JillLepore

It's fascinating that the backstory has been changed, huh? I argue in the book that Wonder Woman's original origin story--the one written by Marston in 1941--borrows, very heavily, actually, from the conventions of Progressive Era feminist utopian fiction. I had never noticed that, as a kid, but when I went back and read the comics, a few years ago, it leaps right out at you, if you've read stuff like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's HERLAND (1915). I'm not a comics purist, that's for sure, but I do think changing the origin story is pretty odd. It's her whole thing, that origin story. The daughter of Zeus? Um, no.

Just to clarify what I meant: Sure, fine to have whatever characters have different backstories and sure, fine, to have a woman be a man's daughter. But making Wonder Woman the son of Zeus is like making Superman come from Kansas, not Krypton.

There's a lot of armchair casting for these things, right? Everyone has an opinion. Should Ben Affleck be Batman? I don't know. Does anyone know? I don't think so. I wrote a piece in The New Yorker, called The Last Amazon, in which I talked a little bit about that. My thinking is, when what people are chiefly complaining about is the size of an actresses's breasts, you have to set those complaints aside. My guess is that it's an unusually difficult role to write, and to cast, and to direct.

Gosh, that's an interesting question. One thing I find troubling, both about the comics and the culture, is the fixation on female sexual power. Hey, what about political power? The history of Wonder Woman is a good illustration of this problem. She's launched as an explicitly feminist project--to show the world, and especially girls who read comics--that women can do anything. But then she's a pin-up girl. A cultural icon, or at least a rich cultural icon, has a lot of different meanings, of course. So, Lady Gaga: feminist icon or soft porn? That's been a question for a very long time. You can see it on every page of the correspondence that survives between M.C. Gaines, who published Wonder Woman from 1941 to 1947, and the members of his editorial advisory board. Those letters are unbelievably interesting. But they don't feel especially out of date ...

It wasn't on purpose; I stumbled onto it. I've been working for a while now on a bunch of different projects related to the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. For those projects, I nded up reading a lot about William Moulton Marston, because he was involved in a very important case in the law of evidence (Frye v. U.S., 1923), and because he is also credited with inventing the lie detector (which is an important moment in the history of privacy). Then I got an assignment to write a piece for The New Yorker about Planned Parenthood, and while reading the papers of Planned Parenthood, and of its founder, Margaret Sanger, I kept coming across stuff from women in Marston's family. That really knocked me out--the tie between Sanger and Wonder Woman. And it seemed like too important a missing piece of American political history to NOT write about it.