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

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.