Download Film Me And My Moulton ' title='Download Film Me And My Moulton ' />The Man Behind Wonder Woman Was Inspired By Both Suffragists And Centerfolds NPRDAVID BIANCULLI, HOST This is FRESH AIR. Im David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. The most popular female comic book hero of all time has a secret past, as revealed in Jill Lepores best selling book, The Secret History Of Wonder Woman, out this week in paperback. The creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, led a secret life with his wife and his mistress. Free radio for everything you do. Store 50,000 tracks from your personal collection. Subscribe for ondemand access to 40 million songs and offline listening. Most young male fans from my generation failed to appreciate the gender imbalance in comic books. After all, what were the XMen without powerful Xwomen Storm, Rogue. Rep. Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, has been calling for new leadership of the Democratic Party. NPRs Robert Siegel asks him why a change is necessary. Download Film Me And My Moulton ' title='Download Film Me And My Moulton ' />He fathered children which each of them, and they all lived together. His vision for wonder woman reflected his interest in the womens suffrage movement and in Margaret Sanger, the birth control and womens rights activist who also happened to be his mistresss aunt. Wonder Womans costume was inspired by his interest in erotic pinup art. Jill Lepore became intrigued by Wonder Womans history and discovered the Marston Sanger connection while researching two seemingly unrelated subjects. One was a legal story involving the lie detector which was invented by Marston before he created Wonder Woman. The other was a history of Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger. Lepore is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a professor of American history at Harvard. Terry Gross spoke with Jill Le. Pore last year. SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCASTTERRY GROSS, HOST Jill Lepore, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Let me just start with a really obvious question. For people who have never read Wonder Woman and just know her more as a metaphor. LAUGHTERGROSS. Just describe Wonder Woman, the super hero character. JILL LEPORE Laughter Well, yeah, thanks for having me. Its fun being here. Wonder Woman is an Amazon from an island of women who left ancient Greece to escape the enslavement of men. They lived on Paradise Island and had eternal life. And a plane crashes on their island, carrying a man. And Wonder Womans mother decides he needs to be brought back to where he came from cause they can have no man on Paradise Island. So she stitches for Wonder Woman this star spangled costume, and Wonder Woman flies in her invisible jet with her man captive, Steve Trevor, whos a U. S. military intelligence officer, back to the United States this is in 1. Wonder Woman because she has superhuman powers that only Amazons have. She has bracelets that can stop bullets. She has a magic lasso a golden lasso anyone she ropes has to tell the truth, and then shes got the cool jet. GROSS So it is just amazing to me that this character is inspired, in part, by Margaret Sanger and the suffragists and Margaret Sanger being the mother of the birth control movement, the person who came up with the term birth control. So how did the creator, William Moulton Marston, come to care first about the suffragists LEPORE So it turns out Marston has all kinds of ties to the early progressive era suffrage and feminist and birth control movements sort of an uncanny number and complexity of ties. But it starts really if you think about Wonder Woman as containing within it a great deal about the story of Marstons own life, his ties really begin when he, as a Harvard freshman in 1. In the fall of 1. Movies On Dvd Shrek 5. Harvard Mens League for Womens Suffrage invites the incredible Emmeline Pankhurst to campus to speak in Sanders Theatre, which is, like, the largest lecture hall on campus. And the Harvard Corporation is terrified. Women are not allowed to speak on campus, and theyve made one exception in the past. And they say theyre not going to make an exception for Emmeline Pankhurst, who is scary, in the sense that she and her followers in England have been doing things like chaining themselves to the gates outside 1. Downing Street and getting arrested. They believe, really, that the fight for suffrage has been so many decades and gotten nowhere that any means necessary are, at this point, allowed. So Pankhurst is banned from speaking on campus, and this is kind of a big fracas across the country cause people like to take potshots at Harvard, of course. But also, its kind of hilarious that Harvard is so terrified of this tiny, little woman Emmeline Pankhurst. They prevent her from speaking on campus, and so she speaks off campus in this kind of dance hall on Brattle Street in Harvard Square. And just pay attention even to that alone theres so much in there that reappears in Wonder Woman 3. Marston creates Wonder Woman in 1. Hes a grown man. Hes a sort of prominent person at that point. But one of the things thats a defining element of Wonder Woman is that if a man binds her in chains, she loses all of her Amazonian strength. And so in almost every episode of the early comics the ones that Marston wrote shes chained up or shes roped up. Its usually chains. And then she has to break free of these chains, and thats, Marston would always say, in order to signify her emancipation from men. But those chains are really an important part of the feminist and suffrage struggles of the 1. Marston was had a kind of front row seat for. GROSS Because those women were chained up LEPORE Yeah, because they would chain themselves three women chained themselves to the gates outside the White House in protest. Their suffrage parades women would march in chains. I mean, they imported that iconography from the abolitionist campaigns of the 1. United States emerges out of the abolition campaign. And chains become a really important signal. And women, in the wake of emancipation and in the aftermath of the Civil War, really turned to the imagery of chains and enslavement and the language of enslavement to talk about the ways in which they have not yet been fully emancipated that they are themselves slaves. So Sanger, for instance you know, she publishes a collection of letters from women called Motherhood in Bondage, which is its all over the place the rhetoric and the language of enslavement. GROSS However, we should acknowledge and well get into this in more detail later theres a big kind of fetishistic, sexual aspect to the bondage and the chains in Wonder Woman. Well get to that a little later. LAUGHTERGROSS So. LEPORE Thats a little teaser, Terry, right there. GROSS Thats just a little teaser. Yeah. LEPORE Stay tuned. Bondage is coming up. GROSS But this next thing is good enough to hold us over for a while. LAUGHTERGROSS I mean, one of the really amazing things youve uncovered in your book is that the creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, lived in a menage a trois, eventually, but earlier in his life, there were two women he was with. There was his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, and another woman, Olive Byrne, and Olive Byrne was Margaret Sangers niece. And so they were in a relationship together. He had four children by those two women. And of course, they couldnt make it public. But describe a little bit this arrangement that he had, first, with these two women. LEPORE So Marston married his childhood sweetheart in 1. He graduated from Harvard that year, and she graduated from Mount Holyoke. This is Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, who becomes Betty Marston. And she was quite an interesting and ambitious woman, a really career oriented woman of that generation of you know, one of the first generations of women to go to college. And Marston embarks on an academic career. He first teaches at American University, and then, in something of a scandal, he loses that job. And he ends up teaching at Tufts in 1. Olive Byrne. Olive Byrnes mother is Ethel Byrne, who is the sister of Margaret Sanger. Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger together founded what becomes Planned Parenthood in 1. United States in Brooklyn. And they are immediately arrested within days of the clinic opening. An undercover policewoman comes in and asks for contraception contraceptives, and Ethel Byrne explains how to use a pessary or a diaphragm. Ethel Byrne is convicted on obscenity charges and sent to prison for a 3. And she goes on a hunger strike.