June 12, 2017 • 43 mins
Most people know Wonder Woman as an embodiment of truth and justice, but don't know much about the comic's earlier years or its creator. Marston lived an unconventional life, and in many ways, Wonder Woman was an expression of that life.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, Hollywood,
you do this weekend? I went a wonder Woman? Hey,
(00:21):
so did I. There might have been a lot of crying.
Me too. And I actually started working on this episode
before seeing Wonder Woman. It even so it feels like
we're maybe a little late to this party. Today, we're
gonna talk about Dr William Molton Marston, who you may
have seen his name in the credits of Wonder Woman.
(00:43):
He actually created wonder Woman. In addition to being a
Harvard educated psychologist who wrote extensively about things like human
emotions and consciousness, he also invented and popularized an early
version of the lie detector test, and, as we just said,
created under Woman. You may have even seen, if you
have seen Wonder Woman, a teaser for a forthcoming biopic
(01:06):
about him that was apparently going to be called Professor
m So if that piqued your interest, we're going to
help out with that today. Yeah. I didn't get I
didn't get that preview. I didn't know it existed until
other people were talking about it on the Internet, and
I was like, what, So to return to the subject
at hand. For folks who maybe no Wonder Woman as
(01:28):
an embodiment of truth and justice and don't have so
much knowledge about the comics earlier years or its creator,
the heads up we're about to give you might be
a little surprising. There is going to be some sex
talk today. As always, it will not be graphic or explicit,
but it will be there. And the first approximately half
(01:49):
of this episode is pretty tame. So if you think
you might uh want to bail, if perhaps younger listeners
are are listening as well, then you'll still be able
to get a sense of where some of the inspirations
for Wonder Woman came from from the first half of
the show. Uh. And also, to be clear, this is
not a history of Wonder Woman. We're not going to
(02:11):
spend a ton of time talking about the early issues
and the many, many different origin stories she has had
and all of that. It is a lot more about
Dr Marston and how his life sort of became subsumed
in this comic book character. Yeah. So, William Molton Marston
was born in Massachusetts on May nine, and while we
(02:35):
usually spend a bit of time talking about a person's
early life. His adulthood is really what's connected to what
we're talking about today. So this time around, we're going
to skip most of that early whose parents were, etcetera.
And we're going right to nineteen eleven, which was his
freshman year at Harvard, and the only subject he really
liked that first year was philosophy, and at that time
a lot of people considered psychology to be a branch
(02:58):
of philosophy. Mars Ston's philosophy professor, George Herbert Palmer, was
outspoken in his view that women and men were equal.
He was also the faculty sponsor for the Harvard Men's
League for Woman's Suffrage, which had invited Emmiline Pankhurst to
speak on campus in November of nineteen eleven, so that
would have been the November of Marston's first year of college.
(03:21):
This was an event that would have a long lasting
influence on Marston's life and work. Pankhurst was the founder
of Britain's Women's Social and Political Union, the nation's most
militant women's rights organization. It was pank Hurst's organization that
reclaimed the derogatory nicknames suffragette and wore it with pride
when other more moderate organizations preferred suffragist. By the nineteen teens,
(03:46):
the suffragettes activism included breaking windows, vandalism, and arson, with
their subsequent arrests infamously followed by hunger strikes and force feedings.
That is, of course not at all a thorough history
of the Suffragettes, but a big part of the movement
and its iconography was the use of chains. This was
really co opted from the earlier abolition movement. Suffragettes framed
(04:11):
their movement as seeking a liberation from bondage, and used
images of chains and their pamphlets and other printed material.
They also physically chained themselves to fences and other barriers
as part of their protests. One invited to Harvard in
nineteen eleven, Pankhurst was banned from actually speaking on the
Harvard campus. At that time, Harvard was an all male
(04:35):
university and it did not allow women to speak on campus.
The administration decided not to make an exception for pank Hurst,
even though it had made an exception for another woman
in the same lecture series, provided the lecture was closed
to anyone from off campus. According to the New York Times,
Pankhurst's invitation caused and quote almost unprecedented stir. The student
(05:01):
body divided into suffs who supported pankhurst invitation and antis,
who did not, and petitions circulated on both sides. And
the end, because she had been barred from speaking on campus,
the event was held off campus, with way more people
trying to get into the lecture hall than would actually fit.
Students from both Harvard and from Radcliffe College, which was
(05:23):
the women's college that started out as Harvard Annex, were
all in the audience, and Marston was caught up in
all of this. While at Harvard, Marston studied under Hugo
Munsterberg in Harvard's Experimental Psychology Lab. Munsterberg was a controversial figure.
He was recruited from Germany specifically to head up the lab,
and he maintained loyalty to Germany even in the years
(05:46):
leading into World War One. Unlike Marston's psychology professor, Munsterberg
was against both the feminist movement and the suffrage movement.
He thought women should have access to education, but not
to graduate studies, which he thought they were not suited for.
Munsterberg believed in psychological parallelism, or the idea that parallel
(06:08):
processes are always going on in both the body and
the mind, uh run parallel to you or complement each other.
He did a lot of work in applied psychology as well,
and he was conducting experiments on whether it was possible
to detect deception through speech and heart rate, as well
as skin temperature. While he did not at all agree
(06:28):
with Munsterberg's thoughts about women, Merston was fascinated with potential
connections between the mind and body and whether it was
possible to use physical responses to detect deception. Around nineteen thirteen,
his childhood sweetheart, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, who he had known
since eighth grade, told him that she noticed her blood
pressure rose when she was upset. Holloway's observation and Munsterberg's
(06:53):
prior work became the foundation for the Marston Deception Test,
a lie detector that predicted whether someone was being truthful
based on their systolic blood pressure. In his first experiment
with it, he used stories actually written by Holloway that
described a fictitious crime that a friend had committed. Participants
had to give mock court testimony about their friend, either
(07:15):
by lying or telling the truth. A mock jury offered
an opinion on whether uh this subject was being truthful,
which and then that result was compared to the blood
pressure reading. The lie detector was right of the time,
while the mock jury was only right about half the time.
(07:36):
Marston got his bachelor's degree from Harvard in nine and
that September he and Holloway, who graduated from Mount Holyoke
that year, were married. Although she took his last name,
she didn't particularly want to, and she also did not
want to be called Betty, which Marston insisted on calling her.
We're calling her Holloway in this episode for those reasons
(07:57):
as well as for clarity. Yeah, this episode would get
really confusing if if we called them both Marston over
the strenuous objections of her father. When Marston went on
to pursue a law degree from Harvard, Holloway did the
same thing from Boton University. She performed a lot better
(08:19):
than he did academically, and they both graduated in nineteen eighteen.
While he was in law school, Marston kept up with
his research into deception, offering up the use of his
lie detector and criminal investigations, and unsuccessfully to the FBI
the Office of Military Intelligence, and the Departments of War
and Justice, among many others. He was really a proponent
(08:42):
for his lie detector. In nineteen eighteen, during the US
involvement in World War One, Marston became a second lieutenant
and he served at the U. S. Army School of
Military Psychology. After the end of the war, he returned
to school again, earning a PhD in psychology from Harvard
in nine. His PhD dissertation was Systolic blood Pressure, Symptoms
(09:05):
of Deception and Constituent Mental States. Holloway mirrored his classes
at Radcliffe, although graduate degrees were not conferred to women. Yeah,
the way that Ratcliffe worked at that time was that
it was basically for women, and it was taught with
essentially identical lectures and all from Harvard faculty um. But
the women weren't really considered to be Harvard students exactly.
(09:30):
And in this case, the advanced work that she was
doing did not result in her getting a PhD along
with him. You can do all the work, but you
don't get the title. She said something very similar to that. Uh.
And from there Marston entered Academia, but Holloway, in spite
of her degrees, which she did have before this whole
(09:51):
Radcliffe course of study and her excellent academic performance, had
trouble finding a job. She did continue to assist him
with his research. We're going to talk about somewhere. After
a quick sponsor break. After finishing his pH d in psychology,
(10:11):
William Moulton Marston took a job as a professor at
American University in Washington, d C. Where he was the
chair of the psychology department. It's a pretty prestigious position
to get in your first job after grad school. For
Halloway's part, she found a job researching answers to readers
questions for a syndicated newspaper column. Marston also attempted to
(10:33):
have the lie detector evidence introduced into the murder trial
of James Alfonso Fry. During an interrogation, Fry had confessed,
but later he said that he had been pressured into
doing so. Marston's aim was to use his lie detector
to prove that Fry's original confession had been false. Two
of Marston's students were also Fry's legal counsel, and they
(10:54):
didn't put much effort into his case, planning to rest
it all on Marston's expert testimony, but the judge would
not allow Marston's testimony, and Fry was convicted. Fry really
got the worst of this deal because a series of
appeals were focused pretty much exclusively on this whole lie
detector testimony, and they led to Fry versus United States,
(11:18):
which was heard in the d C. Circuit Court. This
case established what became known as the Fry standard, basically
the idea that for scientific evidence to be introduced in court,
it had to rely on generally accepted concepts in the
relevant field. It could not, for example, rely on something
that was unproven or something that was considered to be
(11:38):
a fringe belief like Marston's lie detector was. The Fry
standard stayed on the books for a long time. It's
still in use in some states, although at this point
it's mostly been replaced by other laws. Marston's job at
American University was short lived after a completely different business
enterprise we haven't even gotten into here failed. His business
(12:01):
associates in that enterprise accused him of fraud, and that
case never came to trial, but the suspicion around it
was enough to cost Marshton his job. In nineteen five,
he started working in the psychology department at Tufts University
in Medford, Massachusetts, which is where he met Olive Byrne.
She had been born in February nineteen o four, delivered
(12:24):
by her mother's sister, Margaret Sanger. Sanger and Olive's mother,
Ethel had started the United States first contraceptive clinic together
in nineteen sixteen, and it was the foundation for what
would become planned parenthood. When Ethel Burne was arrested for
running this clinic, she went on a hunger strike that
was really threatening her life, and Sanger, without her consent,
(12:47):
negotiated a deal with the governor that she would be
pardoned if she never participated in the birth control movement again.
So all of that happened after Olive Burne's birth, but
before she started attending to US and Burne was a
student at Jackson Women's College. At Tufts University, Marston was
her professor in experimental psychology. Sadie Elizabeth Holloway had not
(13:11):
moved to Massachusetts with him. She had taken a job
as a managing editor of a psychology journal in New York.
At this point, Marston had largely stopped his study of law.
The failure of Fry versus United States really seemed to
put a damper on his enthusiasm for that, and he
had started focusing on the psychophysiology of emotions, for the
(13:33):
connections between the mind and the responses and the body
as they related to emotions. He and many others in
the field of psychology in the nineteen twenties, was extremely
interested in studying sex as well, and in studying sex
differences between men and women. And this is where today's
episode is going to turn into more adult territory. So
(13:55):
in particular, Marston was very interested in bondage, dominance, and submission.
He proposed a study in which they could examine how
women responded to being tied up and how other women
women would respond to striking the ones who were bound.
To that end, burn took him to a sorority hazing
ritual in which freshman pledges dressed like babies and were
(14:17):
led blindfolded with their hands bound while upperclassmen ordered them
around and sophomore sorority sisters hit them with sticks, and
then they interviewed participants who reported quote excited pleasantness. Marston
and Burne became involved sometime in nine and he introduced
her to his wife on Burne's graduation day in some
(14:41):
time around then is also when Marston left Toughs. It's
entirely possible that he was asked to leave based on
everything we have just said in the last few sentences.
Soon after, Marston told Holloway that he wanted burn to
move in with them, and that if she didn't allow it,
he would leave her. Articles about whether women can quote
(15:03):
have it all with all, meaning both children and a
career may seem like a recent phenomenon, but they were
already being written in and Holloway had found herself caught
in that question. She wanted children, but she had always,
long before marrying Marston, been ambitious and career oriented, so
she came to the decision that was at the time
(15:25):
pretty unconventional, illegal, and would have been completely scandalous if
anyone had found out about it. Burne could live with
them if she raised the children, and that would leave
Holloway free to focus on her career. They made up
a cover story that Burne was a relative who had
been previously married, but her husband had died. The two
(15:48):
children that burn had with Marston were really, according to
their cover story, her late husband's children and not Marston's.
I have so many timeline questions about how that worked.
Like that works for one baby, it is weird the
second baby, like, um, wait a minute, already had a
(16:09):
child from the deceased husband. Anyway, Halloway and burn each
had two children with Marston between nine and nineteen thirty three,
and they didn't even tell Burne's children who their father
was until much much later in their lives. Burne had
hoped to get a pH d and got as far
as a master's before dropping out of school to take
care of the first of these four children, which Holloway
(16:31):
gave birth to in night while working at Encyclopedia Britannica
and staying at her job as long as possible before delivering.
So it's not really typical or middle class white women
Lenti's at all. Marston's career really started to flounder in
(16:52):
the late nineteen twenties and into the nineteen thirties. He
had been fired as the chair of the psychology department
at American University, and then he either quit or was
asked to leave his assistant professorship at Toughts. He then
became a lecturer at Columbia after that, and that's really
the opposite of the trajectory that a career in academia
(17:12):
is supposed to follow. He was really struggling to make
his way in the world of academic psychology after all
his experimental work. He developed and published a number of
theories about human emotions and physical responses to them. He
theorized that psychology and neurology had complementary counterparts. Where neurology
(17:34):
had neurons or nerve cells, psychology had the theoretical structure
of psicons. The brain could be explained through neurons and
the mind could be explained through icons. He also proposed
a new framework to understand human emotions. Rather than emotions
like fear and anger, he proposed for primary emotional responses,
(17:56):
which were dominance, compliance, submission, and inducement. He published two
books exploring his theoretical framework. There was Emotions of Normal People,
which came out in ninety eight and Integrative Psychology, A
Study of Unit Response, which came out of ninety one.
This interplay between dominance and submission underpinned a lot of
(18:18):
these theories, and Emotions of Normal People also had a
lot in it that was devoted to reassuring people that
taboo sexual proclivities were really completely normal. Although he often
included Burne in Holloway and his acknowledgements or his thanks
and his books, in some cases one or both of
(18:38):
them had come closer to co writing the book, but
wasn't listed as an author, And he kept using his
lie detector, not so much to test deception anymore, but
to study emotional responses. He used it to study the
question of whether women with different hair color had different
emotional responses. I don't know why I love that so much,
(19:00):
but I sure do. It's because it's hilarious. It's very funny.
A second series of tests examined what provoked an emotional
response with the subject watching movies while hooked up to
the machine. The conclusion, according to The New York Times,
was quote that brunettes enjoyed the thrill of pursuit, while
(19:20):
blondes preferred the more passive enjoyment of being kissed. A
lot of this probably sounds at best specious and also
pretty funny, uh, but it did wind up leading to
more work in the field of pop psychology, which we're
going to talk about after another quick sponsor break in
(19:45):
Night Universal Studios posted an advertisement that they were seeking
a psychologist to help them figure out how audiences would
respond to their movies, and that psychologists wound up being
William Moulton Marston. He was hired as the director of
this studios Public Service Bureau, and once again this job
did not last very long. The passage of the Haze Code,
(20:07):
which prohibited quote im moral content in films, shifted the
types of films that the industry could make and then
consequently what kind of responses they needed to measure. They
also found a more sophisticated lie detector, the polygraph, which
was developed by John Larson and Leonard Keeler, and to
(20:27):
decided to use that to evaluate films instead. After that,
Marston tried to co found a production company called Equitable
Pictures with the goal of making feminist films, and he
had actually made a film before in his undergraduate days.
That was how he made enough money to buy Holloway's
engagement ring. However, Equitable Pictures folded just before the start
(20:49):
of the Great Depression. In his career hadn't exactly been
stable up to this point, and Marston wound up without
steady employment for a lot of the nineteen thirties. For
the most part, Holloway really supported the whole family, although
much about their family was still a secret. Some people
in academia had figured out something was going on in
(21:11):
Marston's household that was not conventional and that torpedoed some
of his academic prospects. Another woman named Marjorie Wilkes Huntley
also lived with them on and off through these decades.
Marston wrote a book called The Lie Detector Test, which
came out in ninety and this was another case in
(21:33):
which Burne was essentially a co writer. To promote his book,
he started doing publicity stunts. There was a love detector
in which pretty ladies were kissed while hooked up to it.
In nineteen thirty nine, he did a Gillette razor blade
add in which people shaved with gilette blades and then
other blades and then answered questions about the experience while
they were hooked up to the detector. The results of
(21:57):
this were apparently padded, and a second, larger study was
conducted under the supervision of Detroit police. In that study,
the results came down fifty fifty in terms of Gillette
versus other blades, and then Marston allegedly bribed someone to
say it was a in favor of Gillette. That person
declined to do. An FBI memo about this whole deal
(22:21):
includes a handwritten note on it that says, quote, I
always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this
proves it. The reason that there was an FBI memo
about it at all was that Marston's publisher had sent
a copy of the Lie Detector Test to J. Edgar
Hoover when it was published, hoping for an endorsement. Instead,
(22:42):
the FBI started a file, and the FBI's assessment of
the book was that it was quote extremely egotistical, and
mostly seemed to exist to establish the fact that Marston
had invented the lie detector. The memo concludes by summarizing
the book's conjecture that having a deception pointed out, will
call was the subject to admit his falsehood then always
(23:03):
tell the truth in the future, which quote exemplifies the
same egotistical, ridiculous strain in which the book was written. Nevertheless,
all this publicity landed Marson a lot of other pop
psychology gigs. He had articles published in Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire,
and Ladies Home journal. He wrote inspirational psychology and self
(23:24):
help books with names like You Can Be Popular and
march On Facing Life with Courage. He also wrote about women,
how in his view, women were largely superior to men.
He gave an interview with The New York Times in
ninety seven in which he said the United States was
within a century of quote the beginning of a sort
(23:45):
of Amazonian matriarchy, and in five hundred years the nation
would see a quote definite battle for sex supremacy, and
in a thousand years, he believed women would rule the
nation both politically and economically. Meanwhile, Olive Byrne had gotten
a job writing for Family Circle magazine, and in her
(24:05):
article she would visit in air quotes famed psychologist Dr
William Molton Marston, who she pretended to know only in
this professional capacity, having in fact met him in order
to interview him. For one of these articles. She would
seek out his professional opinion on child behavior, like, for example,
what to do about a child who was lying all
(24:27):
the time. And in one of these articles the question
was along the lines of I've heard comic books might
be dangerous for children, are they? That was not That's
the sum up of the articles question, Okay, I'm gonna
stop giggling. Comic books at this point had a terrible reputation.
(24:50):
Although the United States hadn't yet become involved, World War
Two was underway and storylines were becoming increasingly violent. The
Chicago Daily News called calm x quote sex horror serials.
Superman had just debuted in ninety eight and Batman in
ninety nine, and they weren't exactly being written as wholesome
role models. Superman came off as a fascist and Batman
(25:13):
was shooting people. So, in her guise of a concerned parent,
Olive Byrne visited famous psychologist William Molton Marston to ask
if comic books were harmful, and his position was that
they were, for the most part, just harmless wish fulfillment.
People read them because they knew that the heroine was
going to be rescued by the hero at the last moment.
(25:35):
She wasn't in any real danger that in most cases
no harm came to her on the page. So his
opinion like people weren't even being taught to enjoy violence
because they were always saved from the violence. This article
caught the attention of Maxwell Charles Gaines of Detective Comics
later known, of course, as d C Comics. He hired
(25:56):
Marston in nineteen forty because he wanted Marston's help defending
him from critics and turning comics reputation around, and Marston's
assessment the root problem of comic books was their quote
blood curdling masculinity. Quote. The obvious remedy, he wrote was
(26:16):
quote to create a feminine character with all the strength
of a superman plus all the allure of a good
and beautiful woman. Marston wanted to provide a role model
for girls and to introduce boys to a feminist hero,
and at one point he said, quote, frankly, Wonder Woman
is psychological propaganda for the type of woman who I
(26:36):
believe should rule the world. Gaines agreed to publish such
a comic if Marston wrote it. He turned in his
first draft, originally titled Suprema the Wonder Woman, in nine
and here's where Wonder Woman became a synthesis of all
these things we've been talking about for this entire episode.
We talked at the top of the show about how
(26:57):
the Suffragettes had used metaphors and depictions of Haynes and
bondage picked up, as we said, from the abolition movement.
That same idea and those same images were picked up
by the greater feminist movement as well. Marston, an advocate
for both of these movements, put that same imagery into
Wonder Woman. According to his writing, if Wonder Woman were
(27:21):
chained up by a man, she would lose her power,
and she was in an overwhelming number of the early
comics chained up by men. Because he also had a
golden lasso that would compel people to tell the truth
like the Lae Detector that Marston had spent so much
of his career trying to convince people was genuine, and
(27:41):
she came from an island inhabited only by women, depicted
in many ways as superior to men, and was framed
in a way that was explicitly feminist. Another aspect came
from Marston's personal life. Wonder Woman's wide bracelets were patterned
after those worn by all of Byrne instead of a
wedding ring, and there are a lot of moments in
(28:01):
Marston's Wonder Woman stories that clearly parallel his life like
a lot a lot. A villain named Dr Psycho was
probably inspired by Hugo Munsterberg, The gates at Holiday College
look a lot like the gates at Harvard. Check out
Jill Lapoor's The Secret History of Wonder Woman if that
sounds interesting, because there is a lot more to delve
(28:22):
into there that is not really part of this so
much she and that book also has a lot more
of the history of Wonder Woman's various incarnations that were
not really going to get into here. It's a really
good book. I read it as part of the research
for this show. Enjoyed it. Thoroughly written by Marston and
drawn by HD Peter, Wonder Woman debuted and All Star
(28:45):
Comics Number eight in the fall of n and she
was immediately immensely popular, with sales of her titles topping
half a million copies by the third issue. She also
drew a lot of controversy. She really wasn't wearing a
lot of clothes, and she got tied up a lot.
Josette Frank of the Child Study Association called it full
(29:07):
of sex antagonisms and perversions, to which Marston replied, quote Frankly,
I don't know what she means. Probably my basic idea
of women fighting male dominance, cruelty savagery and warmaking with love,
control backed by force is what she means by sex antagonisms.
But whatever Marston is the Niles, those so called sex
(29:28):
antagonisms and perversions were really obvious in the minds of
some of the critics. Because Wonder Woman was from an
island populated only by women, and because of the way
those women sometimes interacted with each other, people alleged that
the comic was promoting lesbianism, which at the time was
widely considered to be immoral and also in most places
(29:49):
was illegal. An infantry soldier wrote to Marston in three
basically spelling out that he personally was into sexual bondage
and dering if Marston was too because of how he
was depicting Wonder Woman. That is a complicated question we
cannot answer in the scope of this podcast because the
(30:13):
only people alive to ask are their children, and honestly,
how much do most children know about their parents sexual behavior. Regardless,
though a meeting that followed led into a decision to
cut down the depictions of Wonder Woman tied up by
between fifty and seventy Marston did not agree with the
criticism that Wonder Woman was promoting sexual bondage or torture.
(30:36):
In his words, quote, Wonder Woman breaks the bonds of
those who are slaves to evil masters, but she doesn't
leave the freed ones free to assert their own egos
in uncontrolled self gratification. Wonder Woman binds the victims again
in love chains. That is, she makes them submit to
a loving superior, a beneficent mistress or master, who in
(30:58):
every case represents God or Goodness or aphrodite goddess of
love and beauty. Freedom usually goes through a stage, as
in progressive education, where it becomes detrimental through lack of discipline,
which was a side note that bondage and torture definitely
not the same thing, but a lot of the criticisms
of Wonder Woman conflated that altogether. At first, it was
(31:21):
kept secret that famed psychologist William Moulton Marston was writing
Wonder Woman. The first issues were published under the name
Charles Moulton instead, but All American Comics issued a press
release in the summer of nineteen forty two announcing that
he was the creator and author his polyamorous home life
and the fact that Olive Byrne Sadie Holloway had both
(31:42):
contributed to Wonder Woman in a meaningful way where kept secret.
As examples, we already talked about burns bracelets as the
inspiration for Wonder Woman's wrist cuffs. Holloway, who had studied
Greek in college and was a huge admirer of Sappho,
supplied advice on how Wonder Woman's interjections shouldn't be along
(32:03):
the lines of Vulcan's hammer. The should be more about
women like suffering Sappho. Wonder Woman was nationally syndicated in
newspapers in nineteen forty four. Marston died on May second,
nineteen forty seven, at the age of fifty three of cancer.
Holloway advocated for her following him as a Wonder Woman's writer. Instead,
(32:27):
Robert Cannager followed, and he made Wonder Woman, instead of
being a superhero, into a model movie star a babysitter.
He also replaced wonder Women of History, which was a
feature that had been part of Wonder Woman comics that
talked about, as the name suggests, amazing women from the
historical past. He replaced that feature with one that was
(32:48):
about weddings. Since her introduction in Wonder Woman has become
one of the longest running comic book characters in history.
She is essentially the only female character from the early
days of mass produced comics to survive until the present,
and she's become an icon both as a character and
as a feminist symbol. The feminist publication Miss magazine put
(33:11):
wonder Woman on the cover for its first regular issue. Technically,
there was a preview issue with a different cover that
came out in the spring of nineteen seventy two, and
that first full issue with wonder Woman came out in July.
The cover read wonder Woman for President and Peace and Justice.
In seventy two, Wonder Woman was also the u n's
Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls in
(33:34):
a controversial move that lasted for two months in twenty sixteen.
Olive Byrne died in nineteen nine and Elizabeth Holloway Marston
died in They had continued to live together for forty
three years after Marston's death. Pay to Me are one
of the most interesting pieces of this whole story, because
when Marston came to Holloway and was like, hey, there's
(33:58):
an ultimatum. Is a student, Here's an ultimatum in which
my student is going to move in with us, Like
that's definitely presented as an ultimatum. And most people who
describe that situation like describe it as something that was
definitely like you're gonna do this or I'm gonna leave,
which is ah, most folks I know in the polyamory
(34:20):
community would not agree that that is a healthy way
to approach a relationship, but they really like after he died,
they continued to be together and essentially until one of
them last years, like the it was a desk to
us part situation with the two of them as well
as with the two of them with him involved in
(34:42):
the triangle, which to me is really interesting. Yeah, I
feel like it would be great if one day we
get some secret journal that one of them had kept
where we really get more in depth of how their
whole dynamic amongst the three of them work founded in
that way that is not eel normally, Like, how did
(35:03):
it kind of progress to the point that that they
did want to stay together for another forty three years
without him? Yeah. Well, and Jilliport, when she was researching
her book on the Secret History of Wonder Woman, she
entered she interviewed their three surviving children and the spouse
of the fourth of their children. She talked to all
(35:24):
of them, and she got access to all these family papers. Um,
and there was there was a lot of really candid discussion.
But then there was also like some stuff that the
kids were like, yeah, we did not really we didn't
know that that he was our father until way later.
Uh So, like there's there's a lot of stuff that
will probably always be unanswered, some of which because like
how much do we really need to know about what
(35:47):
they were doing? And then some of it, you know,
some of it still continues to be fascinating. Yeah, when
I say that, please, no, I'm not looking for like
a c D till all. I'm really curious about the
psycho bology of how the three of them, again having
founded this relationship on an ultimatum, that evolved into something
(36:08):
that was clearly much more than that and not it
seemed I mean, again, we're not in it, so we
don't know, but it seemed like it must have been
healthy for the to some degree. Yeah. So well, and
Burne and Holloway both were very unconventional for women in
their time, Like they both had way more education than
women typically did. Um, a lot of Holloway's uh focus,
(36:32):
Like she really was focused on um literature and law,
and she was really into being educated and pursuing a career.
And you know in their class that like that was
not really common. Yeah. Uh. And then with al of Burn,
a lot of like her gender presentation in college was
(36:56):
very androgynous and she was really interested in pursuing a PhD.
Like they both were outside of the norm for women
a lot. So I think all of them are really
interesting as people and as examples of like a relationship
that was not within the norms of society. Like in
(37:17):
some circles this would still be scandalous today, but at
the time it was been really scandalous in career ending
for all three of them. Do you have some career
ending listener mail? I hope not. Before we get into
the listener, mail, I just wanted to say really quickly,
Holly and I, you were doing a live show in
(37:38):
Seneca Falls. Yeah, July sixteenth, which is a Sunday at
an event called Convention Days. Uh. You can find more
information about that on our website and we've been talking
about on our social media. We don't want it to
be a surprise to listeners that we will be out there.
We are looking forward to it. So again that's July
(37:59):
and Seneca Falls, New York. It's a very pretty time
of year out in the Finger Lakes, and I do
have some listener mail. I'm approaching our listener mail a
little bit differently today. In our Ladies of Fan Gothlin episode,
we talked about the idea of the Boston marriage and
how I had not been able to figure out exactly
(38:19):
when that term came into use. UM, and we got
email from Rebecca, Alicia, and Courtney about Boston marriage. UM.
So thank you all three of you for sending email
about Boston marriage. I wanted to both clarify what my
question was and also answer it, which I'm really excited about.
I would down a deep rabbit hole about Boston marriage.
(38:42):
So when researching that episode, I was already familiar with
the term Boston marriage and that it was U used
to describe women having a relationship a relationship. I'm using
that and it's broad sense, like it's it's entirely likely
that in some cases these were like romantic partnerships, but
in some cases they were more like practical roommate situations.
(39:05):
But there were women making a life together, uh, in
a way that was public. People knew about it um
and didn't you know, they didn't have a male partner,
which at the time was not particularly typical. What was
totally unclear to me was when people actually started using
this term, because according to Miriam Webster, it's first use
(39:25):
was in and so I was, yeah, and it's not
in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is my go to
location to find out when words in English arrived. So
in the time leading up to that episode, I was
not able to figure out whether this was a term
that was in use at the time that it's used
(39:48):
to describe, or whether it was like a modern word
that was coined way more recently. I have now answered
that question. Uh. The first known use of the term
Boston marriage and writing was published in a letter to
the editor of the Open Court, which was a journal
printed in Chicago. This was printed on January five, eight three,
(40:13):
and it was by Edna D. Cheney, and she was
writing in response to a legal dust up um in
which two women had had made a home together at
one of the women's father was trying to pursue legal
action over it um, and she wrote this seems very
strange to one who for many years has been accustomed
(40:36):
to the existence of ties between women so intimate and
persistent that they are fully recognized by their friends, and
of late have acquired, if not a local habitation, at
least the name, for they have been christened Boston marriages.
This institution deserves to be recognized as a really valuable
one for women in our present state of civilization. With
(40:58):
the great number of women in our date that an
excess of the men, and with the present independence of women,
which renders marriage merely for a home no longer acceptable,
the proportion of those who can enter into that relation
is diminished, and the glorious spellings of old maids must
find sub substitute for the joys of family life. These relations,
(41:20):
so far as I have known, and I have known
many of them, are not usually planned for convenience or economy,
but out of a constantly increasing attachment, favored by circumstances
which make such a marriage the best refuge against the
solitude of growing age. And then later on in her
letter she says, I do not propose that we should
(41:41):
formally adopt the Boston marriage into our civil code and
celebrate it with ceremonies and festivities, or simplicity and privacy
especially become it. But I do think it is good
to think of it with respect and welcome. It is
one of the helps to human welfare, and not let
any jealous feelings mar the happiness of those concerned in it.
(42:02):
So that not from at all was printed in I'm
glad to know that now. Yeah, I have no idea
why Miriam Webster thinks it is a such such a
more recent word than it actually is. Thanks to the
folks who wrote in with various different tidbits about Boston marriage.
(42:25):
If you would like to write to us, we are
a history podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler
is missing history dot tumbler dot com. We're also on
panterst at pantriest dot com slash miss in History, and
also Instagram at missed in History. You can come to
our parent companies website at how stuff works dot com.
(42:47):
You will find all kinds of information, including some stuff
about wonder Woman. Uh. And you can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com. You will find
show notes for episodes, all the episodes call Ye and
I have done together. Those show notes are now on
the same page as the podcast player for pretty much
everything that's come out after late January. Of old ones
(43:12):
are on their own separate page, and we also have
an art five of every episode. Ever, it is searchable,
so you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or ms in
history dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Hey, Hollywood,
you do this weekend? I went a wonder Woman? Hey,
(00:21):
so did I. There might have been a lot of crying.
Me too. And I actually started working on this episode
before seeing Wonder Woman. It even so it feels like
we're maybe a little late to this party. Today, we're
gonna talk about Dr William Molton Marston, who you may
have seen his name in the credits of Wonder Woman.
(00:43):
He actually created wonder Woman. In addition to being a
Harvard educated psychologist who wrote extensively about things like human
emotions and consciousness, he also invented and popularized an early
version of the lie detector test, and, as we just said,
created under Woman. You may have even seen, if you
have seen Wonder Woman, a teaser for a forthcoming biopic
(01:06):
about him that was apparently going to be called Professor
m So if that piqued your interest, we're going to
help out with that today. Yeah. I didn't get I
didn't get that preview. I didn't know it existed until
other people were talking about it on the Internet, and
I was like, what, So to return to the subject
at hand. For folks who maybe no Wonder Woman as
(01:28):
an embodiment of truth and justice and don't have so
much knowledge about the comics earlier years or its creator,
the heads up we're about to give you might be
a little surprising. There is going to be some sex
talk today. As always, it will not be graphic or explicit,
but it will be there. And the first approximately half
(01:49):
of this episode is pretty tame. So if you think
you might uh want to bail, if perhaps younger listeners
are are listening as well, then you'll still be able
to get a sense of where some of the inspirations
for Wonder Woman came from from the first half of
the show. Uh. And also, to be clear, this is
not a history of Wonder Woman. We're not going to
(02:11):
spend a ton of time talking about the early issues
and the many, many different origin stories she has had
and all of that. It is a lot more about
Dr Marston and how his life sort of became subsumed
in this comic book character. Yeah. So, William Molton Marston
was born in Massachusetts on May nine, and while we
(02:35):
usually spend a bit of time talking about a person's
early life. His adulthood is really what's connected to what
we're talking about today. So this time around, we're going
to skip most of that early whose parents were, etcetera.
And we're going right to nineteen eleven, which was his
freshman year at Harvard, and the only subject he really
liked that first year was philosophy, and at that time
a lot of people considered psychology to be a branch
(02:58):
of philosophy. Mars Ston's philosophy professor, George Herbert Palmer, was
outspoken in his view that women and men were equal.
He was also the faculty sponsor for the Harvard Men's
League for Woman's Suffrage, which had invited Emmiline Pankhurst to
speak on campus in November of nineteen eleven, so that
would have been the November of Marston's first year of college.
(03:21):
This was an event that would have a long lasting
influence on Marston's life and work. Pankhurst was the founder
of Britain's Women's Social and Political Union, the nation's most
militant women's rights organization. It was pank Hurst's organization that
reclaimed the derogatory nicknames suffragette and wore it with pride
when other more moderate organizations preferred suffragist. By the nineteen teens,
(03:46):
the suffragettes activism included breaking windows, vandalism, and arson, with
their subsequent arrests infamously followed by hunger strikes and force feedings.
That is, of course not at all a thorough history
of the Suffragettes, but a big part of the movement
and its iconography was the use of chains. This was
really co opted from the earlier abolition movement. Suffragettes framed
(04:11):
their movement as seeking a liberation from bondage, and used
images of chains and their pamphlets and other printed material.
They also physically chained themselves to fences and other barriers
as part of their protests. One invited to Harvard in
nineteen eleven, Pankhurst was banned from actually speaking on the
Harvard campus. At that time, Harvard was an all male
(04:35):
university and it did not allow women to speak on campus.
The administration decided not to make an exception for pank Hurst,
even though it had made an exception for another woman
in the same lecture series, provided the lecture was closed
to anyone from off campus. According to the New York Times,
Pankhurst's invitation caused and quote almost unprecedented stir. The student
(05:01):
body divided into suffs who supported pankhurst invitation and antis,
who did not, and petitions circulated on both sides. And
the end, because she had been barred from speaking on campus,
the event was held off campus, with way more people
trying to get into the lecture hall than would actually fit.
Students from both Harvard and from Radcliffe College, which was
(05:23):
the women's college that started out as Harvard Annex, were
all in the audience, and Marston was caught up in
all of this. While at Harvard, Marston studied under Hugo
Munsterberg in Harvard's Experimental Psychology Lab. Munsterberg was a controversial figure.
He was recruited from Germany specifically to head up the lab,
and he maintained loyalty to Germany even in the years
(05:46):
leading into World War One. Unlike Marston's psychology professor, Munsterberg
was against both the feminist movement and the suffrage movement.
He thought women should have access to education, but not
to graduate studies, which he thought they were not suited for.
Munsterberg believed in psychological parallelism, or the idea that parallel
(06:08):
processes are always going on in both the body and
the mind, uh run parallel to you or complement each other.
He did a lot of work in applied psychology as well,
and he was conducting experiments on whether it was possible
to detect deception through speech and heart rate, as well
as skin temperature. While he did not at all agree
(06:28):
with Munsterberg's thoughts about women, Merston was fascinated with potential
connections between the mind and body and whether it was
possible to use physical responses to detect deception. Around nineteen thirteen,
his childhood sweetheart, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, who he had known
since eighth grade, told him that she noticed her blood
pressure rose when she was upset. Holloway's observation and Munsterberg's
(06:53):
prior work became the foundation for the Marston Deception Test,
a lie detector that predicted whether someone was being truthful
based on their systolic blood pressure. In his first experiment
with it, he used stories actually written by Holloway that
described a fictitious crime that a friend had committed. Participants
had to give mock court testimony about their friend, either
(07:15):
by lying or telling the truth. A mock jury offered
an opinion on whether uh this subject was being truthful,
which and then that result was compared to the blood
pressure reading. The lie detector was right of the time,
while the mock jury was only right about half the time.
(07:36):
Marston got his bachelor's degree from Harvard in nine and
that September he and Holloway, who graduated from Mount Holyoke
that year, were married. Although she took his last name,
she didn't particularly want to, and she also did not
want to be called Betty, which Marston insisted on calling her.
We're calling her Holloway in this episode for those reasons
(07:57):
as well as for clarity. Yeah, this episode would get
really confusing if if we called them both Marston over
the strenuous objections of her father. When Marston went on
to pursue a law degree from Harvard, Holloway did the
same thing from Boton University. She performed a lot better
(08:19):
than he did academically, and they both graduated in nineteen eighteen.
While he was in law school, Marston kept up with
his research into deception, offering up the use of his
lie detector and criminal investigations, and unsuccessfully to the FBI
the Office of Military Intelligence, and the Departments of War
and Justice, among many others. He was really a proponent
(08:42):
for his lie detector. In nineteen eighteen, during the US
involvement in World War One, Marston became a second lieutenant
and he served at the U. S. Army School of
Military Psychology. After the end of the war, he returned
to school again, earning a PhD in psychology from Harvard
in nine. His PhD dissertation was Systolic blood Pressure, Symptoms
(09:05):
of Deception and Constituent Mental States. Holloway mirrored his classes
at Radcliffe, although graduate degrees were not conferred to women. Yeah,
the way that Ratcliffe worked at that time was that
it was basically for women, and it was taught with
essentially identical lectures and all from Harvard faculty um. But
the women weren't really considered to be Harvard students exactly.
(09:30):
And in this case, the advanced work that she was
doing did not result in her getting a PhD along
with him. You can do all the work, but you
don't get the title. She said something very similar to that. Uh.
And from there Marston entered Academia, but Holloway, in spite
of her degrees, which she did have before this whole
(09:51):
Radcliffe course of study and her excellent academic performance, had
trouble finding a job. She did continue to assist him
with his research. We're going to talk about somewhere. After
a quick sponsor break. After finishing his pH d in psychology,
(10:11):
William Moulton Marston took a job as a professor at
American University in Washington, d C. Where he was the
chair of the psychology department. It's a pretty prestigious position
to get in your first job after grad school. For
Halloway's part, she found a job researching answers to readers
questions for a syndicated newspaper column. Marston also attempted to
(10:33):
have the lie detector evidence introduced into the murder trial
of James Alfonso Fry. During an interrogation, Fry had confessed,
but later he said that he had been pressured into
doing so. Marston's aim was to use his lie detector
to prove that Fry's original confession had been false. Two
of Marston's students were also Fry's legal counsel, and they
(10:54):
didn't put much effort into his case, planning to rest
it all on Marston's expert testimony, but the judge would
not allow Marston's testimony, and Fry was convicted. Fry really
got the worst of this deal because a series of
appeals were focused pretty much exclusively on this whole lie
detector testimony, and they led to Fry versus United States,
(11:18):
which was heard in the d C. Circuit Court. This
case established what became known as the Fry standard, basically
the idea that for scientific evidence to be introduced in court,
it had to rely on generally accepted concepts in the
relevant field. It could not, for example, rely on something
that was unproven or something that was considered to be
(11:38):
a fringe belief like Marston's lie detector was. The Fry
standard stayed on the books for a long time. It's
still in use in some states, although at this point
it's mostly been replaced by other laws. Marston's job at
American University was short lived after a completely different business
enterprise we haven't even gotten into here failed. His business
(12:01):
associates in that enterprise accused him of fraud, and that
case never came to trial, but the suspicion around it
was enough to cost Marshton his job. In nineteen five,
he started working in the psychology department at Tufts University
in Medford, Massachusetts, which is where he met Olive Byrne.
She had been born in February nineteen o four, delivered
(12:24):
by her mother's sister, Margaret Sanger. Sanger and Olive's mother,
Ethel had started the United States first contraceptive clinic together
in nineteen sixteen, and it was the foundation for what
would become planned parenthood. When Ethel Burne was arrested for
running this clinic, she went on a hunger strike that
was really threatening her life, and Sanger, without her consent,
(12:47):
negotiated a deal with the governor that she would be
pardoned if she never participated in the birth control movement again.
So all of that happened after Olive Burne's birth, but
before she started attending to US and Burne was a
student at Jackson Women's College. At Tufts University, Marston was
her professor in experimental psychology. Sadie Elizabeth Holloway had not
(13:11):
moved to Massachusetts with him. She had taken a job
as a managing editor of a psychology journal in New York.
At this point, Marston had largely stopped his study of law.
The failure of Fry versus United States really seemed to
put a damper on his enthusiasm for that, and he
had started focusing on the psychophysiology of emotions, for the
(13:33):
connections between the mind and the responses and the body
as they related to emotions. He and many others in
the field of psychology in the nineteen twenties, was extremely
interested in studying sex as well, and in studying sex
differences between men and women. And this is where today's
episode is going to turn into more adult territory. So
(13:55):
in particular, Marston was very interested in bondage, dominance, and submission.
He proposed a study in which they could examine how
women responded to being tied up and how other women
women would respond to striking the ones who were bound.
To that end, burn took him to a sorority hazing
ritual in which freshman pledges dressed like babies and were
(14:17):
led blindfolded with their hands bound while upperclassmen ordered them
around and sophomore sorority sisters hit them with sticks, and
then they interviewed participants who reported quote excited pleasantness. Marston
and Burne became involved sometime in nine and he introduced
her to his wife on Burne's graduation day in some
(14:41):
time around then is also when Marston left Toughs. It's
entirely possible that he was asked to leave based on
everything we have just said in the last few sentences.
Soon after, Marston told Holloway that he wanted burn to
move in with them, and that if she didn't allow it,
he would leave her. Articles about whether women can quote
(15:03):
have it all with all, meaning both children and a
career may seem like a recent phenomenon, but they were
already being written in and Holloway had found herself caught
in that question. She wanted children, but she had always,
long before marrying Marston, been ambitious and career oriented, so
she came to the decision that was at the time
(15:25):
pretty unconventional, illegal, and would have been completely scandalous if
anyone had found out about it. Burne could live with
them if she raised the children, and that would leave
Holloway free to focus on her career. They made up
a cover story that Burne was a relative who had
been previously married, but her husband had died. The two
(15:48):
children that burn had with Marston were really, according to
their cover story, her late husband's children and not Marston's.
I have so many timeline questions about how that worked.
Like that works for one baby, it is weird the
second baby, like, um, wait a minute, already had a
(16:09):
child from the deceased husband. Anyway, Halloway and burn each
had two children with Marston between nine and nineteen thirty three,
and they didn't even tell Burne's children who their father
was until much much later in their lives. Burne had
hoped to get a pH d and got as far
as a master's before dropping out of school to take
care of the first of these four children, which Holloway
(16:31):
gave birth to in night while working at Encyclopedia Britannica
and staying at her job as long as possible before delivering.
So it's not really typical or middle class white women
Lenti's at all. Marston's career really started to flounder in
(16:52):
the late nineteen twenties and into the nineteen thirties. He
had been fired as the chair of the psychology department
at American University, and then he either quit or was
asked to leave his assistant professorship at Toughts. He then
became a lecturer at Columbia after that, and that's really
the opposite of the trajectory that a career in academia
(17:12):
is supposed to follow. He was really struggling to make
his way in the world of academic psychology after all
his experimental work. He developed and published a number of
theories about human emotions and physical responses to them. He
theorized that psychology and neurology had complementary counterparts. Where neurology
(17:34):
had neurons or nerve cells, psychology had the theoretical structure
of psicons. The brain could be explained through neurons and
the mind could be explained through icons. He also proposed
a new framework to understand human emotions. Rather than emotions
like fear and anger, he proposed for primary emotional responses,
(17:56):
which were dominance, compliance, submission, and inducement. He published two
books exploring his theoretical framework. There was Emotions of Normal People,
which came out in ninety eight and Integrative Psychology, A
Study of Unit Response, which came out of ninety one.
This interplay between dominance and submission underpinned a lot of
(18:18):
these theories, and Emotions of Normal People also had a
lot in it that was devoted to reassuring people that
taboo sexual proclivities were really completely normal. Although he often
included Burne in Holloway and his acknowledgements or his thanks
and his books, in some cases one or both of
(18:38):
them had come closer to co writing the book, but
wasn't listed as an author, And he kept using his
lie detector, not so much to test deception anymore, but
to study emotional responses. He used it to study the
question of whether women with different hair color had different
emotional responses. I don't know why I love that so much,
(19:00):
but I sure do. It's because it's hilarious. It's very funny.
A second series of tests examined what provoked an emotional
response with the subject watching movies while hooked up to
the machine. The conclusion, according to The New York Times,
was quote that brunettes enjoyed the thrill of pursuit, while
(19:20):
blondes preferred the more passive enjoyment of being kissed. A
lot of this probably sounds at best specious and also
pretty funny, uh, but it did wind up leading to
more work in the field of pop psychology, which we're
going to talk about after another quick sponsor break in
(19:45):
Night Universal Studios posted an advertisement that they were seeking
a psychologist to help them figure out how audiences would
respond to their movies, and that psychologists wound up being
William Moulton Marston. He was hired as the director of
this studios Public Service Bureau, and once again this job
did not last very long. The passage of the Haze Code,
(20:07):
which prohibited quote im moral content in films, shifted the
types of films that the industry could make and then
consequently what kind of responses they needed to measure. They
also found a more sophisticated lie detector, the polygraph, which
was developed by John Larson and Leonard Keeler, and to
(20:27):
decided to use that to evaluate films instead. After that,
Marston tried to co found a production company called Equitable
Pictures with the goal of making feminist films, and he
had actually made a film before in his undergraduate days.
That was how he made enough money to buy Holloway's
engagement ring. However, Equitable Pictures folded just before the start
(20:49):
of the Great Depression. In his career hadn't exactly been
stable up to this point, and Marston wound up without
steady employment for a lot of the nineteen thirties. For
the most part, Holloway really supported the whole family, although
much about their family was still a secret. Some people
in academia had figured out something was going on in
(21:11):
Marston's household that was not conventional and that torpedoed some
of his academic prospects. Another woman named Marjorie Wilkes Huntley
also lived with them on and off through these decades.
Marston wrote a book called The Lie Detector Test, which
came out in ninety and this was another case in
(21:33):
which Burne was essentially a co writer. To promote his book,
he started doing publicity stunts. There was a love detector
in which pretty ladies were kissed while hooked up to it.
In nineteen thirty nine, he did a Gillette razor blade
add in which people shaved with gilette blades and then
other blades and then answered questions about the experience while
they were hooked up to the detector. The results of
(21:57):
this were apparently padded, and a second, larger study was
conducted under the supervision of Detroit police. In that study,
the results came down fifty fifty in terms of Gillette
versus other blades, and then Marston allegedly bribed someone to
say it was a in favor of Gillette. That person
declined to do. An FBI memo about this whole deal
(22:21):
includes a handwritten note on it that says, quote, I
always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this
proves it. The reason that there was an FBI memo
about it at all was that Marston's publisher had sent
a copy of the Lie Detector Test to J. Edgar
Hoover when it was published, hoping for an endorsement. Instead,
(22:42):
the FBI started a file, and the FBI's assessment of
the book was that it was quote extremely egotistical, and
mostly seemed to exist to establish the fact that Marston
had invented the lie detector. The memo concludes by summarizing
the book's conjecture that having a deception pointed out, will
call was the subject to admit his falsehood then always
(23:03):
tell the truth in the future, which quote exemplifies the
same egotistical, ridiculous strain in which the book was written. Nevertheless,
all this publicity landed Marson a lot of other pop
psychology gigs. He had articles published in Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire,
and Ladies Home journal. He wrote inspirational psychology and self
(23:24):
help books with names like You Can Be Popular and
march On Facing Life with Courage. He also wrote about women,
how in his view, women were largely superior to men.
He gave an interview with The New York Times in
ninety seven in which he said the United States was
within a century of quote the beginning of a sort
(23:45):
of Amazonian matriarchy, and in five hundred years the nation
would see a quote definite battle for sex supremacy, and
in a thousand years, he believed women would rule the
nation both politically and economically. Meanwhile, Olive Byrne had gotten
a job writing for Family Circle magazine, and in her
(24:05):
article she would visit in air quotes famed psychologist Dr
William Molton Marston, who she pretended to know only in
this professional capacity, having in fact met him in order
to interview him. For one of these articles. She would
seek out his professional opinion on child behavior, like, for example,
what to do about a child who was lying all
(24:27):
the time. And in one of these articles the question
was along the lines of I've heard comic books might
be dangerous for children, are they? That was not That's
the sum up of the articles question, Okay, I'm gonna
stop giggling. Comic books at this point had a terrible reputation.
(24:50):
Although the United States hadn't yet become involved, World War
Two was underway and storylines were becoming increasingly violent. The
Chicago Daily News called calm x quote sex horror serials.
Superman had just debuted in ninety eight and Batman in
ninety nine, and they weren't exactly being written as wholesome
role models. Superman came off as a fascist and Batman
(25:13):
was shooting people. So, in her guise of a concerned parent,
Olive Byrne visited famous psychologist William Molton Marston to ask
if comic books were harmful, and his position was that
they were, for the most part, just harmless wish fulfillment.
People read them because they knew that the heroine was
going to be rescued by the hero at the last moment.
(25:35):
She wasn't in any real danger that in most cases
no harm came to her on the page. So his
opinion like people weren't even being taught to enjoy violence
because they were always saved from the violence. This article
caught the attention of Maxwell Charles Gaines of Detective Comics
later known, of course, as d C Comics. He hired
(25:56):
Marston in nineteen forty because he wanted Marston's help defending
him from critics and turning comics reputation around, and Marston's
assessment the root problem of comic books was their quote
blood curdling masculinity. Quote. The obvious remedy, he wrote was
(26:16):
quote to create a feminine character with all the strength
of a superman plus all the allure of a good
and beautiful woman. Marston wanted to provide a role model
for girls and to introduce boys to a feminist hero,
and at one point he said, quote, frankly, Wonder Woman
is psychological propaganda for the type of woman who I
(26:36):
believe should rule the world. Gaines agreed to publish such
a comic if Marston wrote it. He turned in his
first draft, originally titled Suprema the Wonder Woman, in nine
and here's where Wonder Woman became a synthesis of all
these things we've been talking about for this entire episode.
We talked at the top of the show about how
(26:57):
the Suffragettes had used metaphors and depictions of Haynes and
bondage picked up, as we said, from the abolition movement.
That same idea and those same images were picked up
by the greater feminist movement as well. Marston, an advocate
for both of these movements, put that same imagery into
Wonder Woman. According to his writing, if Wonder Woman were
(27:21):
chained up by a man, she would lose her power,
and she was in an overwhelming number of the early
comics chained up by men. Because he also had a
golden lasso that would compel people to tell the truth
like the Lae Detector that Marston had spent so much
of his career trying to convince people was genuine, and
(27:41):
she came from an island inhabited only by women, depicted
in many ways as superior to men, and was framed
in a way that was explicitly feminist. Another aspect came
from Marston's personal life. Wonder Woman's wide bracelets were patterned
after those worn by all of Byrne instead of a
wedding ring, and there are a lot of moments in
(28:01):
Marston's Wonder Woman stories that clearly parallel his life like
a lot a lot. A villain named Dr Psycho was
probably inspired by Hugo Munsterberg, The gates at Holiday College
look a lot like the gates at Harvard. Check out
Jill Lapoor's The Secret History of Wonder Woman if that
sounds interesting, because there is a lot more to delve
(28:22):
into there that is not really part of this so
much she and that book also has a lot more
of the history of Wonder Woman's various incarnations that were
not really going to get into here. It's a really
good book. I read it as part of the research
for this show. Enjoyed it. Thoroughly written by Marston and
drawn by HD Peter, Wonder Woman debuted and All Star
(28:45):
Comics Number eight in the fall of n and she
was immediately immensely popular, with sales of her titles topping
half a million copies by the third issue. She also
drew a lot of controversy. She really wasn't wearing a
lot of clothes, and she got tied up a lot.
Josette Frank of the Child Study Association called it full
(29:07):
of sex antagonisms and perversions, to which Marston replied, quote Frankly,
I don't know what she means. Probably my basic idea
of women fighting male dominance, cruelty savagery and warmaking with love,
control backed by force is what she means by sex antagonisms.
But whatever Marston is the Niles, those so called sex
(29:28):
antagonisms and perversions were really obvious in the minds of
some of the critics. Because Wonder Woman was from an
island populated only by women, and because of the way
those women sometimes interacted with each other, people alleged that
the comic was promoting lesbianism, which at the time was
widely considered to be immoral and also in most places
(29:49):
was illegal. An infantry soldier wrote to Marston in three
basically spelling out that he personally was into sexual bondage
and dering if Marston was too because of how he
was depicting Wonder Woman. That is a complicated question we
cannot answer in the scope of this podcast because the
(30:13):
only people alive to ask are their children, and honestly,
how much do most children know about their parents sexual behavior. Regardless,
though a meeting that followed led into a decision to
cut down the depictions of Wonder Woman tied up by
between fifty and seventy Marston did not agree with the
criticism that Wonder Woman was promoting sexual bondage or torture.
(30:36):
In his words, quote, Wonder Woman breaks the bonds of
those who are slaves to evil masters, but she doesn't
leave the freed ones free to assert their own egos
in uncontrolled self gratification. Wonder Woman binds the victims again
in love chains. That is, she makes them submit to
a loving superior, a beneficent mistress or master, who in
(30:58):
every case represents God or Goodness or aphrodite goddess of
love and beauty. Freedom usually goes through a stage, as
in progressive education, where it becomes detrimental through lack of discipline,
which was a side note that bondage and torture definitely
not the same thing, but a lot of the criticisms
of Wonder Woman conflated that altogether. At first, it was
(31:21):
kept secret that famed psychologist William Moulton Marston was writing
Wonder Woman. The first issues were published under the name
Charles Moulton instead, but All American Comics issued a press
release in the summer of nineteen forty two announcing that
he was the creator and author his polyamorous home life
and the fact that Olive Byrne Sadie Holloway had both
(31:42):
contributed to Wonder Woman in a meaningful way where kept secret.
As examples, we already talked about burns bracelets as the
inspiration for Wonder Woman's wrist cuffs. Holloway, who had studied
Greek in college and was a huge admirer of Sappho,
supplied advice on how Wonder Woman's interjections shouldn't be along
(32:03):
the lines of Vulcan's hammer. The should be more about
women like suffering Sappho. Wonder Woman was nationally syndicated in
newspapers in nineteen forty four. Marston died on May second,
nineteen forty seven, at the age of fifty three of cancer.
Holloway advocated for her following him as a Wonder Woman's writer. Instead,
(32:27):
Robert Cannager followed, and he made Wonder Woman, instead of
being a superhero, into a model movie star a babysitter.
He also replaced wonder Women of History, which was a
feature that had been part of Wonder Woman comics that
talked about, as the name suggests, amazing women from the
historical past. He replaced that feature with one that was
(32:48):
about weddings. Since her introduction in Wonder Woman has become
one of the longest running comic book characters in history.
She is essentially the only female character from the early
days of mass produced comics to survive until the present,
and she's become an icon both as a character and
as a feminist symbol. The feminist publication Miss magazine put
(33:11):
wonder Woman on the cover for its first regular issue. Technically,
there was a preview issue with a different cover that
came out in the spring of nineteen seventy two, and
that first full issue with wonder Woman came out in July.
The cover read wonder Woman for President and Peace and Justice.
In seventy two, Wonder Woman was also the u n's
Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls in
(33:34):
a controversial move that lasted for two months in twenty sixteen.
Olive Byrne died in nineteen nine and Elizabeth Holloway Marston
died in They had continued to live together for forty
three years after Marston's death. Pay to Me are one
of the most interesting pieces of this whole story, because
when Marston came to Holloway and was like, hey, there's
(33:58):
an ultimatum. Is a student, Here's an ultimatum in which
my student is going to move in with us, Like
that's definitely presented as an ultimatum. And most people who
describe that situation like describe it as something that was
definitely like you're gonna do this or I'm gonna leave,
which is ah, most folks I know in the polyamory
(34:20):
community would not agree that that is a healthy way
to approach a relationship, but they really like after he died,
they continued to be together and essentially until one of
them last years, like the it was a desk to
us part situation with the two of them as well
as with the two of them with him involved in
(34:42):
the triangle, which to me is really interesting. Yeah, I
feel like it would be great if one day we
get some secret journal that one of them had kept
where we really get more in depth of how their
whole dynamic amongst the three of them work founded in
that way that is not eel normally, Like, how did
(35:03):
it kind of progress to the point that that they
did want to stay together for another forty three years
without him? Yeah. Well, and Jilliport, when she was researching
her book on the Secret History of Wonder Woman, she
entered she interviewed their three surviving children and the spouse
of the fourth of their children. She talked to all
(35:24):
of them, and she got access to all these family papers. Um,
and there was there was a lot of really candid discussion.
But then there was also like some stuff that the
kids were like, yeah, we did not really we didn't
know that that he was our father until way later.
Uh So, like there's there's a lot of stuff that
will probably always be unanswered, some of which because like
how much do we really need to know about what
(35:47):
they were doing? And then some of it, you know,
some of it still continues to be fascinating. Yeah, when
I say that, please, no, I'm not looking for like
a c D till all. I'm really curious about the
psycho bology of how the three of them, again having
founded this relationship on an ultimatum, that evolved into something
(36:08):
that was clearly much more than that and not it
seemed I mean, again, we're not in it, so we
don't know, but it seemed like it must have been
healthy for the to some degree. Yeah. So well, and
Burne and Holloway both were very unconventional for women in
their time, Like they both had way more education than
women typically did. Um, a lot of Holloway's uh focus,
(36:32):
Like she really was focused on um literature and law,
and she was really into being educated and pursuing a career.
And you know in their class that like that was
not really common. Yeah. Uh. And then with al of Burn,
a lot of like her gender presentation in college was
(36:56):
very androgynous and she was really interested in pursuing a PhD.
Like they both were outside of the norm for women
a lot. So I think all of them are really
interesting as people and as examples of like a relationship
that was not within the norms of society. Like in
(37:17):
some circles this would still be scandalous today, but at
the time it was been really scandalous in career ending
for all three of them. Do you have some career
ending listener mail? I hope not. Before we get into
the listener, mail, I just wanted to say really quickly,
Holly and I, you were doing a live show in
(37:38):
Seneca Falls. Yeah, July sixteenth, which is a Sunday at
an event called Convention Days. Uh. You can find more
information about that on our website and we've been talking
about on our social media. We don't want it to
be a surprise to listeners that we will be out there.
We are looking forward to it. So again that's July
(37:59):
and Seneca Falls, New York. It's a very pretty time
of year out in the Finger Lakes, and I do
have some listener mail. I'm approaching our listener mail a
little bit differently today. In our Ladies of Fan Gothlin episode,
we talked about the idea of the Boston marriage and
how I had not been able to figure out exactly
(38:19):
when that term came into use. UM, and we got
email from Rebecca, Alicia, and Courtney about Boston marriage. UM.
So thank you all three of you for sending email
about Boston marriage. I wanted to both clarify what my
question was and also answer it, which I'm really excited about.
I would down a deep rabbit hole about Boston marriage.
(38:42):
So when researching that episode, I was already familiar with
the term Boston marriage and that it was U used
to describe women having a relationship a relationship. I'm using
that and it's broad sense, like it's it's entirely likely
that in some cases these were like romantic partnerships, but
in some cases they were more like practical roommate situations.
(39:05):
But there were women making a life together, uh, in
a way that was public. People knew about it um
and didn't you know, they didn't have a male partner,
which at the time was not particularly typical. What was
totally unclear to me was when people actually started using
this term, because according to Miriam Webster, it's first use
(39:25):
was in and so I was, yeah, and it's not
in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is my go to
location to find out when words in English arrived. So
in the time leading up to that episode, I was
not able to figure out whether this was a term
that was in use at the time that it's used
(39:48):
to describe, or whether it was like a modern word
that was coined way more recently. I have now answered
that question. Uh. The first known use of the term
Boston marriage and writing was published in a letter to
the editor of the Open Court, which was a journal
printed in Chicago. This was printed on January five, eight three,
(40:13):
and it was by Edna D. Cheney, and she was
writing in response to a legal dust up um in
which two women had had made a home together at
one of the women's father was trying to pursue legal
action over it um, and she wrote this seems very
strange to one who for many years has been accustomed
(40:36):
to the existence of ties between women so intimate and
persistent that they are fully recognized by their friends, and
of late have acquired, if not a local habitation, at
least the name, for they have been christened Boston marriages.
This institution deserves to be recognized as a really valuable
one for women in our present state of civilization. With
(40:58):
the great number of women in our date that an
excess of the men, and with the present independence of women,
which renders marriage merely for a home no longer acceptable,
the proportion of those who can enter into that relation
is diminished, and the glorious spellings of old maids must
find sub substitute for the joys of family life. These relations,
(41:20):
so far as I have known, and I have known
many of them, are not usually planned for convenience or economy,
but out of a constantly increasing attachment, favored by circumstances
which make such a marriage the best refuge against the
solitude of growing age. And then later on in her
letter she says, I do not propose that we should
(41:41):
formally adopt the Boston marriage into our civil code and
celebrate it with ceremonies and festivities, or simplicity and privacy
especially become it. But I do think it is good
to think of it with respect and welcome. It is
one of the helps to human welfare, and not let
any jealous feelings mar the happiness of those concerned in it.
(42:02):
So that not from at all was printed in I'm
glad to know that now. Yeah, I have no idea
why Miriam Webster thinks it is a such such a
more recent word than it actually is. Thanks to the
folks who wrote in with various different tidbits about Boston marriage.
(42:25):
If you would like to write to us, we are
a history podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler
is missing history dot tumbler dot com. We're also on
panterst at pantriest dot com slash miss in History, and
also Instagram at missed in History. You can come to
our parent companies website at how stuff works dot com.
(42:47):
You will find all kinds of information, including some stuff
about wonder Woman. Uh. And you can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com. You will find
show notes for episodes, all the episodes call Ye and
I have done together. Those show notes are now on
the same page as the podcast player for pretty much
everything that's come out after late January. Of old ones
(43:12):
are on their own separate page, and we also have
an art five of every episode. Ever, it is searchable,
so you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or ms in
history dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.