William Moulton Marston

It's impossible to talk about the beginnings of Wonder Woman without talking about the weird fetishist/feminist who created her: William Moulton Marston. He was already a psychologist and inventor of an early prototype lie detector when he created Wonder Woman.

While a professor he fell in love with one of his students, Olive, and brought her home to his wife, Elizabeth, and demanded that Olive be allowed to live with them or he was going to file for divorce. So the three of them lived together with the wife out working and the mistress taking care of each woman's two children.

Marston showing off his lie detector

This wasn't the only different way he handled the usual roles of the sexes. From his psychological work, Marston became convinced that women were more honest than men in certain situations and could work faster and more accurately. During his lifetime Marston championed the latent abilities and causes of the women of his day.

Marston was also a writer of essays in popular psychology. In 1928 he published Emotions of Normal People, which elaborated the DISC Theory. Marston viewed people behaving along two axes, with their attention being either passive or active, depending on the individual's perception of his or her environment as either favorable or antagonistic. By placing the axes at right angles, four quadrants form with each describing a behavioral pattern:

• Dominance produces activity in an antagonistic environment
• Inducement produces activity in a favorable environment
• Submission produces passivity in a favorable environment
• Compliance produces passivity in an antagonistic environment. 

Marston posited that there is a masculine notion of freedom that is inherently anarchic and violent and an opposing feminine notion based on "Love Allure" that leads to an ideal state of submission to loving authority.

Dominance and submission were themes that played a large role in Wonder Woman, as Alan Moore noted in his Glory proposal.

Marston (l) and Gaines (r)

In a 1940 interview conducted by his mistress published in The Family Circle, Marston said that he saw "great educational potential" in comic books. The interview caught the attention of comics publisher Max Gaines, who hired Marston as an educational consultant for National Periodicals and All-American Publications, two of the companies that would later merge to form DC Comics.

Marston recommended an idea for a new kind of superhero, one who would conquer not with fists or firepower, but with love. "Fine," said Elizabeth, "but make her a woman." Marston introduced the idea to Gaines. Given the go-ahead, Marston developed Wonder Woman, basing her character on the unconventional, liberated, powerful modern women of his day.

In a nice little connection, apparently Suprema was going to be the name for Wonder Woman, but was replaced with WW, which was a popular term at the time that described women who were exceptionally gifted.

Marston with his four children

Marston used a lot of bondage themes that were entering popular culture in the 1930s. Physical and mental submission appears again and again throughout Marston's comics work, with Wonder Woman and her criminal opponents frequently being tied up or otherwise restrained, and her Amazonian sisters engaging in frequent wrestling and bondage play. These elements were softened by later writers of the series.

Though Marston had described female nature as being more capable of submission emotion, in his other writings and interviews, he referred to submission as a noble practice and did not shy away from the sexual implications, saying:

"The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound... Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society... Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element."

One of the purposes of these bondage depictions was to induce eroticism in readers as a part of what he called "sex love training." Through his Wonder Woman comics, he aimed to condition readers to becoming more readily accepting of loving submission to loving authorities rather than being so assertive with their own destructive egos. About male readers, he later wrote: "Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves!"

Marston died in 1947. After his death, Elizabeth and Olive lived together until 1990, when Olive died.