As promised, we’re doing our best to cover a variety of genres. For April, we decided to take a stab at non-fiction! We saw Captain Marvel a few weeks ago and immediately started discussing which super hero we would be (as you do). Both of us wanted to be Wonder Woman, so we figured – why not learn more about her?
The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, examines more than just Wonder Woman’s history – it examines the history behind Wonder Woman. Who was her creator? What was his life like? Who inspired her? Jill Lepore explores all of these questions and more.
By the way, in case you were wondering, we have decided that Jacquie would be Captain Marvel and Chrissy would be Scarlet Witch. Maybe just… file that away for future use.
A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of Wonder Woman, one of the world’s most iconic superheroes, hides within it a fascinating family story – and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism.
Beginning in his undergraduate years, William Moulton Marston – creator of Wonder Woman – was influenced by early suffragists and feminists. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth – he invented the lie detector test – lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights – a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Description abridged from Goodreads; book design by Maggie Hinders
(Read) Between the Vines 