“If you need to stop an asteroid, you call Superman,” comic book writer Gail Simone observed. “If you need to solve a mystery, you call Batman. But if you need to end a war, you call Wonder Woman.” Easily the most recognizable and longest-running female superhero, Wonder Woman’s strength and ferocity are equaled only by her compassion and dedication to peace: an iconic depiction of female empowerment and independence, a nurturing role model for girlhood, and womanhood, embodying those contested sensibilities that animate our changing ideas about feminism.
So, step aside Steve Trevor. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
Created in December 1941 by Dr. William Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist and writer, Wonder Woman joined DC Comics three years after Superman and two years after Batman. Anticipating Rosie the Riveter on the eve of World War II, Wonder Woman’s female-oriented origin story reflected Marston’s belief in female superiority: how women were more reliable, honest, inherently less violent than men. With bulletproof bracelets, lasso of truth, and invisible plane, she was deliberately the antidote to comic book superpower masculinity.
“Not even girls want to be girls,” Marston once explained, “so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman… Frankly,” Marston concluded, “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”
Making the postwar transition from comics to daily newspaper syndication – joining only Superman and Batman in making that leap – Wonder Woman bridged the gap between feminism’s first wave – those suffragists and birth control activists of the 1910s – to second wave feminism and women’s liberation in the Vietnam era. Having grown up in a secluded, matriarchal paradise, the Amazonian princess leaves her magical all-female sisterhood to save the world from manmade war and brutality. And as American women struggled to define their movement and its direction, feminists applauded her inspiring example of self-confidence and autonomy: using her strength and intelligence to challenge sexism and misogyny. Liberationists decried her submission to the status quo: disguising her true identity as Diana Prince, sacrificing for romance with Steve Trevor, and curiously losing her powers when bound by men.
Still, when Ms. magazine debuted in 1972, the first cover featured Wonder Woman. That same year, with the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX in Congress and the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision, Gloria Steinem spoke to Wonder Woman’s role, emphasizing that she “symbolizes many of the values of the women’s culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream: strength and self-reliance for women; sisterhood and mutual support among women; peacefulness and esteem for human life; a diminishment both of ‘masculine’ aggression and of the belief that violence is the only way of solving conflicts.”
Three year later, in 1975, Lynda Carter starred in a television version, a kitschy series galvanizing Wonder Woman in the Gen X imagination. A major motion picture in 2017 finally brought Wonder Woman to theaters, decades after her male teammates in the Justice League.
