1
The Birth of Modern
Mythology and the Mother
of Female Superheroes
“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… The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. This is what I recommended to the comics publishers.
—William M. Marston
Thus wrote Dr. William Moulton Marston in a 1943 essay for The American Scholar. Motivated by his disappointment in how he had seen women portrayed in the nascent, yet booming, medium of comic books, Marston created a superhero character the world would know as Wonder Woman—a lasting symbol of female power, independence, and sisterhood.1
There were already many remarkable women in both comic books and news strips by the time Wonder Woman debuted in late 1941, but the liberatory power of most of them was contained, even diminished, by the secondary status of their roles. There were female superheroes, yes, but more often there were girl sidekicks, girl heroes, girl sleuths, and girl reporters; “Girl,” meaning not yet woman, not quite mature, not entirely whole. Girls could have careers, as long as they were culturally appropriate for their gender, but grown women were married and homemakers.
Beyond girls of books and radio shows, there were some flying aces and a spy or two, as well as a nominal number of costumed female action heroes in comics of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.2 But Wonder Woman would become the only female superhero of that era to rival the iconic status of Superman, a character widely recognized as the first modern superhero.
Superman was born in the 1930s, when Cleveland teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster combined their love of science fiction stories, pulp magazines, adventure movies, radio serials, and Sunday newspaper funnies to forever change the world of mythic storytelling. A writer and an artist, respectively, the young men suffered numerous rejections until finally, in 1938, their amalgam of genre and form debuted in Action Comics #1.
Extraordinary beings possessing phenomenal strength have been around since stories were first told, but Siegel and Shuster's legacy to popular culture was a modern myth for modern times. By 1941, comics that featured superheroes—larger-than-life characters with a secret identity, a costume, and a greater purpose—were flying off newsstands and rolled up in the back pockets of a generation of children. As America prepared for its involvement in the Second World War, Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Captain Marvel were just a few of the names illustrating patriotism and bolstering hope: that families would be reunited from across the Atlantic Ocean; that the innocent would be saved and protected from our enemies; that justice would prevail; and that maybe beneath our seemingly frail exteriors, which were damaged by the Depression or stricken with polio, there existed warriors to entertain, lead, and inspire us toward greatness.3
But these growing ranks of superheroes were missing a superwoman who could capture the national imagination as they did. She was soon to come from the unusual mind of Dr. William Moulton Marston.
Dr. Marston was a modern renaissance man, a Harvard-educated doctor and lawyer who was also a writer, an editorial consultant, and the inventor of the systolic blood pressure test—a precursor to what is known today as the polygraph lie detector test. He was also a notoriously shameless, yet successful, self-promoter. In the 1930s and 1940s, the comics industry was growing so fast that parents began to worry about this overwhelmingly new medium that was monopolizing their children's attention.4 Savvy publishers quickly hired psychologists as editorial advisors, who also publicly gave their “expert” opinion on the value of comic books—namely, that they were good for children.
Marston was savvy as well, and saw an opportunity to promote himself. He had his girlfriend and assistant, Olive Byrne, “interview” him on the topic of children and comic books for the women's magazine Family Circle. The article caught the attention of All American Comics5 executive M.C. Gaines, who subsequently hired Marston as an editorial advisor and writer for the company. The position ultimately led to the creation of Wonder Woman.
Marston had observed that the majority of superheroes were men, and that women were relegated to secondary roles. He later reflected:
It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics' worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as a 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 is still 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.6
What Marston rejected was not the presence of violence in comics (as other psychologists had and would) but the lack of multidimensional female characters. To him, masculinity was overshadowing femininity, and that was a disservice to both men and women alike. This was compounded by the fact that Marston had fairly radical ideas about sex and gender—ideas that would be subversively expressed in the comic he would come to write, but which were already overtly expressed in his other works, most notably his 1928 publication The Emotions of Normal People. In brief, Marston believed that women were the superior sex and that men should submit to what he called, “their loving dominance.” These convictions were based on his pseudo-psycho-physiological theories regarding the human organism, including that a woman's body contained “twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male.”7
To further promote his ideology, Marston's formula for his superhero series consisted of a beautiful woman who fought for the greater good of humanity through her altruistic love. The doctor also went so far as to proclaim that Wonder Woman was “psychological propaganda” for the type of woman he believed would soon rule the world, and predicted our society would evolve into a matriarchy within a century—if only characters like his led the way. By using the Amazon Princess and her allies as role models, he hoped to show that any young girl could become a Wonder Woman if only she took the time and energy to properly train herself; if only she had an example to guide her.
Written by Marston under the pseudonym “Charles Moulton” (a combination of the names Maxwell Charles Gaines and William Moulton Marston) and drawn by Harry G. Peter, Wonder Woman first appeared in the December 1941 issue of All Star Comics #8. One month later she began a regular appearance in Sensation Comics #1, and an eponymous title, Wonder Woman, saw print six months later.
Wonder Woman's origin story tells us that she is Princess Diana of the matriarchal Paradise Island. The Amazons of this hidden island are peaceful, highly trained athletes who live an immortal existence free from the brutality of men. When their Queen, Hippolyte, desires a child she is instructed by Aphrodite to mold one from clay. So was born Diana, a child “as lovely as Aphrodite, as wise as Athena, with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules.”8
This first tale also tells us how Steve Trevor, a US army officer, comes to crash his plane on the women-only island. As he is nursed back to health, it is discovered through a sort of magic television that Trevor is fighting for America against the “forces of hate and oppression.” Hippolyte consults the gods, who order that he immediately be returned to duty and that the strongest of the Amazons must return with him to help win the war. Athena proclaims America as “the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women.”
An athletic contest is held to find the strongest emissary. Diana has been forbidden to participate by her mother, but since she has fallen in love with Trevor—the only man she has ever seen—the princess disobeys her Queen by participating in disguise. She bests her competitors and wins the tournament. As Diana leaves for “man's world,” she takes sacred totems with her: a magic Lasso of Truth formed from the girdle of Gaea (inspired by Marston's proto-polygraph) and bullet-proof bracelets—a reminder to never submit to the authority of any man. Her mission to protect America is alive in her star-spangled costume of red, white, and blue. She returns Steve Trevor to his base, and adopts a secret identity as “Diana Prince.”
Marston freely borrowed from classic Greek and Roman culture, blending names, places, and customs with contemporary American values to create his mythic Amazons. The Amazons familiar to the ancient Greeks, however, were a legendary matriarchal society that took part in activities normally associated with Greek men such as hunting, farming and fighting. Stories of Amazons frequently placed them geographically near the southeastern shore of the Black Sea, around the city of Themiscyra. (Years later, in a Wonder Woman reboot, Themyscira would replace Paradise Island as the home of Marston's Amazons.) Historian Sue Blundell notes that for most writers of classical Greek texts the Amazons were “a phenomena of the distant past” and that no one had ever claimed to have seen or met one.9
The “outrageous” customs of the Amazons included members of the all-female society anonymously copulating with men twice a year.10 Of the resulting births, only female children remained with their mothers. Some stories tell that the males were given up for adoption, while others claim they were victims of infanticide. It was told that the Amazons removed their right breast, either with a knife or cauterization, in order to more proficiently wield weapons. Legends say that these women were horse riders and horse stealers, who fed their girl children on horse's milk to prevent breast development altogether.11 Tall tales to be sure; vase paintings and other images almost always depict Amazons with two breasts. However, the Greek word a-mazon can be translated as “without a breast.”12
Just as centuries later Marston wanted his stories about Wonder Woman to be psychological propaganda for the empowerment of women, it is argued that Amazonian myths served as “Athenian propaganda” for the proper behavior of women—yet another testament to the power of stories to influence societal ideas. As Ruby Blondell writes in her essay “How to Kill an Amazon,” “in the Greek imaginary, Amazons function in many respects as an antithesis to ‘civilized' society, and their myths enact a prohibition on disrupting the roles and relationships between the sexes enshrined in the institutions of marriage and the household.”13 For Athenians, these daughters of Ares represented female independence and bravery, which was as exciting as it was a threat to established social structures. Amazonian rejection of appropriate gender roles necessitated their defeat, and as a cautionary tale about the dangers of social transgression, Amazon defiance actually facilitated their mythic downfall.
In ancient Greece, myths were continually reimagined to serve a changing culture and politics—a tradition Marston continued by manipulating the raw power inherent in a story about a race of warrior women to make it relevant for his time and place. In his efforts to invert the classic myths about warrior women who were tamed by love and domination, he made a symbolic nod to them in the origins of his Amazon race. In All Star Comics #8, Marston retells the myth of Hercules' Ninth Labor (of which there are many classic versions)—to steal the magic girdle of the Amazon Queen, which was a gift to her from the goddess Aphrodite. Hippolyte tells her daughter Diana, “Hercules, by deceit and trickery, managed to secure my MAGIC GIRDLE—and soon we Amazons were taken into slavery. And Aphrodite, angry at me for having succumbed to the wiles of men, would do naught to help us!”14 The Amazons continued to appeal to the goddess for help, and she eventually relents. But she decreed that the women must always wear the wrist bracelets fashioned by their captors as a reminder to be cautious of men. These became famous for being Wonder Woman's bullet-proof bracelets.15
Marston believed in the power of stories to influence children; if they were going to read comics, they should be given comics that mattered— words and pictures that could change ideas about gender roles, power structures, and war. Clearly, Marston's warrior women were much more playful than their mythic namesakes, and perhaps it is because he rewrote their myth for a modern consciousness that the word Amazon is no longer associated with the “bogeywomen” whose gender subversiveness was a threat to Athenian society. Instead, “Amazon” now generally connotes strength, independence, power, and sisterhood—ideas which Wonder Woman would symbolize during the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s (indicating that American feminism during this time also influenced new associations with the word, as covered in Chapter 2).
Marston's fictional superwoman was also infused with aspects of the real females in his life—he lived with not one, but two wonder women, each phenomenal in their unique way. His legal wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, had three degrees herself, including one in psychology and one in law. She also assisted in the creation of the Amazon Princess. Olive Byrne was a former student and research assistant of William Marston who lived with the Marstons in a polyamorous relationship. The Marstons had two children of their own, and legally adopted Byrne's two children, also fathered by Marston. Each adult contributed to the workings of their household and all were an indispensable part of their harmonious family unit.
After Marston's death from skin cancer, Byrne raised the children and kept house while Holloway-Marston provided financial support. With her salary and Marston's royalties she was able to put all four children through college and Byrne through medical school. The women lived together until Byrne's death in the 1980s. Holloway-Marston died at the age of 100 in 1993.
Wonder Woman had a definite impact on young girls of the 1940s and 1950s, but it's hard to find evidence of her inspirational impact on adult women venturing into the homefront workforce during the Second World War. Through observation we can say that she debuted at a time when real and fictional representations of strong, resourceful women were in relative abundance in both advertising and popular culture.
With America finally forced to enter the war with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, media images of self-sufficient and patriotic women became important, not only to American economics, but to the threatened morale of its people.
Women suddenly found themselves in liberating industrial positions. Encouraged by public service ads, movie reels, and other propaganda created by the Office of War Information, they patriotically stepped up to serve their country. Riveters built planes and the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) flew them. Women were nurses overseas and ballplayers at home. For the first time, they were not only allowed into exciting new positions in the public sphere, but were actually encouraged by those in power to be there, but only temporarily, and not without being subjected to misogyny, sexism, and racism (the last of which many white women sadly contributed to).
For the young girls that read Wonder Woman, and perhaps saw their mothers venturing into the same workforce as their fathers, opportunities for achievement were further emphasized via an inspirational recurring segment titled “Wonder Women of History.” Written by tennis champion Alice Marble, these one-page inserts spotlighted women such as Amelia Earhart, Annie Oakley, and Florence Nightingale. This message of empowerment was consistently brought to young girls and grown women alike in the regular comic narrative as well.
We tend to romanticize women's involvement in homefront industry, but as with any story or image, the reality is always much more complex. The riveters embodied in Norman Rockwell's famous painting were expected to work in factories to make machines that would protect their husbands; they were also expected to be “good mothers” but had to work and rear without government-assisted childcare, or even, at the very least, day-care facilities at the factories where they labored.16 The brave and talented WASPs, who transported planes from the factories to the ports and towed targets for artillery practice, were refused military status. One thousand American women ferried 12,650 planes and flew a total of 60 million miles during the war. Thirty-eight of them died in the line of duty. But because they weren't allowed official military status, their friends were forced to take up collections to send the bodies home. Female fliers were not even allowed to have an American flag placed over their coffins, despite having died in the service of their country.17 Wonder Woman must have been ashamed.
The Intrepid Reporter is another archetype to come out of this era, and has remained as recognizable as the superhero, a character with whom the journalist has frequently shared a genre. And, some of the strongest representations of women in modern myth came in the form of “Girl” or “Women” reporters. As Gail Collins notes in America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, the girl reporter was one of Hollywood's stock heroines “tough as nails but with a romantic streak.”18
The epitome of this description is, of course, Lois Lane, possibly the second most recognizable female figure from comics after Wonder Woman— even though she actually debuted three years prior to the Amazon Princess. Just as superheroes came to be associated with the American values they fought for, the name “Lois Lane” to this day remains synonymous with gutsy investigative journalism.
Like Superman and his alter ego, Clark Kent, Lois has been around since the inaugural issue of Action Comics over 70 years ago, and though she predates Wonder Woman, it's doubtful anyone would call her the “mother of superwomen,” as she is generally viewed as a supporting character. Regardless, her trademark moxie was present from the very beginning, as illustrated in Lois and Clark's initial scene together. Having finally agreed to give the awkward reporter “a break … for a change,” Lois and Clark head out for an evening of dinner and dancing. When a thug tries to cut in on a dance, Clark is forced to adhere to his secret identity as a submissive weak-ling. Lois, furious with her date for failing to defend her honor, slaps the mobster herself. She grabs her coat and hat, and Clark runs after her. As she climbs into a cab, her quick tongue and fiery temper lash out: “You asked me earlier in the evening why I avoid you. I'll tell you why now! Because you're a spineless, unbearable coward !”19
Later in the episode, Lois is abducted by the thug she had earlier refused. Superman arrives to rescue her, and thus the tone is set for a decades-long pattern of animosity, jealousy, and obsession. For the next half century, Lois will love Superman, Superman will be disguised as Clark Kent, Clark Kent will love Lois, Lois will dismiss Clark, Clark will scoop Lois' stories, and because of this, Lois' attempts to prove herself as a journalist will force her into increasingly dangerous stunts that require the Man of Steel to save her.
Comics historian Les Daniels has written that:
On one level Lois Lane can be seen as a shallow gal who dismisses a decent guy (Clark, her coworker) while dreaming about a muscular member of another species. From today's perspective, it's easy to denounce Lois as the misogynistic fantasy of a disappointed male. Yet both men and women can relate to the pain of being judged by superficial standards, thus giving Clark Kent's trials and Superman's triumphs a broad appeal.20
The problem with Daniel's statement here is that it forces women to identify with Clark/Superman instead of with Lois—assuming the privilege of the male hero's perspective. Since the audience knows Clark's secret, we are apt to feel as frustrated as he does whenever Lois works against him or loses her temper because we know he's saving the world in his other identity, not simply dumping his work responsibilities on her.
But, even if Superman is our hero and Lois is a secondary character, it's better for the purposes of this book to consider her role in his mythos from what we can imagine is her perspective. It's certainly not the intended reading, but it will allow us to see how for many years Lois represented conflicted feelings toward women's roles in society and how she at least tried to face them as a superwoman.
In the early days of the Superman mythos, Lois was eager to be a news reporter, but wasn't often offered that type of career-making assignment— rather she was confined to “women's news.” Once, when she asks her editor if she can report on a particularly exciting story, he tells her, “It's too important! This is no job for a girl!” When alone, Lois fumes, “No, job for a woman, eh? I've half a mind to….” She corrals Clark, who had received the said assignment, but instead of relaying the proper message to him she sends Clark on a fake mission so that she can cover the real deal.21 In another episode, Lois actually slips the mild-mannered reporter a sedative!22 When
Clark (who is, of course, immune to sedatives) realizes what she's done he muses, “Double-crossing a pal, eh? Just like a newspaperwoman!”23
While other men would be frustrated by Lois's expressions of vanity, acts of scheme and spunk, and insensitive public swooning over a romantic competitor, Clark is able to find her behavior amusing because it is as Superman that he will continually end up having to rescue this irrepressible newspaperwoman.24 But because she doesn't know that Clark and Superman are one and the same, Clark's genuine expressions of concern come off feeling like a challenge to her journalistic capability. Who is the mild-mannered, ineffectual Clark Kent to tell the street-smart, quick-thinking, fast-talking Lois Lane what to do? The following exchange serves as a perfect example:
Clark: Stay clear of this yarn, it's dangerous!
Lois: You have a nerve … telling me what to do!
Clark: I was only thinking of your welfare!
Lois: On the contrary, you were only thinking of your by-line! No, Clark, I'll do what I like, when I like, and where I like!25
You Go Girl (Reporter)! Lois calls it as she sees it, as she has every opportunity to see it. Clark's continuous scooping of her stories and the realities of being a woman trying to maintain a career in the 1940s (even the realities of a fictional woman) would certainly lead Lois to feel she is being systematically pushed out of her job. Not to condone Lois's acts, drugging someone to scoop a story and see your boyfriend Superman, is extreme, but, at least in this era, the behavior of her sometimes nemesis/sometimes lover also leaves much to be desired.
Take this example from Action Comics #47, which follows a familiar formula: Clark and Lois are sent on an assignment and they discretely slip away from each other. Lois gets in over her head and Superman saves her. But the event is not her story to tell. Lois waves goodbye as her hero flies off: “So long, Superman, and thanks for a swell news story!” “Don't thank me yet,” he yells back in response, “I have a hunch Clark Kent will get the story into print before you do!”26 For the savior of the human race, he can be disturbingly cold and cruel.27
When Lois sends Clark on a wild goose chase, we think ill of her. But is she just supposed to sit back, be a good girl, and be happy that she gets to report at all? At what point does it become her prerogative to take charge and get the scoop? Isn't she asserting herself against what from her perspective is obvious journalistic one-upmanship? Clark has an unfair advantage that goes well beyond male privileging; he essentially gets to report on his own actions. To top it off, he taunts Lois for his own pleasure, though occasionally, out of the goodness of his heart, he'll throw her a newsworthy bone.
“Girl reporters” such as Lois continued to be a popular role for women in modern storytelling throughout the 1940s. Rosalind Russell starred as Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (1940), a film adaptation of the play The Front Page. Dale Messick's Brenda Starr (1940) sizzled in the dailies. Nancy Drew had even gotten into the journalism game in 1939, when Bonita Granville played the title character in the movie Nancy Drew … Reporter. Her line, “A reporter has the right to do things an ordinary person shouldn't,” could just as easily have been a sentiment expressed by Ms. Lane, who was famous for sneaking into (and being rescued out of ) places she wasn't supposed to be.28
And again, real and fictional women mirrored each other's achievements as America tried to make sense of the social upheaval caused by the war. According to the Library of Congress, which in 1995 featured an exhibit called “Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During World War II”:
For female journalists, World War II offered new professional opportunities. Talented and determined, dozens of women fought for—and won—the right to cover the biggest story of their lives. By war's end at least 127 American women had secured official military accreditation as war correspondents, if not actual front-line assignments. Other women journalists remained on the home front to document the ways in which the country changed dramatically under wartime conditions.29
Women's news, like Lois Lane's “sob sister” column, was a way to break into the profession, but the war allowed for much more active reporting, helped by none less than First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt who facilitated women in journalism. During the Depression, when women were encouraged not to take jobs away from men, Mrs. Roosevelt “instituted a weekly women-only press conference to force news organizations to employ at least one female reporter. During World War II, many of the newswomen in the First Lady's circle served as war correspondents.”30
Wonder Woman may have been the poster child for women's empowerment during the war years, but it's clear Lois Lane more accurately reflected social attitudes regarding women—particularly career women. They would both morph to fit with changing politics in subsequent years, but in the late 1930s and through the 1940s they set a precedent for subsequent new myths.
In the 1940s women had been represented in popular culture as strong, capable, and collaborative—a tactic necessary to keep American production flourishing while a war was fought overseas. But in the 1950s many women, both fictional and real, were returned to the traditionally defined domestic sphere. Even Wonder Woman wasn't exempt. She suffered a harsh blow when William Moulton Marston died in 1947, and his princess was left to generations of writers who didn't understand her revolutionary purpose. For example, “Wonder Women of History” was replaced with a feature that documented wedding customs across the globe. As Lillian S. Robinson writes in Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes, “his utopian feminist dream died with him,” and in these post-war years Wonder Woman declined “from an inconsistent, but unquestionably liberatory icon into something quite different.”31
After Marston's death, Sheldon Meyer, editor, cartoonist, and family friend of the unusual clan took over writing Wonder Woman. Soon, he wished to return to his love of drawing, and Robert Kanigher, who had been writing another female character, Black Canary, was hired as his replacement. Kanigher served the dual role of writer and editor of Wonder Woman for the next 20 years.
According to Les Daniels, Sensation Comics was yet another title about to fold when an attempt to save it was by made by incorporating a romance theme.32 In what can be assumed to be a correction to the gender reversal that made Wonder Woman so wonderful in the first place, the cover of Sensation Comics #94 (Nov.–Dec. 1949) depicts Steve Trevor carrying Wonder Woman across a stream (presumably so she won't get her dainty self wet) as she gazes lovingly into his eyes. The cover blurb, meant to entice readers, reads “Only a call for help could prevent Wonder Woman from marrying Steve Trevor!” By 1950, Sensation Comics and All Star Comics had folded and only the eponymous Wonder Woman survived. But Kanigher had removed Etta Candy and the Holliday Girls—Wonder Woman's friends, protégées, and collaborators—from the narrative. Diana's origin story was also rewritten. Instead of being formed from clay, she was now the child of two members of the opposite sex. (One can only assume from the television of the time that they slept in separate beds.)33
In the late 1950s, the adventures of a teenaged Diana called, of course, Wonder Girl, were added to the Wonder Woman family. Continuing with the romance theme approach, Wonder Girl was given a boyfriend named Mer-Boy. This completely ignored the fact that Diana had never seen a man before Steve Trevor, although it could be argued that meant a human man. Drifting even further away from the independence and inspiration of the original Amazon Princess, another version of Diana soon followed in the chronicles of Wonder Tot—Diana as a toddler. For a while the adventures of Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot were kept separate until all logic was thrown out in the 1961 story The Impossible Day.34 In this tale, Hippolyta—now a much less Greek-looking blonde—uses a magic camera to take a photo of her daughter at these three stages in her life, which allows them to forthwith reside together in the present in several “impossible tales.”35
Though characters must evolve to serve the purposes of their times, clearly this Wonder Woman was a devolvement, caught up in infantile— in some cases quite literally—adventures rather than her initial calling as a champion of female strength and love.
During this backlash to the empowering images of Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter, women in comics were often little more than simpering girlfriends who shopped, fainted, cried, and were obsessed with marriage. Lois Lane was Superman's Girl Friend instead of having a title in her own right like Lois Lane, Star Reporter. Batgirl consistently bungled missions, instead of truly being an asset to the dynamic duo, and usually needed to be saved, rather than actively doing the saving.
Supergirls, rather than superwomen, were also a common post-war theme. Ironically, Supergirl (Superman's teenage cousin), whose very name embodied the infantilization of women with power, was one of the only lasting female sidekicks to come out of this era. With the rare exception, girl sidekicks were generally less capable than their male counterparts, of whom they were character spin-offs. Like the hero's love interest, though sometimes they were that too, supergirls often attempted to handle situations above and beyond their capabilities, which ultimately necessitated their rescue by the hero. Their bumbling incompetence reinforced the superiority of the male hero and the paternalism that plagued much of 1950s' media. The fact that the majority of supergirls had a familial relationship to the hero—cousin, niece, sister, and so on—reinforced a “father knows best” ideology. (Though to be fair, Mary Marvel was a teenage girl who held her own comic and was very popular with young girls.)
Additionally, after the war, public interest in superheroes declined as a sense of normalcy settled over the nation. As with the women of wartime industry, once the war was won, superheroes were no longer needed. Whereas caped crusaders and masked avengers had once dominated newsstand space, gaps left by discontinued titles were quickly filled by other genres. Horror comics, Westerns, funny animal stories, and romance comics rose to the fore, many of these directed toward a new market called “the teenager.” By the end of 1948, most superhero comics had been canceled or converted to other genres. The survivors, mostly the big-name heroes, were being aimed more consciously at a juvenile audience.
But no matter the genre, one man viewed all comics as a danger to society and launched a crusade against them.
At the height of their popularity in the 1940s, hundreds of millions of comic magazines were sold every month. The relatively new medium that captivated the nation's children was beginning to alarm parents, and Seduction of the Innocent, a book written by Dr. Frederic Wertham and published in 1954, fueled their panic.
Frederic Wertham was a German-Jew, an intellectual, and an immigrant, whose writings on the harmful effects of racial segregation on children had helped end separate-but-equal education in the United States when they were used as evidence during Brown v. Board of Education. He was also renowned for establishing a clinic in Harlem for at-risk youth and their families to receive free psychological care. It was there that he made a connection between comic book violence and juvenile delinquency, though his was a controversial, and reductionist, assumption about cause and effect. As Trina Robbins snarkily notes, “Using the same logic, we could prove that tomatoes turn people into killers by showing that 99 percent of the residents of our prisons' death rows regularly eat tomatoes.”36 But she also points out:
Whereas it was certainly true, as Wertham stated, that the vast majority of young criminals he studied were avid comic book readers, he neglected to mention that the vast majority of American children were avid comic book readers. And while some comics mentioned in Wertham's book were indeed objectionably violent, gruesome, and sadistic, he tended to get carried away and lump all action comics under the title ‘crime comics,' including even Wonder Woman.37
Wertham testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency using evidence from his text, taking issue not only with the more gruesome horror comics, but with the violent acts of superheroes—that to him were reminiscent of Nazi oppression.38 He was also appalled by Marston's delight in portraying bondage scenes, and criticized what he interpreted as homoerotic subtext in superhero comics, particularly in the mentorship of Batman to Robin.39 He labeled Wonder Woman and her sometime-collaborators, the Holliday Girls, lesbians and claimed it would be detrimental to the mental health of children to be exposed to such menace. His testimony contributed to the cancellation of many superhero titles, as well as causing those that survived to take a more gentle tone as the Congressional hearings led comics publishers to create the Comics Code Authority—a self-regulatory organization that screened comics for adherence to specific standards. Regulations included a policy to present crimes so that they should never create sympathy for the criminal—making good and evil strictly black and white issues.40 The code also stated that the treatment of love–romance stories should emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.
Comics, once titillating, had become vanilla.
They were also competing with a new storytelling medium—television. Television sets had been available since the late 1920s, but were a rarity in American living rooms until the 1950s when post-war advances in technology and the lifting of rations on manufacturing materials led to mass production of television sets at affordable prices. This allowed for yet another way to capitalize on already familiar characters who were successful in other media such as comics, radio, and theatrical serials.
In fact, by the 1950s, stories featuring Superman and Lois were being told in all three of these mediums. In the theatrical serials, Kirk Alyn portrayed the Man of Steel and Noel Neill was Lois Lane. In 1951, a feature-length film, Superman and the Mole Men, was produced, which served as a combination pilot episode for the subsequent television series The Adventures of Superman (1952–8).41 George Reeves portrayed the title character, and Phyllis Coates, who was known for her roles in science fiction B-movies, played Lois Lane.42 When it was unclear whether the show would return for a second season, Coates took a job elsewhere, and Neill was called in to take her place when production did indeed resume. She went on to play Lois Lane for a total of five seasons.
But back in the comics one had to wonder whether Lois Lane was a star reporter or a desperate housewife. When the character finally got her own book in 1958, it was titled Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane, as if she were a piece of property rather than someone who could be independently dynamic. Her accomplishments and stature as an independent woman continued to be diminished.
One of many tales that undermine Lois's talents and minimize her success as a reporter is 1960's “How Lois Lane Got Her Job” (Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane #17 May 1960). The teaser narrative reads:
As a girl reporter for the Daily Planet in Metropolis, Lois Lane has gained fame for her many headline stories through the years! But have you ever wondered just how she got her job? How her daring career of hunting down scoops began? Did her great friend, Superman, whose feats are always super-news, get her started? Well, you're in for a big surprise, as we give you the untold story of …How Lois Lane Got Her Job.”43
The set-up is a party at the Daily Planet to celebrate the anniversary of the day Lois was hired at the prestigious news publication. Here she is praised as a famous and daring hunter of headlines. But again the joke is on Lois, as the ensuing tale exposes her inadequacy, “proving” that she is incapable of landing a scoop without assistance.
The teaser panel goes on to show Lois telling Superman, “You gave me many scoops, Superman … But only after I became a girl reporter! Those three Lois Lane Scoops” she says pointing to a bulletin board featuring her clips “won me my job, and I got them without your help!”
It turns out she didn't.
In order to get hired as a reporter, Lois Lane was tasked by Editor-in-Chief Perry White to bring him three scoops in three days, a feat which Lois accomplishes. As Lois begins to tell the tale of her first scoop, Super-man's super-memory recalls that by chance he happened to instigate the very events that led her to successfully gather the material for her article. In each case Superman was coincidentally behind the scenes. And if it wasn't for some minor act on his part, Lois would never have completed her quest and been hired at the Daily Planet.
Even though it's stated time and again that Lois has talent, these stories are designed to illustrate her as magnificently inept. Lois had previously appeared in two issues of Showcase that focused on her character and that served as a test run for a possible Lois Lane spin-off series (Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen had already been running for several years). The sexism, and occasional outright misogyny, that plagued Lois for many years was not absent from these two 1957 issues. The first all-Lois issue, Showcase Presents Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane (#9) depicts Lois on the cover as Mrs. Superman, scolding her husband for leaving her alone with their Super-Baby, whom she can't handle by herself. The cover of the second issue (#10) shows Superman reprimanding Lois for opening “The Forbidden Box from Krypton”—the allusion to Pandora's Box is made clear by Superman's commentary, “Lois—Your curiosity in opening that chest has released Three Super-Powers which may doom the world!”44
It's hard to decide which stereotype is more offensive, the housewife or the woman whose curiosity is a plague. But by the debut issue of Lois' eponymous title, a whole host of ugly, sexist assumptions about women were added. The first issue (March–April 1958) featured a cover story titled “The Witch of Metropolis.” Even Daniels notes that the book “was a catalog of stereotypes—from hussy to helpmate to hag—but the series lasted 16 years.”45
Throughout its run, the stories of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane would revolve around three insidious stereotypes concerning women: (1) they are obsessed with finding a husband; (2) they are a danger to themselves and others—and therefore must be looked after; and (3) they are rivals, prone to catfights, and as a result can never have authentic friendships.46
Fortunately, the possibilities of the 1940s were only temporarily quelled in the 1950s. The 1960s would get superwomen out of the kitchen and into something exciting.