Wonder Woman Unbound (12 page)

After the first issue premiered, Marble sent packages to several notable American women asking for their help. The package contained items like
Wonder Woman
#1 and a copy of Marston’s article “Women: Servants of Civilization” from
Tomorrow
magazine, as well as a letter. Marble wrote that “women still have many problems and have not yet reached their fullest growth and development” and that “
Wonder Woman
marks the first time that daring, strength and ingenuity have been featured as womanly qualities.” She asked each of the recipients to use an included form to list the famous women they’d like to see profiled and to send it back to her. The whole campaign was a very thorough operation.

However, it looks like Marble left her editorial position after sixteen issues, or roughly four years, because the byline “as told by Alice Marble” no longer appeared on “Wonder Women of History” after
Wonder Woman
#16. While the exact details of her departure are unknown, it was likely for personal reasons. In 1944, the newly married Marble suffered a miscarriage after a car accident, then days later learned that her husband had been killed in the war. She attempted suicide soon after, though she survived and recovered,
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but it’s reasonable to assume that comic books weren’t much of a priority for her during this time. Despite the loss of Marble, “Wonder Women of History” continued after her departure, profiling over fifty women before it was canceled.

Each edition of “Wonder Women of History” followed the same pattern: the subject overcame some kind of adversity, usually related to her gender, and ultimately accomplished something of great importance. They were heroic stories, and showed how one woman could have a big impact and influence the world. As fantastic as Wonder Woman was, presenting real-life role models alongside her adventures showed that being a strong and successful woman wasn’t just for people with superpowers.

Due to their short length, the writing on “Wonder Women of History” had to be to the point, but that didn’t stop Alice Marble and, after she left, famed editor Julius Schwartz from crafting thorough and engaging stories. The art was intriguing as well. It used a realistic style to present an authentic depiction of each woman’s historical setting. The first six strips were drawn by legendary comics artist Sheldon Moldoff, one of the main artists for Batman during the Golden and Silver Ages. He was followed by notable artists like Paul Reinman, Bob Oksner, and Alfonso Greene.
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The strips were always engaging as well as informative.

“Wonder Women of History” covered an impressive array of professions. No matter what career a young reader was interested in, the feature likely had an ideal role model. Medicine was the best-represented field, and the strips included five nurses, three doctors, and various medical researchers and health reform advocates. There were obvious choices like Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, but also many lesser-known women like Florence Rena Sabin, the first woman to graduate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Dorothea Lynde Dix, an advocate for the mentally ill whose work led to the creation of America’s first mental asylums.

Women’s rights was a popular topic as well. The women profiled spanned the history of women’s fight for the right to vote, from Lucretia Mott and Emma Willard in the early 1800s to Susan B. Anthony in the latter half of the century to Carrie Chapman Catt and the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Abolitionists and civil rights advocates had several representatives too, including Sojourner Truth, a former slave turned abolitionist; Julia Ward Howe, the writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; and Lillian D. Wald, one of the founders of the NAACP. The rest of the biographies depicted a myriad of professions; there were three astronomers, three authors, two aviators, two First Ladies, two lawyers, two Nobel laureates, a journalist, a missionary, an opera singer, a saint, a sculptor, a sharpshooter, and many others.
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As if showcasing strong women wasn’t enough, the feature was also diverse in terms of race and nationality. While Americans dominated “Wonder Women of History,” with Great Britain and France close behind, there were women like Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the famed wife of the Chinese general; Mumtaz Mahal, the Indian empress for whom the Taj Mahal was built; Emilja Plater, a Polish/Lithuanian revolutionary; and Queen Margrete, a medieval queen of Scandinavia, just to name a few. The Native American population was represented too, with Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark’s Shoshone guide.

Between “Wonder Women of History” and the adventures of the amazing Amazon, the early years of
Wonder Woman
presented women as heroes in both a literal and a fanciful manner. Young girls could play as Wonder Woman in the backyard every afternoon after they studied hard at school each day to be the next Marie Curie or Clara Barton. This progressive double feature was incredibly rare in the 1940s; women had just earned the right to vote two decades before, and many people still weren’t pleased about that. While the war may have given women some new opportunities in the workforce, that quickly ended once the fighting was done and the men came home. Encouraging young girls to grow up to be anything other than housewives and mothers wasn’t a huge priority, but
Wonder Woman
told them they could be anything they wanted to be. However, by the late 1940s, the supplementary contents of
Wonder Woman
began to change.

The Interregnum

After Marston’s death in 1947 and before
Wonder Woman’s
shift to the Silver Age in 1958, the additional contents of the series were completely revamped. This started soon after Marston passed away, thus the timing seems more than coincidental. Marston died in May 1947, and 1948 saw two big changes to the book’s supplementary materials. First, “Wonder Women of History” lowered its page count, and second, the prose section shifted from stories to essays.

Before 1948, almost every edition of “Wonder Women of History” had been four pages long, but the profile of Sacajawea in
Wonder Woman
#27, published in January 1948, was only two pages. As was the profile of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the following issue. The next two subjects, Dorothea Lynde Dix and Nellie Bly, each had three-page strips, but Jenny Lind and Mary Slessor were the only women to have a four-page profile after 1948. From January 1948 until the feature’s final appearance in May 1954, the twenty-nine women profiled got an average of 2.4 pages each.

Furthermore, “Wonder Women of History” became increasingly intermittent over these six years. It sporadically skipped months, and then the feature disappeared for seven issues after
Wonder Woman
#57 in January 1953, finally returning more than a year later. But this return was short-lived; the next two women profiled, medical scientist Florence Rena Sabin and lawyer Gail Laughlin, were the last two new profiles, receiving only one page each. Laughlin’s profile was buried with the advertisements at the very end of the comic book, and after
Wonder Woman
#66 the feature was over for good. “Wonder Women of History” faded away without any fanfare, a rather inauspicious end for a strip that had been in
Wonder Woman
since its very first issue.

The shift from prose stories to essays was, in its initial years, insignificant. The adventure stories were replaced by mildly interesting essays on seemingly random topics: the first essay was entitled “Race to the Top of the World” and discussed attempts to reach the North Pole; the second, “You Name It,” explained the origins of several common last names; topics for the next several essays included the calendar, the Colossus of Rhodes, pineapples, and unique headdresses from around the world. The essays were gender neutral, aimed only at those curious about fruit, headwear, or the ancient wonders of the world. This informative new endeavor lasted for a few years, but by 1952 the essays had a different aim. The topics were geared toward girls, as the following list of essays shows:

• Wonder Woman
  #51—“Let’s Dance!”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #52—“What the Well-Dressed Women Wore 300 Years Ago”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #53—“Fashions of the Far East”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #54—“Swing Your Partner!”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #55—“Those Rings on Your Finger”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #56—“Women in War”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #57—“Her Crowning Glory”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #58—“Those Lovely Liberty Belles”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #59—“Background to Stardom”
  
• Wonder Woman
  #60—“With This Ring …”
  

These ten essays included two about fashion, two about dancing, two about jewelry, one about hairstyles (“Her Crowning Glory” is about hair, not crowns), and one about becoming a movie star. Now, while many boys enjoy dancing and fashion and the like, these were topics aimed squarely at young girls.

Two of these essays didn’t quite fit this format: “Women in War” was about warrior queens, and “Those Lovely Liberty Belles” discussed the need for women in the armed forces. However, “Those Lovely Liberty Belles” made sure to point out that a woman in the armed services “can wear her hair in bangs or a chignon, and she can wear nail polish,” adding hairstyles and fashion to the mix.
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By and large, the essays continued in this manner from then on. There was the occasional essay on the Leaning Tower of Pisa or umbrellas, but dancing and perfume and jewelry and dolls were the types of topics that dominated the feature. This isn’t to say that those topics were bad; there’s nothing inherently wrong with learning about different hairstyles throughout history. There’s just a stark juxtaposition between “Wonder Women of History” telling the reader about the first female doctor or Nobel Prize–winning scientist and “Your Favorite Color” offering readers some tips on what colors of clothing best matched their hair and complexion. The subtext couldn’t be more different.

A close look at May 1954’s
Wonder Woman
#66, the last issue where “Wonder Women of History” appeared, gives us a sense of the extra features in this era:

• The inside cover featured a strip from the National Social Welfare Assembly called “Binky Says: Welcome Amigo!” that taught children to be kind and welcoming to Mexican immigrants.
  
• There was a half-page strip titled “Broken Engagements!” that showed superstitions about what could break off an engagement, like a woman putting cream in her coffee before the sugar or sitting on a table while talking to her fiancé.
  
• A full-page strip called “Clothing of Fortune!” was also about superstitions. The reader learned how doing up your buttons wrong would lead to bad luck all day, and that it’s important for a girl to take off a garment when a tear needs to be mended “lest she lead a threadbare existence the rest of her life.”
  
• Another full-page strip, “Wedding Forecast,” provided some “sooth-saying” suggestions for how to tell when and who you’ll marry, such as pulling out enough strands of your hair to match your age, and then burning them one by one until you see a vision of your future husband.
  
• The next strip was “Romantic Notions …,” and it provided even more marriage-related superstitions. For example, you shouldn’t marry someone whose last name starts with the same letter as yours because “If you change the name and not the letter, you change for the worse and not the better.”
  
• There was a two-page essay on “The Dazzling Dolls,” a history of doll collecting from ancient Rome to Belgium and China. It said that “psychologists tell us that little girls love dolls because of an innate mother instinct” and suggested that this desire to play with dolls and pretend to be a mother “is nature’s way of preparing them for their future roles in life.”
  
• Buried at the very back of the book was the one-page “Wonder Women of History” strip on Gail Laughlin. We very succinctly learn how Laughlin earned a law degree, met President Coolidge to argue for equal rights, fought for women’s suffrage, and argued a case before the Supreme Court. There were no tips on how to get a man, though.
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If you take out “Wonder Women of History,” which they did the very next issue, you can see that marriage and children were the main focus of the extra features by the mid-1950s. The informative essays became pro-domesticity propaganda, and the humor strips disappeared entirely. Interestingly, these new romance-centric strips had the same style as “Wonder Women of History,” with realistic art and more narration than speech balloons, giving the superstition-laden strips the appearance of the same weight and factual value as the tales of women’s historical achievements. As the Silver Age began, these random strips evolved into regular features that dominated the extra materials in
Wonder Woman.

The Silver Age