Marston, Holloway and Olive Byrne all lived together under the same roof in a polyamorous relationship with the cover story that Byrne, who penned an advice column for housewives in the Family Circle magazine in spite of her unconventional lifestyle, was a widowed sister-in-law. Byrne’s mother, Ethel, had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States with Sanger, and she nearly died in prison from a hunger strike after her 1917 arrest for illegal distribution of contraception. Marston had married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Holloway, in 1915, and a decade later the psychology professor fell in love with one of his students, Olive Byrne, who was also Sanger’s niece. Marston’s response may have been rooted in his liberal sexual views for the inventor of the lie-detector test lived quite a big lie of his own. “The secret of woman’s allure,” Marston said in response to one objection of Wonder Woman’s constant binding, is that “women enjoy submission-being bound.” Lepore suggests the chains could have also been tied to Marston’s bondage fantasies. Roosevelt and behind only Henry Ford in their contributions to humanity. Marston thought so highly of Sanger that in 1937 he placed her ahead of President Franklin D. From his days as a Harvard undergraduate before women had the right to vote, Marston had sympathized with suffragists and birth-control advocates such as Margaret Sanger who had symbolically used chains to represent American patriarchy. As Harvard historian Jill Lepore writes in her book “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” this was no accident. Indeed, a 1943 issue had Wonder Woman winning a presidential election over the Man’s World Party-albeit 1,000 years in the future as Marston had predicted.Ĭontroversy grew around Wonder Woman due to her skimpy outfits and her particular proclivity for being tied or chained up in nearly every story. “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world,” Marston wrote.

Wonder woman rule 34