Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her Book of Ages was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Lepore’s brilliance lies in knowing what to do with the material
she has. In her hands, the Wonder Woman story unpacks not only a
new cultural history of feminism, but a theory of history as well.”
—Carla Kaplan, New York Times Book Review
“Ms. Lepore’s lively, surprising and occasionally salacious history
is far more than the story of a comic strip. The author, a
professor of history at Harvard, places Wonder Woman squarely in
the story of women’s rights in America—a cycle of rights won, lost
and endlessly fought for again. Like many illuminating histories,
this one shows how issues we debate today were under contention
just as vigorously decades ago, including birth control, sex
education, the ways in which women can combine work and family, and
the effects of ‘violent entertainment’ on children. ‘The tragedy of
feminism in the twentieth century is the way its history seemed to
be forever disappearing,’ Ms. Lepore writes. Her superb narrative
brings that history vividly into the present, weaving individual
lives into the sweeping changes of the century.” —Carol
Tavris, The Wall Street Journal
“After years of sifting through unpublished letters and diaries,
Lepore has written the authoritative work on William Moulton
Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist best known for two things:
inventing the lie detector test and creating the world’s most
famous superheroine. Lepore’s careful detective work reveals a man
of fascinating contradictions. . . . The Secret History of Wonder
Woman is the fullest and most fascinating portrait ever created
about the complicated, unconventional family that inspired one of
the most enduring feminist icons in pop culture. . . . In
[Lepore’s] hands, The Secret History of Wonder Woman is its own
magic lasso, one that compels history to finally tell the truth
about Wonder Woman—and compels the rest of us to behold it.” —Laura
Hudson, Los Angeles Times
“The Secret History of Wonder Woman relates a tale so
improbable, so juicy, it’ll have you saying, ‘Merciful Minerva!’ .
. . an astonishingly thorough investigation of the man behind
the world’s most popular female superhero. . . . Lepore has
assembled a vast trove of images and deploys them cunningly.
Besides a hefty full-color section of Wonder Woman art in the
middle, there are dozens of black-and-white pictures scattered
throughout the text. Many of these are panels from Marston’s comics
that mirror events in his own life. Combined with Lepore’s zippy
prose, it all makes for a supremely engaging reading experience.”
—Etelka Lehoczky, NPR
“If it makes your head spin to imagine a skimpily clad pop culture
icon as (spoiler alert!) a close relation of feminist birth control
advocate Margaret Sanger, then prepare to be dazzled by the
truths revealed in historian Jill Lepore’s The Secret History
of Wonder Woman. The story behind Wonder Woman is sensational,
spellbinding and utterly improbable. Her origins lie in the
feminism of the early 1900s, and the intertwined dramas that
surrounded her creation are the stuff of pulp fiction and tabloid
scandal. . . . It took a super-sleuth to uncover the mysteries of
this intricate history, hidden from view for more than half a
century. With acrobatic research prowess, muscular narrative chops
and disarming flashes of humor, Lepore rises to the challenge,
bringing to light previously unknown details and deliberately
obfuscated connections.” —Audrey Bilger, San Francisco
Chronicle
“On the one hand, the story [The Secret History of Wonder Woman]
relates has more uplift than Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane or
her eagle-encrusted red bustier. It’s a yea-saying tale about how
this comic book character, created in 1941, remade American
feminism and had her roots in the ideas and activism of Margaret
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. On the other hand, The
Secret History of Wonder Woman is fundamentally a biography of
Wonder Woman’s larger-than-life and vaguely creepy male creator,
William Moulton Marston. . . . [Lepore] fully tells Marston’s
history for the first time, as well as the complete history of how
so many crisp feminist ideas made their way into Wonder Woman
comics. It’s complicated material that she capably explores. . . .
There are many profitable detours in this book: the history of
female cartoonists; the moral panic over comics and juvenile
delinquency; a history of the feminist movement.” —Dwight
Garner, The New York Times
“Lepore specializes in excavating old flashpoints—forgotten or
badly misremembered collisions between politics and cultural
debates in America’s past. She lays out for our modern sensibility
how some event or social problem was fought over by interest
groups, reformers, opportunists, and ‘thought leaders’ of the day.
The result can look both familiar and disturbing, like our era’s
arguments flipped in a funhouse mirror. . . . Besides archives and
comics Lepore relies on journalism, notebooks, letters, and traces
of memoir left by the principals, as well as interviews with
surviving colleagues, children, and extended family. Her discipline
is worthy of a first-class detective. . . .Lepore convinces us that
we should know more about early feminists whose work Wonder Woman
drew on and carried forward. . . . A key spotter of connections,
Lepore retrieves a remarkably recognizable feminist through-line,
showing us 1920s debates about work-life balance, for example, that
sound like something from The Atlantic in the past
decade.” —New York Review of Books
“Even non-comix nerds (or those too young to remember Lynda Carter)
will marvel at Jill Lepore’s deep dive into the real-world origins
of the Amazonian superhero with the golden lasso. The fact that a
polyamory enthusiast created her partly as a tribute to the
reproductive-rights pioneer Margaret Sanger is, somehow, only the
fourth or fifth most interesting thing in Ms. Woman’s bizarre
background.” —New York Magazine
“With a defiantly unhurried ease, Lepore reconstructs the
prevailing cultural mood that birthed the idea of Wonder Woman,
carefully delineating the conceptual debt the character owes to
early-20th-century feminism in general and the birth control
movement in particular. . . . Again and again, she distills the
figures she writes about into clean, simple, muscular prose, making
unequivocal assertions that carry a faint electric charge . . .
[and] attain a transgressive, downright badass
swagger.” —Slate
“Deftly combines biography and cultural history to trace the
entwined stories of Marston, Wonder Woman, and 20th-century
feminism. . . . Lepore—a professor of American history at Harvard,
a New Yorker writer, and the author of Book of Ages—is an
endlessly energetic and knowledgeable guide to the fascinating
backstory of Wonder Woman. She’s particularly skillful at showing
the subtle process by which personal details migrate from life into
art.” —Christian Science Monitor
“This captivating, sometimes racy, charming illustrated history is
one part biography of the character and one part biography of her
fascinating creator, psychologist and inventor William Moulton
Marston—an early feminist who believed, way before his time, that
the world would be a better place if only women were running it. .
. . In the process of bringing her ‘superhero’ to life in this very
carefully researched, witty secret ‘herstory,’ Lepore herself
emerges as a kind of superheroine: a woman on a mission—as
energetic, powerful, brilliant and provocative as her subject.”
—Meredith Maran, Good Housekeeping
“This book is important, readable scholarship, making the
connection between popular culture and the deeper history of the
American woman’s fight for equality. . . . Lepore restores
Wonder Woman to her rightful and righteous place.” —Jeffrey Ann
Goudie, The Kansas City Star
“Jill Lepore’s generously illustrated The Secret History of Wonder
Woman impressively links the iconic superhero’s 1941 creation by
William Moulton Marston (also the inventor of the lie detector)
both to the aims of mid-twentieth-century feminism and to the
influential Marston family’s deep domestic intrigues.” —Elle
“An engaging, well-researched look at the unconventional family
behind the character and stories of Wonder Woman….Lepore handles
her potentially thorny topic well and manages to avoid being
salacious or gossipy. . . . Fans interested in the background of
the character and readers who appreciate well-written popular
history will enjoy this thought-provoking volume.” —Library
Journal
“Relegated to second-class status in her kitschy later years, long
overshadowed by her male colleagues in the Justice League, the
exiled Amazonian goddess is rescued and recast as the missing link
of the feminist movement. She was created by William Moulton
Marston: rogue psychologist, inventor of the lie-detector test, and
head of a polyamorous household that included the niece of
birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger. In wartime, she was a Rosie
the Riveter in actual combat. It’s an origin story far deeper,
weirder, and kinkier than anything a cartoonist ever invented.”
—Vulture, 8 Books You Need to Read This October
“The story of William Moulton Marston, the Harvard-trained
psychologist, inventor of the first lie-detector test, and creator
of Wonder Woman for DC Comics, is at once inspiring and
disheartening. His unlikely career shows us (among other things)
that the qualities that make it possible to innovate—swagger,
cleverness, tenacity—are the same ones that can render a person
hopelessly out of sync with the reigning strictures of the times.”
—Bookforum
“Fascinating . . . often brilliant. . . . Through assiduous
research (the endnotes comprise almost a third of the book and are
often very interesting reading), Lepore unravels a hidden history,
and in so doing links her subjects’ lives to some of the most
important social movements of the era. It’s a remarkable,
thought-provoking achievement.” —Alden Mudge, Bookpage
“The Marston family’s story is ripe for psychoanalysis. And
so is The Secret History, since it raises interesting questions
about what motivates writers to choose the subjects of their books.
Having devoted her last work to Jane Franklin Mecom, Benjamin
Franklin’s sister, Lepore clearly has a passion for intelligent,
opinionated women whose legacies have been overshadowed by the men
they love. In her own small way, she’s helping women get the
justice they deserve, not unlike her tiara’d counterpart. . . . It
has nearly everything you might want in a page-turner: tales of
S&M, skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in
its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers
even the most ‘serious’ feminist history—fun.” —Entertainment
Weekly
“Hugely entertaining. . . . Lepore calls Wonder Woman the missing
link between the first and second waves of feminism, as they’re
known—that is, between the suffragist era that so inspired Marston
and the 1970s women’s-liberation movement. . . . She’s right that
the imagery of waves and troughs overlooks the complicated ways
that movements make advances even when no one’s looking—even as
daily lives seem stuck and society seems to be moving
backwards.” —Katha Pollitt, The Atlantic
“Lepore has an astonishing story and tells it extremely well. She
acts as a sort of lie detector, but proceeds through elegant
narrative rather than binary test. Sentences are poised, adverbs
rare. Each chapter is carefully shaped. At a time when few are
disposed to see history as a branch of literature, Lepore occupies
a prominent place in American letters. Her microhistories weave
compelling lives into larger stories.” —The Daily Beast
“In the spirited, thoroughly reported The Secret History of Wonder
Woman, Jill Lepore recounts the fascinating details behind the
Amazonian princess' origin story. . . .[Lepore]seamlessly shifts
from the micro to the macro. . . . A panel depicting this labor
unrest is just one of scores that appear throughout Lepore's book,
further amplifying the author's vivid prose.” —Newsday
“A Harvard professor with impeccable scholarly credentials, Lepore
treats her subject seriously, as if she is writing the biography of
a feminist pioneer like Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth
control movement—which this book is, to an extent. . . . Through
extensive research and a careful reading of the Wonder Woman comic
books, she argues convincingly that the story of this character is
an indelible chapter in the history of women’s rights.” —Miami
Herald
“The Secret History of Wonder Woman is as racy, as improbable, as
awesomely righteous, and as filled with curious devices as an
episode of the comic book itself. In the nexus of feminism and
popular culture, Jill Lepore has found a revelatory chapter of
American history. I will never look at Wonder Woman’s bracelets the
same way again.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“Jill Lepore’s obsessively researched book on Wonder Woman, the
four-color embodiment of the women’s rights movement, reveals that
the life of the character’s creator, Dr. William Marston—inventor
of the lie detector, charming crank, ardent feminist and secret
polygamist—was waaay more colorful than any comic book superhero.
Suffering Sappho!” —Art Spiegelman, author of Maus
“An absolutely unputdownable book. The life history of polymath
charlatan and/or genius (I couldn’t ever decide) William Moulton
Marston, who worked his way through law, movie scenarios, lie
detection, ménages a trois, free love, BDSM and polygamy before
creating the first feminist super-person had me saying ‘wow’
practically every other page. And that’s not even mentioning the
tough-as-nails women he exalted, lifted from and, uh, shared who
make up the molten core of this newly-revealed story. Rocketing
from the suffragism of the 1910s to the ERA of the 1970s on a wave
of home-spun pop culture righteousness, this story’s head-spinning
weirdness ultimately makes you question your own accomplishments,
aims, and—almost like a great modern novel—your real motives.”
—Chris Ware, author of Building Stories
“Lepore restores Wonder Woman to her rightful place as an essential
women’s rights icon in this dynamically researched and interpreted,
spectacularly illustrated, downright astounding work of discovery
that injects new zest into the history of feminism.” —Booklist,
starred review
"It's an irresistible story, and the author tells it with relish
and delight." —Kirkus Reviews
“Wonder Woman, feminist hero, was the creation of a husband and
wife who led, on the surface, average existences. Behind the mask,
however, they had extraordinarily unconventional lives. It takes
Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Lepore to dig into the
complicated story behind the lasso (of truth), and forgive me for
sounding like Upworthy, but it’s true: what she uncovers will shock
you. Let’s just say that Wonder Woman’s S&M subtext was there
for a reason.” —Flavorwire, 25 Must-Read Books for the Fall
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