New York Tri-State Network: UCLA / Cal Alumni Book Club: "The Secret History of Wonder Woman," by Jill Lepore

As we embark on a three-month unit on the theme of heroes, we begin with a discussion of "The Secret History of Wonder Woman," by Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore.

Wonder Woman, 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 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. (from Barnes and Noble)