The Secret History of Wonder Woman

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Within the origin of one of the worlds most iconic superheroes hides a fascinating family storyand a crucial history of feminism in the twentiethcentury.Everything you might want in a pageturnerskeletons in the closet, a believeitornot weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most serious feminist historyfun. Entertainment WeeklyThe 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 womens rightsa chain of events that begins with the womens 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 neverbeforeseen private papers of Wonder Womans 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 aregular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truthhe invented the lie detector testlived 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 familys papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.