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The Secret History of Wonder Woman QUOTES

The Secret History of Wonder Woman QUOTES

1 " Feminists in Greenwich Village had begun bobbing their hair in 1912. In 1915, it was still radical. “The idea, it seems, came from Russia,” the New York Times reported. “The intellectual women of that country were revolutionaries. For convenience in disguising themselves when the police trailed them, they cropped their hair.”2 Holloway was something of a revolutionary, too. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

2 " Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

3 " Why do beautiful women love ugly men? "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

4 " Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

5 " You can be strong as any boy if you'll work hard and train yourself in athletics, the way boys do. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

6 " IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC’s editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.1 Batman had debuted in Detective Com-ics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman’s organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR’s solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2 "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

7 " In 1934, after Upton Sinclair was defeated in his campaign to become the next governor of California, he labeled the advertising concern that defeated him a “lie factory.” Marston took much the same view. One of Wonder Woman’s most sinister adversaries, the Duke of Deception, runs an advertising firm called the Lie Factory. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

8 " ...we must be tolerant with ourselves and allow ourselves some deviations from the straight line we set up to follow. Even more we must allow others the same prerogative. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

9 " Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism.... "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

10 " Girls are also human beings, a point often overlooked. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

11 " Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

12 " All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

13 " The most ignorant young man, who knows nothing of the needs of women, thinks himself a competent legislator, because he is a man,” Pankhurst told the crowd, eyeing the Harvard men. “This aristocratic attitude is a mistake. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

14 " The fight for women’s rights hasn’t come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women’s liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women’s rights has been a river, wending. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

15 " All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists,” as one feminist explained. Feminists rejected the idea of women as reformers whose moral authority came from their differentness from men—women were supposedly, by nature, more tender and loving and chaste and pure—and advocated instead women’s full and equal participation in politics, work, and the arts, on the grounds that women were in every way equal to men. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

16 " In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception”: if a woman isn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

17 " Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. —William Moulton Marston, March 1945 "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

18 " female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since “the comics’ worst offense was their bloodcurdling masculinity.” He explained, A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary power to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing—love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl’s stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl?” And that’s the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.14 "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

19 " Wonder Woman’ is gifted with tremendous physical strength—but unlike Superman she can be injured.” Marston went on, “ ‘Wonder Woman’ has bracelets welded on her wrists; with these she can repulse bullets. But if she lets any man weld chains on these bracelets, she loses her power. This, says Dr. Marston, is what happens to all women when they submit to a man’s domination. "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman

20 " The “basis of Feminism,” Sanger said, had to be a woman’s control over her own body, “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.”15 "

― Jill Lepore , The Secret History of Wonder Woman