Further, Huntley, Byrne, Holloway, and Marston all participated in what Lepore describes as a 'sex cult' in 1925-26 at the home of Marston's aunt Carolyn. Huntley, before they met Byrne, and that she remained an on-and-off member of the family long after Byrne arrived, helping out with the inking and lettering of the Wonder Woman comics in the 1940s, and occasionally staying with Holloway and Byrne after Marston's death. Lepore reports, for instance, that the Marstons had a polyamorous relationship with another woman, Marjorie W. Many of the details of this relationship, though, are new, and riveting. Similarly, the biggest secret in Wonder Woman's history has been common knowledge for some time Marston was a polyamorist, who had children both by his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, and by his live-in lover and former graduate student, Olive Byrne. Marston's racism, for example, should be evident to anyone who has read his comics-though the discussion of his attitudes towards black defendants during his lie-detector work (he invented the device) is especially painful. Not all of Lepore's account is a surprise. As such, it provides a lot of new information about where Wonder Woman came from, and what that means for her feminism, or lack thereof. But it's also the most extensive account ever written of Marston and his milieu, using archival sources that no one else has had access to. It's focused on the history of Wonder Woman's creator, psychologist William Marston, and his family, rather than on the comics per se, and it's more interested in biographical narrative than in thinking about feminism. Jill Lepore's just-released The Secret History of Wonder Woman doesn't directly address this question.

How committed can a work of art be to feminist liberation when women (and it is overwhelmingly women) are shown being tied up on every page? But she also wears that swimsuit … and in the original comics from the ‘40s, more than a quarter of the panels included images of bondage, as Tim Hanley documents in Wonder Woman Unbound. Is Wonder Woman feminist? Yes, the Amazon princess is often seen as an icon of female empowerment and heroism.

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