The Secret History of Wonder Woman

This second chapter introduces Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, Marston’s girlfriend and future wife. She was born the same year as Marston on the Isle of Man in England and moved to the United States in 1898 when she was five. Her family also lived in Cliftondale before moving to Dorchester, south of Boston, when she was in high school. Holloway was tough, someone who could hold her own among the neighborhood boys. Once, for instance, she worked over two boys who were beating up her brother. As Lepore writes, she retained this toughness when she went to college at the all-girls school Mount Holyoke: “She was bold; she was unflinching: she played field hockey” (18).

The author explains that education for women came late to America, as Mount Holyoke College wasn’t founded until 1837. Through the 18th century, girls had not even been taught to write. Early ventures into their education focused on their need to raise informed sons who could be good citizens of a democracy, but women’s education for its own sake gained steam during the 19th century. The suffrage cause was strong at Mount Holyoke when Holloway was a student there; its president, Mary Woolley, had helped to establish the National College Equal Suffrage League, which almost half the students belonged to in 1915.

Feminism was also a recent idea that had become popular, transforming the idea of women’s rights. No longer were women set on a pedestal and deemed morally superior to men by their greater purity; feminism instead demanded equality with men and full participation in all aspects of life. What’s more, feminists wanted to control their own bodies and enjoy sex for pleasure, not just as the duty of having children. Holloway bought into this view wholeheartedly.

At Mount Holyoke, Holloway’s favorite subject was Greek, and her favorite book was on the writings of Sappho, a poet who lived in ancient Greece and resided on the Greek island of Lesbos. The island’s name gave rise around this time to the word “lesbian,” meaning a woman attracted to other women, and Sappho came to be “the symbol of female love” (22). 

This chapter begins with an overview of the study of psychology within the Philosophy Department at Harvard. As Lepore writes, Marston “fell for philosophy just when philosophy was falling for psychology” (24). Psychology began as a branch of philosophy, and William James, the chairperson of Harvard’s Philosophy Department, sought an expert to lead the field of experimental psychology at Harvard. He found such a person in Hugo Münsterberg of Germany, who oversaw the building of a psychological laboratory on Harvard’s campus. His research “concerned perception, emotion, reaction, and sensation” (28), and he conducted much of his experiments on the young women of Radcliffe College, the “Harvard Annex” where women could take classes (since Harvard admitted only men). Although Münsterberg taught there himself, he was against education and suffrage for women.

Marston studied with Münsterberg as a sophomore and soon after began helping his professor with teaching and research at Radcliffe. The research involved experiments in attempting to discern whether someone was telling the truth by looking for physical evidence of lying. These included such things as heart rate and hesitation in speaking.

Münsterberg had tried to prove his theory about lying in 1907 during the famous murder trial of Harry Orchard, who had confessed to killing Idaho’s former governor. Allegedly, Orchard was directed by labor leader Big Bill Haywood, who was on trial for murder, but Haywood denied it. Münsterberg gave Orchard a series of tests in jail and came away convinced that his confession was truthful. He had promised to keep his conclusions to himself until the trial was over but ended up telling a reporter and word got out. Haywood’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow, denounced Münsterberg’s findings as speculation and the result of a bribe by the prosecution. Ultimately, Haywood was acquitted and Münsterberg’s reputation ruined. 

In this chapter, Lepore fills in another aspect of Marston’s life as a Harvard student: his side gig as a screenwriter. Movies were very new at the time, and the term “screenwriter” hadn’t even been settled on; instead, “scenario writer” was used at the time. Marston and Holloway used to walk down to Central Square in Cambridge to watch movies at the Scenic Temple, and Marston quickly took a liking to them. He bought a book on writing “photoplays” (as movies were called) and studied everything he needed to know. Eventually, he sold a few scenarios to film companies, but he stopped writing after about a year when his financial condition worsened. He applied for a scholarship and returned to psychological experiments.

Marston’s work on the detection of lies now centered on reading systolic blood pressure. With Holloway’s help, he designed a new experiment. Volunteers each read a different story about a friend who had been accused of a crime. The volunteers had to testify on the friend’s behalf, saying something either true or false that would help their friend. Since he wasn’t supposed to know the stories at all, he had Holloway write them. Marston then measured the volunteers’ blood pressure from behind a screen as they testified, after which he questioned them in the presence of a “jury” consisting of other volunteers. In the end, the jury predicted the correct answer for about half the cases while Marston’s blood pressure readings gave him the correct answer 96% of the time. This was an early version of Marston’s invention, the lie detector test.

At the end of Marston’s junior year, he learned of a contest the Edison Company was holding for ten top colleges. It would pay $100 to the writer who submitted the best scenario. Marston started attending movies again for research and then wrote and entered a scenario of his own to compete with 336 others. His submission, entitled Jack Kennard, Coward, won. It was about a high school football star who comes to Harvard and starts to play football there before quitting. Everyone thinks he’s scared, and he get a reputation as a coward. At the end, he rescues his girlfriend by jumping onto the tracks of a subway just before a train comes, thereby proving his courage. All of the events in the scenario were based on things that actually happened to Marston or events in and around Cambridge he would have known about. The movie was filmed and played in theaters around the country in the spring of 1915, a few months before Marston graduated.

Chapter 5 is about Marston and Holloway’s life together just after graduating from college. Like her boyfriend, Holloway received her diploma in June 1915. They became engaged that summer, and Marston used the money from his film scenario contest to buy a ring. They married in September, honeymooned in Maine, and immediately began further studies that fall. Both went to law school, he at Harvard and she at Boston University because, as she put it, “Those dumb bunnies at Harvard wouldn’t take women” (44). Boston University had accepted women since its founding, but Holloway had only two female classmates that year at the law school. She loved studying law and did well; Marston trudged through indifferently and got mostly Cs. He was mostly interested in learning about the use of evidence in law as it could be applied to his lie detector test.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection. The two issues looming above others were the ongoing war in Europe and woman suffrage. Wilson was against entering the war and against women’s suffrage while his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, was in favor of both. Many women were in favor of peace as well as gaining the vote nationwide, and their votes—from individual states that already had woman suffrage—ended up being the difference in Wilson’s reelection.