Sex cult that gave birth to WONDER WOMAN
She’s the superhero whose latest film’s been hailed a victory for girl power. Just one problem: she was the invention of a bondage-obsessed free-love fanatic who kept TWO mistresses
Cult rulebook demanded sex, nudity and submission Girls dressed up as babies were beaten by fellow students
ARRIVING home one day after work, William Moulton Marston, a doctor of psychology at Tufts, one of America’s most prestigious universities, had some dramatic news for his wife, Betty. There would soon, he told her, be another member of the household. One of his students, a pretty young woman named Olive Byrne, would be coming to live with them. Not as a lodger, but a lover. And if Betty did not like it, he would leave her.
One can only imagine what Wonder Woman – the comic-book superhero that Marston went on to create – might have done to a man who brought home a younger mistress and demanded either a divorce or a menage a trois. But in real life, Marston’s wife complied.
Now that happy threesome would become the basis of a free love cult, where they took on the titles Love Leader, Mistress and Love Girl, and where nudity, dominance and submission were demanded in a closely typed 95-page memo of sexual instruction.
So it is a touch ironic, perhaps, that Marston, who created Wonder Woman as a feminist icon, and claimed that the comic strips were, ‘psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world,’ expected his women to submit to his transgressive sexual tastes.
Not that any of this appears in the first Wonder Woman feature film, which opened to rave reviews on Friday, with Israeli supermodel turned actress Gal Gadot, 32, praised for her portrayal of the heroine who embodies female empowerment.
But if a film were to be made of Marston’s private life, it would hardly make for family viewing, given his distinctly kinky sexual tastes.
William Marston was born in 1893, brought up by his heiress mother and coddled by a bunch of spinster aunts in a turreted manor house near Boston, Massachusetts. Perhaps as a result of his femaleoriented upbringing, he became an early supporter of women’s rights and their advancement in the workplace. In fact, he believed women were superior to men and that one day they would rule the world.
Studying law and then psychology at Harvard University, Marston amazed his professors with his brilliance, and married his childhood sweetheart Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, whom he renamed Betty, in 1915.
She, too, was highly intelligent, a committed feminist and a qualified lawyer and psychologist. Nonetheless, she allowed Marston to pass off her ground-breaking research on the psychology of deception as his own.
It was, in part, her observation that her blood pressure rose whenever she was angry or excited that led her husband to devise a prototype for lie detector machines. But rather than merely detecting frauds and liars, Marston used his invention to measure women’s erotic arousal when they watched romantic films, concluding that brunettes were friskier than blondes.
The American military later adapted the machine for interrogating spies and prisoners of war.
But the first suggestion that this was not to be a conventional marriage came in 1919, when Betty was pregnant and Marston brought home a young colleague, Marjorie Huntley, a divorcee who believed in ‘love binding’ – or bondage – and the psychic power of orgasm. Marjorie, he informed Betty, would be living with them as a lover. And so began a happy on-off threesome.
Yet if Betty hoped this departure would curb her husband’s extraordinary sexual appetite, she was sadly mistaken – and was devastated when her husband introduced her to the boyish, well-connected Olive Byrne. He wanted her to become the fourth member of their sexual quartet and a permanent member of the unorthodox family, compared to the more on-off arrangement with Marjorie.
Byrne belonged to a generation of ambitious women who enjoyed an androgynous look and a quite unashamed appetite for sex. Avant-garde in her views, she was the niece of America’s birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, the longterm love of H.G. Wells, whose radical writing and speeches had fired Marston’s own staunchly feminist opinions and by extension, his imagining of Wonder Woman.
When Marston, by then 32, tall, dark and dangerous, came to teach experimental psychology at Tufts in 1925, Byrne became his ‘research assistant’. She was drawn to her handsome professor and took him along to an extraordinary sorority party at which girls dressed as babies were blindfolded and bound while fellow female students made them carry out tasks or hit them with sticks.
Marston breathlessly wrote up an ‘academic’ account of the ritual, noting in detail the ‘excited pleasantness of captivation emotion’ among the girls punishing the ‘captive’ students. It is little surprise that this blindfolds and bondage scene would later find its way into Wonder Woman comics.
Not long afterwards, Marston delivered his ultimatum to Betty, demanding that 22-year-old Olive come to live with them permanently. Betty embarked upon a sixhour walk to think about it, before eventually agreeing to this demand – hoping that she could turn Olive’s presence to her advantage.
She insisted that Olive should bring up any children, leaving her to carry on with her career as an editor of academic publications. And so it was that she, Marston, Olive and the bondage-loving Marjorie – together with several others – formed an ‘Age of Aquarius’ free love cult they called the Love Unit.
It was the culmination of Marston’s sexual dream: three women to attend to his pleasure at home and a licence to indulge in bondage orgies staged at the nearby apartment of Marston’s aunt. The women themselves seem to have been quite happy. Marston was unemployed for most of the 1930s and, after having two children, Betty returned to work as the main breadwinner, while Olive stayed at home to look after them as well as her own two children fathered by Marston.
The outside world was not quite ready for such a bohemian set-up, so Marston told people that Olive was his sister-in-law, while she claimed that she was a widow, working as the family’s housekeeper.
In 1935, in a bid to regularise this very irregular arrangement,
Marston and Betty legally adopted Olive’s children, setting up home in a rambling house in Rye, York, with a cherry orchard and 48 acres of farmland.
The children were also told Olive’s husband was dead. They didn’t necessarily believe it, but in public they maintained the family fiction. As Betty later explained to them, envisaging what went on in theirlove cult ‘would require great flexibility in your thinking and the wide extension of your mental horizons.’
Unorthodox as it was, the menage seems to have worked well. Family albums from the time show their babies are dandled on knees, there are picnics and garden games and even a shot of Betty and Olive hooked up to Marston’s lie-detector machine.
Marston proved himself a devoted, inspiring and affectionate father but his career was still shambolic, with Betty bringing in the money. Even Olive added to their income with occasional articles for supermarket magazine Family Circle, giving tips on how to create a wholesome family home, all the while living in circumstances that her readers would have regarded as highly immoral. She would regularly quote Marston as an expert on child psychology. It was thanks to one such article that Marston became involved with the world of superheroes. He had praised the effect of the golden age of comic books on America’s children, and was quickly recruited by DC Comics as a consultant. The timing was perfect. It was 1941 and they had been stung by criticism that Superman seemed somewhat ‘fascist.’ An antidote was needed to what Marston called the ‘bloodcurdling’ masculinity of Superman, Batman and othersuperheroes and his solution was to create Wonder Woman: a strong, independent woman (with a tight fitting corset). She was a hit from the beginning, the embodiment of all Marston’s physical and intellectual ideals.
According to her son, the female superhero was Betty’s idea, something she always denied. But there is no doubt that Wonder Woman’s feisty character owes much to Betty. Expressions, such as ‘Suffering Sappho’ and ‘Great Hera’ come from her too, while WonderWoman’s bullet deflecting bracelets were inspired by the wide cuff bondage-style bracelets Marston gave Olive in 1928 in lieu of a wedding ring.
Marston had written the stories under a pen name, Charles Moulton, but his true identity was revealed in his own lifetime, and he began to get letters from fellow bondage enthusiasts asking him if he could help them source the kind of equipment depicted in Wonder Woman – ‘the leather mask, or the wide iron collar from Tibet, or the Greek ankle manacle…’
Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, who wrote a 2014 biography of the character, confirmed that the super-heroine herself seemed to enjoy a bit of light bondage.
‘In episode after episode WonderWoman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled,’ Lepore explains.
‘She is locked in an electric cage. She is winched into a straitjacket, from head to toe. Her eyes and mouth are taped shut. She is locked in a bank vault. She’s tied to railroad tracks. She’s pinned to a wall. “Great Girdle of Aphrodite,” she cries. “Am I tired of being tied up.”’
Although many of WonderWoman’s male readers were no doubt as enthused by her voluptuous form as her fight for justice, she was adopted in the 1970s as a female icon by Gloria Steinem’s feminist, liberal magazine Ms. A TV series starring Lynda Carterfollowed, which enjoyed reruns through the until the early 2000s.
Then last year Gadot portrayed her for a new generation when she appeared alongside otherDC superheroes in the blockbusterBatman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, which in turn paved the way for the first standalone WonderWoman film.
It is now 70 years since Marston’s death from cancer in 1947, at the age of only 53, but he would have been happy to know that his dream of a matriarchal society endured after his death, in his own household at least.
Olive and Betty remained happily together, raising their children and pursuing their careers until Olive died in 1990. Marjorie Huntley was a regularvisitor until the end.
Marston would no doubt have been pleased too, that his whipcracking heroine, Wonder Woman, has endured, embodying his love of what he considered to be the stronger, wiser sex – even if his admiration of them took a bizarre form.
As Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s ever-patient Wonder Woman editor, once observed of his views on women: ‘William had a ratherstrange appreciation of them. One was never enough.’