Wonder Woman Book Club!

[missroserose]

Friends, readers, countrymen...which is to say, those of you who joined me in reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman this month...lend me your thoughts! What struck you about this story? What was unexpected? What did you find surprising, impressive, underwhelming, fascinating? Did it change your perception of feminist- or comic-book history at all?

I'll have my thoughts in the comments, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what you all come up with! Some of you have shared insights with me already and I'm having a hard time sitting on those because they're all excellent and I'm excited about them, but I'll hold off so you can post them in your own words.

Comments

[missroserose]

Having had a couple of weeks to digest the text, here are some of the thoughts that've been most persistent about it:

—I think the part that surprised me the most was the way their unconventional family was formed. I suspect that's because of how I came to this story; there not being a whole lot of openly polyamorous historical figures (and, indeed, the Marston/Holloway/Byrne family wasn't precisely public about their arrangements), this story coming to light has led to a lot of folks in the poly community adopting a certain reverent tone to Marston in particular as a successful historical example of practicing polyamory. Thing is, by the standards of the modern poly community (open and uncoerced consent from all parties), Marston was far from a great example, at least at the start; the family history has it that he informed Holloway that Byrne was moving in with them, and either she could deal with it, or else he'd divorce her. It all seems to have worked out all right in the end; the fact that Holloway and Byrne were inseparable after Marston's death seems to indicate that they grew close, but it's hardly an auspicious example to hold up.

—"Hardly a magazine was sold, in 1925 and 1926, that didn't feature an article that asked, 'Can a Woman Run a Home and a Job, Too?'" (p. 121) I think I made an audible "whoof" noise reading this. I find it genuinely depressing how little progress we've made on this front—not only in terms of addressing the question, but in the framing. Somehow you never see magazine articles asking "Can a Man Run a Home and a Job, Too?"

—That said, I kind of admired Holloway's pragmatism about it; she wanted kids and a career, and with Byrne taking care of the children she could have both. I've often thought extended poly families have a distinct advantage over nuclear families when it comes to child-raising, for precisely this reason. Not only do the children get exposed to wider varieties of experience, but there are more potential caretakers around.

—Getting back to the public-ness (or lack thereof) of Marston/Holloway/Byrne's living arrangements, I've been ruminating a lot on their choices to keep their relationship hidden, even from their children. (I was particularly struck by the bit in the afterword that talks about how Byrne very carefully split up the family papers between the four children, effectively gifting each of them with separate family histories.) I completely understand why they did so, but at the same time the author's very cogent in pointing out that keeping the secret effectively severed Wonder Woman from her roots in the suffragette and feminist movements, and endangered future scholarship. Not to mention, as I said earlier, there's a dearth of historical examples of successful poly families precisely because most of them lived secretly! It makes me think about both the power and the danger of living one's truth; many poly families today are semi-hidden because of the danger of judgemental neighbors calling CPS. And yet, without that truth being open, future generations gain an incomplete picture at best of the context surrounding their history. And the history-lover in me recoils at the thought of purposefully obscuring or destroying that.

—I found the recounting of the "Diana Prince era" of Wonder Woman (when WW was stripped of her powers and demoted to a Barbie-like figure with jobs like secretary and fashion model) both heartening and depressing. The latter because it so neatly mirrored the stripping of overt female social power post-WWII, and the former because she remained popular and survived long enough to rise again as a feminist heroine.

I have lots more thoughts, but I think that's good enough for a start...

[ivy]

Yeah, I know some current poly folks who ended up that way because one or the other partner of a starting couple "declared that they were poly", sometimes not even admitting as much of the other party's agency as Marston did to Holloway. Not even "you can leave if you want not", but straight to "we're poly now because I say so". In one case, it's a she-can-he-can't setup... the woman in question just declared that that's how it was, and her male partner shrugged and went "well, okay I guess then". What the hell... but they seem happy.

Also, reverent tone to Marston is pretty bullshit, because for all his advancing of feminist ideals, he sure behaved like a patriarch. He had several partners and (as far as we know) no one else got to, he dictated how the relationships were gonna be, he got supported financially and by all the domestic labor rather than doing the supporting... that was a pretty sweet deal for him. So he gets a bunch of side-eye from me if people are looking at that to be a role model. He can act that way if he wants, and if everyone consents it's okay-ish, but as you say it is certainly not behavior to be admired or emulated.

The other difficulty about being out as poly, even if you don't have kids and don't want them and are not going to suffer any career consequences... people take your experiences as a referendum on poly as a whole. So if I have a breakup, ooh, proof that poly doesn't work after all, behold the example. If I'm happy and things are going well, everyone makes you the poster child for their projections. It's hard to just live your authentic life without dragging everyone else's baggage along with you. Many people don't want that attention and judgment, so they stay closeted.

[missroserose]

I definitely feel you on the referendum thing—when you're the only (or one of the only) openly poly (or gay, or trans, or whatever) person someone knows, you're going to represent an outsized sample in their mind. It's frustrating, having to be the ambassador, especially when things aren't going well in your life and you get all that smug "I *told* you this doesn't work" implication from people.

Maybe "reverent" is the wrong word for what I've been seeing, but...there's definitely a certain amount of "ooo, look, intelligent successful historical figure with multiple spouses!" Which made reading about him an interesting experience—you're absolutely right that he sure behaved like a patriarch despite decrying the patriarchy. (Isn't that so often the way with humans, though? Our biggest blind spots are so often regarding our participation in the things we despise...) The descriptions of him in the text were contradictory enough that I really appreciated the afterword in my edition on "The Hyde Detector", where the author does some analysis of the information she has and tries to come up with a summary of his personality and whether or not he was a feminist figure. I appreciated even more that she admitted that the answer seems to have been "it's complicated". As Tess said to me once, "I love people, but they only ever seem to come in 'complicated'."

[cyrano]

Tagging for reply once I've read it.

[missroserose]

I'll look forward to your thoughts!

The Truth About Truth

[faith_in_the_journey]

You all have covered the fascinating topic of polyamory quite well, so I am going to comment on two other aspects of this book. First, the marvelous way the author meticulously researched and painted all the interconnections between feminism, women’s suffrage, birth control, free love and the Amazon mythos. I am a “big picture” person – I love it when someone shows me how things tie together, especially when I can see the results in my own life.

When I was in law school back in the late 80s, I was published in the Pacific Law Journal writing a comment on a then recent California Supreme Court case that upheld the state Pregnancy Discrimination Act job protections for women on maternity leave. With all the paid and unpaid mandatory leave, disability insurance, paternity leave for fathers and job protections now a days, it is difficult to remember that when I was pregnant with my daughter Ambrosia, I had none of this! My boss decided that I could not work in the lower management position I had just been promoted to in retail sales because I shouldn’t be lifting and hanging cloths and boxes and checking in inventory. Now a days, that would be unlawful unless I asked for the change as a reasonable accommodation. According to the research I did for my law review article, the feminist legal writers in the late 80s heralded the Pregnancy Discrimination Act as one of the most essential keys to empowering women’s equality in the workforce.

I can tell you as a young attorney in the 90s one of the most frustrating thing was the mind set of male partners in their 50s. They had grown up with Wonder Woman comics and they would hire women and even promote them, but they still expected us to dress like them and practice law like them. We had to be little men in our three piece, pen-striped, skirted suits recommended by “dress for success”. I can remember Ambrosia seeing me in the custom made, charcoal gray pen-stripe suit my mother got me for my graduation from law school present (thanks again Mom I always LOVED that suit). My bright four year old daughter took one look at me, her face broke into a sunny smile and she piped up “Mommy, you look so nice in Daddy’s clothes!”

It wasn’t until the late 90s and early 2000s, when women began to tip the scales first as equal in number and then as a majority of practicing lawyers that the profession really began to change and I finally felt comfortable being myself at work as both a woman and a top attorney.

Moving on now to Marston’s relationship with the truth – was anyone else struck by the fact that William Moulten Marston developed the lie-detector and was fascinated by how to uncover deception, when he was living a lie in his sex and family life, lying constantly about his credentials, lying to the public, lying in his business ventures, and publishing Wonder Woman under an assumed name??? Yet as the same time, he was telling so much truth about his real beliefs about men, women, sex, feminism, the Amazon mythos, in the “fiction” of Wonder Woman! Paradox upon complexity! Did the man understand how to tell the truth at all? Or was the fact that he couldn’t tell the truth about the most important aspects of his life the motivation to tell the truth in fiction? I can’t decide.

Marston was definitely a con man, but a con man with a Machiavellian purpose – to sow the seeds of feminism in the next generation through the innocent media of comic books! That was truly, truly, ingenious. The way the author laid out this book it brought home to me how deeply indebted to Wonder Woman I truly am in my own life. If it hadn’t been for Wonder Woman paving the way would I even have had the opportunity to become the self-supporting, independent professional attorney and professional artist I am today? My own mother (who was a HUGE fan of the Wonder Women comics in the 40s) calls me “Wonder Woman Faith” and I think of it as the greatest compliment she’s ever paid me. Is it any wonder that I fell in love with the Wonder Woman who filled the big screen in 2017 played so beautifully by Gal Gadot, without even understanding why she resonated so strongly within my spirit?

This book helped me understand so much of my own life, and even more, it helped me appreciate the courage, sacrifice and conniving of so many amazing people who went before, without whom I would not enjoy the life I live today. Thanks for hosting this forum – I look forward to more comments.

Re: The Truth About Truth

[missroserose]

Wow, I don't remember you ever telling me that about being demoted when you were pregnant with me. That is Some Bullshit, as Brian would put it. I think it's interesting what you say about all the protections and leave options we have nowadays—most of my social circle regularly bemoans the fact that, compared to most developed nations, we have one of the most patchwork and ineffective systems of maternal/paternal protections/leave out there, with very little consistency in availability or application, especially for folks in lower-paying jobs. (I know pregnancy discrimination protections, at least, are supposed to be universal, but especially to people on the lower tier of the socioeconomic spectrum, in practice they just aren't—they either aren't informed about them or don't have the resources to sue when they're discriminated against. I know of at least two cases personally and it's not hard to guess that there are many more.) But you're absolutely right that we've made great strides since the eighties; at least now we have laws on the books. If only changing the culture were so simple.

I was definitely struck by Marston's strange relationship with the truth! (Interestingly, I didn't think of his family arrangements as living a lie so much as making them palatable for public consumption, but yours is absolutely a valid reading.) Marston's questionable integrity is part of what makes him such a fascinating figure, I think; like many hyperintelligent polymaths, I suspect he had a tendency to see himself as above the rules and didn't consider the social consequences of his deceptions, since clearly he was performing them for A Higher Purpose (whatever that happened to be at the time). I'm reminded of the line in V for Vendetta about how artists use lies to tell the truth, whereas politicians use lies to obscure it...by that metric, I suspect, Marston comes off as both, although it makes me happy that he was most successful when he found a way to tell the truth in his art.

Re: The Truth About Truth

[ivy]

Moving on now to Marston’s relationship with the truth – was anyone else struck by the fact that William Moulten Marston developed the lie-detector and was fascinated by how to uncover deception, when he was living a lie in his sex and family life, lying constantly about his credentials, lying to the public, lying in his business ventures, and publishing Wonder Woman under an assumed name??? Yet as the same time, he was telling so much truth about his real beliefs about men, women, sex, feminism, the Amazon mythos, in the “fiction” of Wonder Woman!

Totally! I've seen a lot of this kind of dynamic in the lives of people in security or intelligence, too -- that fascination with information and power leads to some super weird dynamics, and I know at least one person in the field who felt like he had to write fiction to tell the truth.

About a decade ago, a friend at the National Security Agency suggested that he could address the issues they discussed in a context of “ethical considerations for intelligence and security professionals” only if he wrote fiction. “It’s the only way you can tell the truth,” he was told. Three dozen published short stories and one novel-in-progress later, the result is “Mind Games,” published in 2010 by Duncan Long Publishing. “Mind Games” illuminates four kinds of “non-consensual realities:” the world of hackers; the worlds of intelligence professionals; encounters with other intelligent life forms; and illuminations of deeper states of consciousness. In addition, his topic for Def Con 22 (August 2014), The Only Way to Tell the Truth is in Fiction: The Dynamics of Life in the National Security State has been watched several thousand times.

Re: The Truth About Truth

[faith_in_the_journey]

Oh dear! Now I’m going to be reading all my favorite fiction with new eyes . . . Very thought provoking comments.

[cyrano]

I'm having difficulty gaining traction in the first few chapters--it feels like just a list of things happening. Did anybody else see something similar in their reading?

Re: The Truth About Truth

[missroserose]

I actually thought it did a remarkably good job giving context for Marston and Holloway's childhood and relationship, as well as some detail about the suffragette movement I was unfamiliar with.

[cyrano]

I found things much easier to track after a couple of chapters, and I wasn't being hit by a barrage of new names on every page. And once I finished it, I watched the movie. Which is, wow, a little different. The book reads more as relating archival material on a cluster of fascinating people, and the movie is an untraditional love story. Marston's 'rough edges' were sanded down, and the whole thing had a kind of 'soft focus' effect. Olive (who was blonder than I expected) had a mother and an aunt who were mentioned in passing, but with very little about the suffragette and feminist movements in the script they never actually showed up. It felt like... maybe the writers made some unnecessary assumptions in order to make the story flow more conventionally.