A look back at Wonder Woman’s feminist (and not-so-feminist) history
Histoire d’une super-héroïne souvent reléguée au second plan.
Première recrue féminine des comics américains, la superhéroïne Wonder Woman apparaît pour la première fois dans leurs pages en 1941. Après quatre-vingt ans de péripéties, cette icône incontournable de la pop culture est aussi devenue un témoignage de l'histoire : son parcours reflète étrangement celui de la place accordée aux femmes dans la société américaine...
During World War II, as Superman and Batman arose as mainstream pop symbols of strength and morality, the publisher that became DC Comics needed an antidote to what a Harvard psychologist called superhero comic books’ worst crime: “bloodcurdling masculinity.” Turns out that psychologist, William Moulton Marston, had a plan to combat such a crime – in the starspangled form of a female warrior who could, time and again, escape the shackles of a man's world of inflated pride and prejudice.
2. That creation was Diana Prince, who, upon landing in America from her isolated Paradise Island, donned the identity of Wonder
Woman. Marston – whose scientific work led to the development of the lie-detector test – also outfitted Wonder Woman with the empowering golden Lasso of Truth, whose coils command veracity from its captive. Ahead of the release of the new Wonder Woman film here is a timeline of her feminist, and lessthan-feminist, history.
1941: THE CREATION
3. According to lore, Marston didn't initially have a female character in mind when mulling a superhero less masculine than Superman. But Marston later characterises it as a natural solution, saying: “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.” Upon being hired as an editorial adviser at All-American/ Detective Comics, Marston sells his Wonder Woman character to the publisher with the agreement that his tales will spotlight “the growth in the power of women.” He teams with not a woman but rather male artist Harry G. Peter to create her tiara-topped, flesh-flashing attire.
4. Wonder Woman first appears in All-Star Comics No. 8, wearing bracelets which, according to Wonder Wom
an's prose, were “fashioned by our captors” as physical symbols that “we must always keep aloof from men.” The New Yorker's Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, writes that her look is “the suffragist as pinup.”
SPRING 1942: JUST “ONE OF THE GUYS” – SORT OF
5. Wonder Woman becomes an honorary member of the DC superhero team-up Justice Society of America, yet her official position long remains “secretary” – a striking distinction compared with her fellow heroes.
SUMMER 1942: SOLO STARDOM
6. Wonder Woman proves so popular that she gets her own comic book with Sensation Comics. Her rise was assured, Martin Pasko writes in the book The DC Vault, “by an epidemic of hero worship that would seize the home front as [men] went off to war”. As Rosie the Riveter becomes iconic, and women fill men's shoes back home, readers of all ages more readily embrace the tough, well-muscled female hero. Within a few years, Wonder Woman has ten million readers and her own syndicated comic strip.
1950S: THE RISE OF SOAPY ROMANCE
7. Congressional overreaction to Seduction of the Innocent, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's questionable findings about the “effects” of comic books on children leads to the Comics Code Authority to soften content. As a result of this crackdown, superhero and horror comics ebb and romance stories rise. Following the trend, Diana Prince – who left women-only Paradise Island with the crash-landing military hero Steve Trevor – becomes a more domesticminded figure whose thoughts are often on marriage and modelling, when not working as a “lonely hearts” columnist.
1960S: FULL SURRENDER
8. The sacrifice is complete: Diana decides to surrender her superpowers for the sake of being near Steve. Two decades after Marston’s death, that narrative registers as a far cry from the creator’s stated sentiment, when he wrote, “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”
1972: COVER WOMAN
9. Wonder Woman boosts her perception as a feminist icon by appearing on the first cover of Gloria Steinem’s Ms magazine, thus tying her image to the women’s rights movement.
1973-1975: TV STARDOM
10. Wonder Woman increases her presence and popularity on television, by getting her own Emmy-nominated network series starring the iconic Lynda
Carter. Wonder Woman '77 writer Marc Andreyko asserts : “[Wonder Woman] encompasses everything great and powerful about being a woman, and Lynda took it all seriously,”
1997-1999: SERIES SCUTTLED
11. NBC works on developing a new live-action series in which Diana Prince will work as a UCLA professor of Greek history. Despite national casting efforts, the series is shut down before a frame is shot.
SEPTEMBER 2016: THE RUMOURS ARE TRUE
12. DC writer Greg Rucka confirms the long-standing belief that Wonder Woman is canonically gay. Rucka tells Comicosity: “By our standards where I am standing ... Themyscira [Paradise Island] is a queer culture. I'm not hedging that. And anyone who wants to prevaricate on that is being silly.”
OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2016: AMBASSADOR PRINCE
13. The United Nations names Wonder Woman as an honorary ambassador, intending to move her beyond supervillainbattling crime-fighter to help raise awareness of gender equality for “the empowerment of women and girls as a critical component for a peaceful and prosperous world.” In December, however, the United Nations drops Wonder Woman after many of its employees object to a character they say in a petition is an overtly sexualised figure – “the epitome of a pinup girl” who now embodies “a largebreasted, white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh-baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee-high boots.”
2017: THE STAR-SPANGLED RED CARPET
14. Wonder Woman is the first solo film for a superheroine in the DC Extended Universe, and the first release to be directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. And yet, Jenkins notoriously said : “I don't think of myself as a female filmmaker and I don't think about Wonder Woman as a female film. She's a major superhero.”
30 DECEMBER 2020
15. Wonder Woman is back in cinemas with Wonder Woman 1984, a new adventure staring actress Gal Gadot.
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