The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Boy (or I should say "Girl"), Jill Lepore must have been thrilled when she came upon the previously unseen papers of Wonder Woman's creator William Marston. The facts, both sensational and substantial, behind the Amazon superhero's true origin story make her career an even more revealing case study in 20th-century feminist iconography. Before creating Wonder Woman, it turns out, Marston—a part-quack, part-visionary psychologist and a lifelong feminist grounded in the radical protests for suffrage and birth control—not only invented the lie detector and destroyed his academic career with stunts like "proving" that brunettes are easier to arouse than blondes, he also presided secretly over a household he shared with three women, two of them his artistic collaborators and the mothers of his children. Fascinating.