cruel to their families. It’s like someone wrote “The Secret of George Herriman” without providing a discussion of passing, and without considering why a black man might need to keep his racial identity a secret. If someone who was not Jill Lepore wrote that book, you would rightly say that their theoretical blindness had undermined their narrative to some considerable extent. Right?
I’m very happy she has a different approach to me. There are other folks who have different approaches to me whose work I quite like, including Ken Alder, Lillian Robinson, Geoffrey Bunn, and Phil Sandifer, among others. I’m impressed with many aspects of Lepore’s work as well. However, as someone who cares a lot about this topic, I also think it’s reasonable to point out where I think she’s gone astray, not because she’s not doing my project, but because I think (as you do) that there are some problems with hers.
In terms of the title…I think you’re glossing over the extent to which the elision of other scholars frames the “secret” not as historical, but as a live issue. That is, because she doesn’t make it clear that other scholars have been here before her, the “secret” ends up being, not something that defines Marston, but an actual revelation that she and the readers are uncovering. Again, I think that’s a really problematic framing.
Finally, on narrative history — I like a lot of narrative history, truly. I just finished Richard J. Evans’ three volume history of Nazism, which I thought was great; I adore William Taubman’s Khruschev biography. As with anything, though, narrative history can be done well or not, and doing it well can involve lots of different things. Lepore’s research skills are very impressive, but I think theoretical and intellectual engagement is important in narrative history as well, and there I’m not always as sold on Lepore’s success.
Noah: What you wrote was this: “It’s not entirely clear that she knows that the way wave is usually used is to separate second and third wave.” And then you elucidate this statement by saying, “I said that there’s nothing in the book to indicate she knows what 3rd wave feminism is.” There are two problems here. First of all, it’s incredibly insulting to speculate that an accomplished scholar might not know something very basic. This isn’t an argument from authority, it’s an argument about treating people with respect that they’ve earned from their work, especially if it’s a female scholar writing about women’s history. It’s okay to challenge Lepore on stuff she got wrong or for her general approach but it’s not okay to speculate that that she doesn’t know basic facts. If Lepore doesn’t talk about 3rd wave feminism in this book, the logical conclusion is that she doesn’t think it’s relevant to her book, not that she doesn’t know what third wave feminism is. Like I said, this would be like speculating that Henry Louis Gates doesn’t know basic facts about African-American history based on him deciding not to write about a particular topic or speculating that Amartya Sen might not know some basic information about South Asian history based on the fact that he chose not to write about it.
The second point is that you’re probably not even right to say “the way wave is usually used is to separate second and third wave.” It really depends on the context of the discussion. If it’s a contemporary political discussion, sure, the difference between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism is probably salient. But among historians, if you’re teaching women’s history, there’s a huge discussion of the differences between 1st and 2nd wave feminisms. Lepore is a historian. She writes books about the past — going back centuries. The Wonder Woman book is actually about something more recent than most of her work is (although some of her New Yorker essays also deal with contemporary events). She teaches about the past. So for her, the difference between 1st wave and 2nd wave feminism isn’t arcane or irrelevant. It’s very much a live debate in women’s history. It’s that women’s history literature that Lepore is addressing. It’s perfectly legitimate to dispute the approach she’s taken and say she should have written a queer theory book instead of a women’s studies book, but what seems objectionable is not even acknowledging the tradition she’s working in.
Finally, I think this sentence is a misreading of the book: “She doesn’t use the words ‘the closet’ or seem to have much sense of its place in queer history, nor of Marston and his family as bearers of a marginalized sexual identity.” The entire book is about the closet — that’s the “Secret” of the book and the dramatic tension in the family. The last 2 sentences of chapter 29: “Marston, Holloway, and Byrne had led a secret, closeted life. It had its costs.” The best way to think about this is that Lepore wants to explore the issues of marginalized sexual identities the way a novelist would: by constructing a narrative with characters and showing the impact of the closet on them as people. For a narrative historian, just as much as for a novelist, it’s a good strategy to show and not tell, to let the moral implications of the story emerge from the unfolding of events rather than from an explicating authorial voice. You on the other hand want to deal with the same material as an essayist and theorist, which means applying labels to everything and spelling out the moral as bluntly as possible. There’s nothing wrong with either approach but it’s important to see that both approaches entail differing protocols.
“You on the other hand want to deal with the same material as an essayist and theorist, which means applying labels to everything and spelling out the moral as bluntly as possible.”
If I wanted to get all cranky, I’d say that was pretty insulting, and quite reductive about what essayists and theorists do. (Including, you know, female theorists writing about women’s history). You’re not saying both ways are good; your saying Lepore is a subtle artist, and theorists are just dumb, pedantic scholars. I presume you don’t actually think that though; you’re just indulging in a bit of rhetorical overreach in the heat of a comments thread. These things happen.
“So for her, the difference between 1st wave and 2nd wave feminism isn’t arcane or irrelevant. It’s very much a live debate in women’s history. It’s that women’s history literature that Lepore is addressing.”
She doesn’t address it though. What are the differences between 1st and 2nd wave that she thinks are important in the literature that have been ignored because of this secret history she’s discovering? How does the link between Sanger and Marston change that view? She doesn’t say. She just refers to the periodization, and then asserts that somehow it would be seen differently if we knew more about the history of Wonder Woman. But as I said above, 2nd wave feminists were well aware of Sanger, and saw her as a vital predecessor. (Isn’t it a bit insulting to people like Steinem to assume they didn’t know who Sanger was?) So what did the connection to Wonder Woman add? These seem like pretty basic, even rudimentary questions. And, again, there’s no mention of the fact that for most folks, the live issue is second and third wave, not first and second…so it’s really unclear whose mind she thinks is being changed. If it’s scholars, why not explicate and enter into the scholarly debate? If it’s the public in general, why ignore the main way the public sees these issues?
The sentence you quote does in fact use the word closet; you’re right. However, I think it’s telling too. They led a secret closeted life, and it had its costs. Okay. But why did they have to endure those costs? How were those costs enforced by the world they lived in? Why did they have to make those choices? She doesn’t talk about that. Nor does she think about what it means in terms of stigma against marginalized sexual identities when she alludes to the family as a “harem.” Again, it’s like writing a history of Herriman and saying, his decision to pass as white had its costs without providing a context. Or, writing a history of Herriman’s decision to pass in which his decision to pass is the most important thing about him, and the reader is encouraged to feel that he or she is discovering the central truth of life and history by looking, not at the work or really the struggle with the closet, but at the secret revelation itself. Again, it seems like you’d find that problematic in a Herriman biography. Why isn’t it a problem here?
This really is not about different protocols. I’m not attacking narrative history. You do narrative history no favors by suggesting that problems with Jill Lepore’s work have to be representative of the genre as a whole. It’s reminiscent of discussions about comics where folks say, don’t compare this to serious literature, comics must be taken on their own ground. It’s condescending. Lepore, as you say, is an accomplished scholar and very popular writer. It’s no compliment to the genre of narrative history to say that her handling of the closet, or her thesis, can’t be questioned because of the genre she’s working in.
As Nate suggests, the truth is that the thesis about periodization seems really tacked on, and not like something she’s particularly seriously interested in. I’m really a bit dumbfounded that you think otherwise, or that you see it as a major scholarly intervention in debates about feminism. I mean, do you really think scholars of feminism were unaware of continuities between first and second wave until Jill Lepore came breezing in and pointed out that Margaret Sanger existed? Seriously? You can’t really think that.
Also, I’d point out that it’s not “The Secret of Wonder Woman” but “The Secret History of Wonder Woman”. The title doesn’t refer to the fact that people at the time didn’t know about the arrangement, but that, as history, the story hasn’t been told. The book’s title is about the book; this is The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which you, reader, are now privy to, as no one else has been.
I think up until the last five years or so, from my experience, people with a passing knowledge of Wonder Woman’s history would tout Marston’s involvement with the Lie-Detector test as a “DID YOU KNOW?!?!?!?” facet. However, comic nerds knew about his relationships with Olive Byrne, Elizabeth Marston, etc. It’s sort of akin to the real involvement of Bob Kane compared to Bill Finger in the development of the Batman. It’s not widely known to the mainstream, but it’s certainly not a secret. An “open secret” more than anything.
Noah & Jeet: To the first vs. second wave debate, I agree with Jeet that Lepore is most certainly familiar with the “waves” of feminism. She’s written about Sanger and her legacy over time before, for the New Yorker, and seems to have done a fair bit of research into her and her career. (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/14/birthright-2) I did not have a problem with her not explicitly defining what she considered to be the “second wave” of feminism, because she ends the book sometime in 1972, if I recall correctly, which according to most scholars, is really towards the beginning of “women’s liberation.” If she has not defined the “second wave” well, it may partially be because most of the book does not take place during that time period, or because she wants to point out that both “waves” exist on a longer continuum of feminist thought and action. One *could( argue that her narrative seeks to resist “periodization.” Noah, I agree that doing so is not a “major scholarly intervention” into feminist history, but I think that creating narrative continuity between successive feminist actions/groups/people is a worthwhile goal, particularly for a more general reading audience.
Hey Samantha! Good to see you over here again.
I don’t think there’s any question that she knows the waves of feminism; I was just frustrated with the lack of theoretical engagement, really. I’d agree that the audience seems like a general readership, and that she’s not really engaged with scholarly questions. I guess I’m somewhat disappointed that with all the new information and the access to all these records that no one has seen before, what gets done with them theoretically is not especially ambitious or thoughtful. Though it is worthwhile as you say to let a general audience know that feminism is more complicated than people sometimes say — but if she was doing that, I wish there’d been an engagement with third wave at least a little bit, since that’s where the popular discussion is at the moment.
Have you read the book, Samantha? If so, I’d be curious to hear what you thought of it?
Also, are we ever going to get you to write here again, or not going to happen anytime soon?
Pingback: Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 11/21/14: A serious matter — The Beat
Just finished the book, Noah, and I hope you won’t mind if I use this as a place to write a few thoughts, which I think intersect with your conversation.
1. Lepore’s lack of engagement with more current Wonder Woman scholarship, at least in her notes, is striking, especially considering her attention to far more recent writings on such figures as Wertham (e.g., Beaty, Tilley). Nonetheless, I think that Jeet’s genre-based point speaks a bit to this: Lepore is not invested in the “secrets” of today, as much as the secrets of yesterday — the past that ends mainly with her narrative, in the 1970s.
2. That said, I think that Noah’s point about how the issues of queer identities — and even the practices of queer life in mid-century America — is barely a topic for this book. Lepore actually spends little time talking about sex, sexuality, or theories of same (Marston’s or otherwise). Dramatically more space is given over to issue of suffrage, to the economics and power dynamics of women’s work, to the lie detector and its place in the juridical-military system, and to the shitty way that women are treated by men. The material on sexuality is there, but hardly dwelt on or analyzed. Indeed, with its New Age and Aquarian designations, Marston’s ideas about love and submission as much an object of fun as anything else.
3. But t be clear, the lack of a “queer” history or theoretical context is certainly intentional and not an oversight. The “secret history” of Wonder Woman, for Lepore, is not a secret of sex or love or the closet; it is a secret history of politics. It is a story of the deep roots of feminism: it’s about the fight for women’s rights. (Even the discussion of chains, for example, focuses far more explicitly on its ties to feminist imagery than to kink.) And the book’s commitment is to tracing those roots as thoroughly as possible. An alternate title might have been “the political origins of Wonder Woman.”
4. Pace Noah, I don’t think Lepore does much to privilege her own or her reader’s sleuthing skills. Unlike her New Yorker article, Lepore never puts herself into this story, trying desperately to break through the walls of silence. The “secret” framing — just like the academic framing — is actually pretty thin. It’s the intersection of documents and stories in the middle that counts.
5. When it comes to the “waves of feminism,” Lepore both wants and does not want to make the argument that seems to be promised. She definitely has a passage on the forgetfulness of the radical wing of the second wave, with Shulamith Firestone visiting Alice Paul and not being able to identify portraits of the nation’s most famous feminists (and the Red Stocking’s hatred of Wonder Woman). And she then paints post-Roe feminism as a process of in-fighting, with people trying to out-radicalize each other.
At the same time, I think her heart wasn’t really in this: the real story is over, and she seems to be looking for a quick rhetorical punch. As a historian, she’s just not that invested in her New Yorker claim that Wonder Woman is “the missing link” (ha!) chaining the suffrage movement to “the troubled place of feminism a century later.”
6. A telling moment: Lepore tell us that historians have tended to use the “wave” metaphor to imply that nothing much happened in feminism between the 20s and the late 60s. Here is the totality of that argument: “In between, the thinking goes, the waters were still.” The note to this passage, oddly, only refers to writers who have challenged the “wave” metaphor — which Lepore then does herself later, saying we should call it a river. Oddly enough, it is Lepore who then makes the claim that nothing much has happened in feminism between 1973 and today, characterizing the years as a series of generation or women, all eating their own mothers.)
7. The book is the most exciting and well-researched piece of scholarship related to comics I have ever read. At the same time, I hesitate to call it “comics scholarship,” per se. And this isn’t simply a matter of guarding the field’s borders, keeping it safe from poachers. TRE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN, in the end, just doesn’t seem particularly interested in Wonder Woman comics, Wonder Woman stories, or Wonder Woman art — except as “telling” and glittering superficies of a much more interesting biographical and historical tale.
She does not spend much time looking at Wonder Woman as an artistic creation, giving shape to particular concepts or exploring certain obsessions. Rather, the links of the comics to history emerge in the book as series of equations, or even one-way vectors: Hugo Münsterberg => Dr Psycho; Appellate Judge Walter McCoy => the stammering Judge Friendly from the comic strip; Progressive Era fights and imagery => Wonder Woman’s fights and imagery; Marston later behavioral troubles with his children => Wonder Woman’s later stories with kids named Don and Olive.
Moreover, these claims are not so much supported as *revealed* — and very briefly revealed, in most cases — like when Lepore parenthetically discloses that Marston had written a story about Wonder Woman and rabbits after talking for a page or so about the pets at Cherry Orchard. Large passages of the book take this form: tell an exciting and detailed story about Marston or Sanger, then close the chapter or section by saying, in essence, “this happen in Wonder Woman too.”
8. This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t change the way we look at Wonder Woman. The comic, after one is done with Lepore, seems to just vibrate with historical energy: the last, unexpected explosion of Progressive Era feminism. But it is not really a book about Wonder Woman; it is a book about Marston and the world of women in which — and out of which — he made his fame.
Marston comes across, in the end, as a classic American charlatan and genius — and a genius due in no small part to his charlatanism. He is a huckster, a relentless self-promoter, an almost unending failure, and even (in my opinion) a misogynist. His heart, politically, is in the right place, but his ego and his loins are often someplace else.
9. Perhaps this makes the biggest secret of Wonder Woman the fact that she ended up existing in a such a potent and coherent form at all, coming as she did from the mind of a made who (after reading Lepore’s account) seems to have been a mass of contractions, opportunism, and outright absurdity.
Luckily, the book seems to say, the women in his life and his world were strong enough, politically and philosophically, to counteract Marston’s personal weaknesses.
The book’s biggest secret: Women and feminism — not Marston — created Wonder Woman.
Dang, that was one long comment.
That’s a great comment! And now it is also a post. I’m going to close comments here; if folks want to keep talking, click over to Peter’s discussion at the link and we can keep talking there.
Pingback: Exclusive Interview: Wonder Woman Bondage And Feminism In The Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948 Author Noah Berlatsky - paulsemel.com