And she unreels her research into this moving, mendacious ménage a trois like a screwball family movie.įor graphic novel fans, it’s a potpourri of Wonder Woman philosophy, exploits and re-imaginings by a hodgepodge of writers including Robert Kanigher.įor Second Wave feminists, it’s a look back at the battles for women’s rights waged by forgotten rebels like Ethel Byrne, Olive’s mother, who went on a hunger strike after being jailed for co-founding the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn with her sister Margaret Sanger. Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer and author, is known for her scholarly, lucid and witty, wise style. But if neither claimed credit, they surely influenced the daring, sincere character, who hated guns, spared her victims and was bound or chained in nearly every strip. Peter, who had suffrage and feminist ties.Īccording to Holloway’s son Pete, whom Lepore interviewed, a Superwoman was his mother’s idea. Impressed with his views, comic book publisher Charlie Gaines hired him as consulting psychologist.Īnd it wasn’t long before the disarming huckster convinced Gaines he needed a female superhero to counter critics, submitted a draft for the first installment and hired his own artist, Harry G. Then in 1940, as fighting raged in Europe, the author reports, the Chicago Daily News declared war on comic books, calling them “sex-horror serials.” Without bothering to mention that she lived and slept with him, freelancer Byrne offered to interview Marston on the subject of comic books for Family Circle magazine.Īs it turned out, Marston said he’d been studying comics for more than a year and declared them mostly good reading for children. He could have his mistress, she would have a career, and young Byrne, niece of embattled birth control crusader Margaret Sanger, would raise the children. Marston gave his wife an ultimatum: Either Byrne could live with them or he would leave her.ĭevastated, Lepore writes, Holloway walked around for six hours, then made Marston a deal. She did it to work for - and to live with - him. “What more the psychologist and his assistant did together that year is hard to say,” Lepore writes.īut Byrne, “the wittiest, cleverest, and most distinctive graduate of the Tufts class of 1926,” that fall entered a doctoral program in psychology at Columbia University, where Marston had been hired as a lecturer. In the academic year 1925-6, they conducted a study into how women felt when the were tied up and how other women felt when they beat them. In his Experimental Psychology class at Tufts, where he was an assistant professor, Marston had a chic and radical student named Olive Byrne, who began working as his research assistant. Marston began studying at Harvard Law, and Holloway at co-educational Boston University Law School because, as she said, “Those dumb bunnies at Harvard wouldn’t take women. Her favorite book was “Sappho,” about the seventh-century Greek lyric poet born on the island of Lesbos. Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, “a whip-smart tomboy from the Isle of Man,” met her sweetheart Marston in eighth grade, went on to Mount Holyoke, then a feminist citadel, where she loved everything Greek. But Lepore tells us he also had what his editor at DC Comics once called “a rather strange appreciation of women. Big, brash and seriously self-promoting, Marston smoked Philip Morris cigarettes from cans of 50, drank rye and ginger ale, morning and night, and had trouble holding a job.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |