The Secret History of Wonder Woman

In Chapter 11, Lepore tells of Sanger and Byrne’s efforts to inform women about birth control. Through publications and face-to-face consultations, the sisters repeatedly disseminated information despite censorship and, eventually, imprisonment. In 1912, Sanger wrote a series in a socialist newspaper called “What Every Girl Should Know,” which frankly discussed topics about sex. The final installment was banned by the post office. Two years later, she founded her own monthly magazine, Woman Rebel, in which she first used the term “birth control.” All but one of the issues were banned, and Sanger was indicted for obscenity. She fled to England.

There she met Havelock Ellis, a psychologist sympathetic to her cause, and they became lovers. She also learned of methods of birth control widely used in Europe and wrote them up in a pamphlet, which she handed out on the street. Meanwhile, back in New York, her husband was convicted of disseminating the pamphlet, and Sanger returned to be with her children. Her five-year-old daughter Peggy was ill with pneumonia and soon died. When Sanger returned to court to face her earlier charges, the judge dismissed them, fearing that her cause would only be bolstered by punishing a grieving mother.

In the fall of 1916, Sanger and Byrne opened a clinic in Brooklyn where they instructed women in the use of various methods of birth control. They were arrested, as it violated state law at the time. Byrne was tried first, convicted, and sentenced to 30 days in prison. She vowed to follow the example of Emmeline Pankhurst and began a hunger strike, rejecting both food and water. As she weakened, the press picked up the story and appeals went out for the governor to pardon her. One newspaper wrote that “[i]t will be hard to make the youth of 1967 believe that in 1917 a woman was imprisoned for doing what Mrs. Byrne did” (94). Newspapers seemed to be unaware that Byrne had children until Sanger highlighted this by traveling to Rochester to visit her niece Olive Byrne, who was in a convent school there.

Byrne was force-fed when she slipped into unconsciousness but continued to refuse food when conscious. Finally, on the 10th day of her hunger strike, Sanger was able to meet with the New York governor, who agreed to pardon her sister if she promised never to participate in birth control efforts or break the law in the future. Although Byrne was in no shape to agree to anything, Sanger promised on her behalf, and she was freed. Byrne would always be upset at this, suspecting that Sanger actually wanted to push her out of the movement because she was too radical. Next Sanger was tried for her part in the Brooklyn clinic and was also found guilty and sentenced to 30 days in prison. She served her full time, opting not to go on a hunger strike. 

By 1920, Sanger had gone to California, where she was writing a book. Its working title was Voluntary Motherhood, but it was ultimately published in October of that year with the title Woman and the New Race. In it, Sanger argued that a woman’s right to control her own body through birth control was an issue even more important than woman suffrage. Without such agency, women were in chains, bound by motherhood and controlled by men. In Sanger’s view, it was time to break the chains.

Lepore explains that the symbol of chains and describing women as enslaved had long been used in the literature of feminists. In the 19th century, the suffrage and abolitionist movements were closely allied, and the comparison of women with African Americans borrowed such language. Sanger believed that voluntary motherhood through birth control, not the right to vote, would emancipate women from their slavery. Once the “feminine spirit” was freed, the world would be a better place. She argued that overpopulation was the root cause of the world’s problems, and women limiting reproduction would help to alleviate poverty and avoid war.

The following year, in 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. She had begun to make alliances with various groups of people to promote her cause. She sought out doctors, for example, because they had a legal right to dispense contraception. She also found common cause with eugenicists and other conservatives who favored birth control (even if coerced) as a way to limit the population of people they deemed somehow defective or inferior. Sanger’s sister Ethel, on the other hand, always remained a rebel and refused to compromise with anyone who did not share her radical outlook. 

This chapter discusses Sanger’s niece Olive Byrne and her time as an undergraduate at Tufts University. Olive had begun visiting her mother Ethel in New York City in 1920, after not seeing her for a decade. They spent the summer of 1922 together on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, where Ethel had a house. In September, Ethel got word that her sister, who was now divorced, had married millionaire oilman J. Noah Slee. Sanger felt conflicted about the marriage, as millionaires were not part of her more radical social circle, but her cause needed money. With such money in the family, Ethel decided her daughter would study to be doctor (she had been studying nursing) and that her new brother-in-law would pay the tuition.

Ethel and Olive returned to New York City, where they researched colleges. It was already late September, and most college classes had already begun, but Tufts University, outside Boston, accepted Olive and off she went. There she took part in many activities, joined clubs, played basketball, and wrote for the newspaper. She even founded her own club, the Liberal Club, which mirrored the one by the same name that Ethel and Margaret had been part of in Greenwich Village.

Olive struggled in math, however, and the university placed her on academic probation at the end of her first semester. A friend named Mary Sears helped Olive by tutoring her, and Olive soon joined Mary’s sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi. Lepore writes that Mary was the inspiration for Wonder Woman’s best friend, named Etta Candy in the comic strip. The name came from the fact that she liked sweets and was, in the author’s words, “rotund”—just like Mary.

When Olive was a sophomore, she invited her Aunt Margaret to speak at Tufts, but the university barred her from campus. Instead, she was invited to a nearby church so students could easily attend. By then, Sanger had opened a clinic in New York City with her new husband’s money, and Olive sometimes referred her classmates there for birth control devices. Undergraduate women in the 1920s were more sexually active than previous generations, as later research would show, and also more likely to view sex as an activity done purely for pleasure. Olive herself worked at the clinic during Christmas vacation.

Later on, as a senior, Olive took up the fashion known as “boyette” and cut her hair very short in what was called the “Eton crop.” That fall, she took a class with William Marston, who had arrived there after his indictment for fraud was dropped. Lepore writes that “[s]he found him irresistible” (109).

Chapter 14 describes how Byrne and Marston met and how their relationship developed. Marston was hired as an assistant professor at Tufts in the fall of 1925, and Byrne was a student in his class on experimental psychology. His research had moved from the law to sex, which was popular in the 1920s due to Freud’s theories and the development of behavioralism, though he was still using blood pressure measurements. He had published a journal article that examined differences in blood pressure for men and women based on various stimuli.

Holloway had taken a job as editor of a psychology journal in New York and remained there. The journal, Child Study, was one of several that sprung up in the 1920s attempting to apply new ideas of psychology to childrearing and parenting skills. At Tufts, Marston recommended that Byrne come to his new clinic for students when he learned she was depressed and possibly suicidal. After a time, she also began working as his research assistant.

From previous research, Marston was devising a theory of emotions and wanted to focus on something he termed “captivation,” which was a part of sadism involving teasing or torturing someone who is weaker. Together, he and Byrne decided a good example of this was exhibited by sorority pledge activities, and she took him to her sorority house during one called a “Baby Party.” The freshman pledges had to dress like babies and were blindfolded with their arms bound. Then sophomores hit them with sticks while the juniors and seniors forced them to

do certain tasks. (Such a scene would later appear in Wonder Woman.)

Marston observed the Baby Party, then he and Byrne conducted interviews. He was fascinated that the sophomores mostly had positive feelings when punishing the pledges, especially if this involved ratcheting up the punishment to make them obey. He credited Byrne when he published his findings. Lepore notes, “What more the psychologist and his assistant did together that year is hard to say” (115), but it’s clear their involvement went beyond the usual student-teacher relationship. When Byrne graduated in June 1926, her mother came to the ceremonies, as did Holloway. Marston told his wife he wanted her to meet “somebody special,” and the four of them took a photograph together as if one big family. 

Here Lepore discusses how the Marstons’ marriage evolved into an arrangement that included Olive Byrne as William’s mistress and the couple’s childcare provider. After Byrne graduated, she moved to Connecticut with the Marstons and planned to live with Holloway in New York while she attended graduate school at Columbia. Marston left Tufts at the same time, after just two semesters there. He was likely fired, Lepore writes, if his relationship with Byrne had been discovered; even his research at her sorority’s Baby Party would have been frowned upon.

While Marston and Byrne were still at Tufts, they met with several others at the apartment of Marston’s Aunt Carolyn, who had become an Aquarian, a form of Christianity devoted to peace and love. The participants included Holloway and Huntley and were divided into “Love Leaders,” “Mistresses,” and “Love Girls.” One of each formed a kind of balanced unit of relationship, and the meetings seem to have been largely about sexual training and bondage. Byrne’s contributions were contraception and books from her aunt, Margaret Sanger. The result was a new way of living together that satisfied each person’s desire: “What Marston wanted went well past free love. Olive Byrne wanted, desperately, to be part of a family. Holloway wanted something else” (121).

Later Marston presented his wife with an ultimatum: either Byrne moved in and lived with them as his mistress, or he would leave her and go off alone with Byrne. Holloway accepted, at least in part based on her calculation that it would allow her to maintain her career. She would work while Byrne took care of the children. In the 1920s, this work-family balance came to the fore in society. More women held jobs, and feminism had introduced a more independent mindset in many women. How to properly care for children applying the latest research from psychology while holding down a job was a conundrum, and Holloway had found her solution. Marjorie Wilkes Huntley also became a de facto member of the household, but she came and went, unlike Byrne.