3.5
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
ByPublisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Within the origin of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of feminism in the twentieth-century.
“Everything you might want in a page-turner…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
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston.
The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. Even while celebrating conventional family life in a regular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.
Includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.
“Everything you might want in a page-turner…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
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston.
The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. Even while celebrating conventional family life in a regular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.
Includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.
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3.5
simran kalkat
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Jessica Burke
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Grace Miller
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“This book was a bit of a disappointment — I wish it was more about her and less about the man that made her”
Asphodel
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“*Listened to audiobook*
I really wanted to like this, but it was a lot of information and a lot of different bios.
I understand why the title of the book is what it is, but it felt really misleading for this book.
I enjoyed the first third and the last third the most, but the middle section had a lot of legal talk, too many different people’s life stories (or at least it felt like it), and barely any talk of Wonder Woman.
The first third was neatly paced, a bit slow, but it’s a biography so kind of expected. It soon jumps into things that happened or people that Marston met and how they influenced characters created as part of Wonder Woman’s rogues gallery, which is how I thought the rest of the book would be written out.
Then there’s just so much info about his experiments with his lie detector, which yes I get it he invented it, but some of it felt so repetitive. Also included were the lives of the people he met who also contributed in some part to the creation of Wonder Woman, but it went so deep into each of their lives that it felt like a whole new biography starting over.
Once it gets to the actual creation of Wonder Woman, then I was back into it because it did that same jumping back and forth between their real lives and how that reflected into Wonder Woman’s story like in the beginning, which to me were the best parts of this book.
Yes it’s an interesting history, but be prepared to meet so many people within these pages.”
Christy
Created about 2 months agoShare
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