Introduction
Everybody loves a hero. People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they'll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them how to hold on a second longer. I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride.
—Spider-Man 2
In Sam Raimi's 2002 film, Spider-Man 2, Aunt May tells her nephew, Peter Parker, that she believes “there's a hero in all of us.” If this is true, what happens to our social consciousness if the presence of our mythic heroes is—and has always been—overwhelmingly male? In a world where many young girls would rather be Harry Potter than Hermione—or Peter Parker than Mary Jane Watson—I often wonder where our “Wonder Women” are.
Well … there have been a few.
As a little girl in the 1970s, I adored the televised Wonder Woman series. Each time the ever-graceful Lynda Carter transformed herself from Diana Prince into the Amazon Princess by holding out her arms and spinning from her alias into her true identity, my younger sister and I would hop up out of our seats to twirl along with her. We hoped that by mimicking her magic we too could possess the admirable powers of justice and truth, compassion and love. Carter's pirouettes look a bit silly in retrospect, but as a child, they meant possibility. My sister and I may never be endowed with superpowers, though like all children, we certainly hoped we would be, and as adults secretly still do. But seeing Wonder Woman's acts of bravery and kindness, her reaching beyond the everyday, allowed us to see the potential in ourselves.
Wonder Woman was joined by Charlie's Angels and The Bionic Woman, each series an attempt to capitalize on the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. In the subsequent backlash years of the 1980s, superwomen in modern myth enjoyed a sporadic presence at best, though the revitalized Star Trek franchise did feature women in positions of authority and leadership, such as Chief of Security Lieutenant Tasha Yar and Dr. Beverly Crusher. She-Ra: Princess of Power, a spin-off of the animated series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, as well as Princess Leia of the Star Wars movies, showed young girls they could aspire to power—if they were royalty. The strongest women on American television were career women Murphy Brown and Claire Huxtable. While groundbreaking in their respective ways, they weren't exactly mythic—or even capable of more-than-human acts.
The Uncanny X-Men comics, as written by Chris Claremont, featured prominent females, including original member Jean Grey, as well as new characters Ororo Munroe, and her protégée Kitty Pryde. But superhero comics have not traditionally been written with a female audience in mind. The powers that be in the comics industry assume that girls don't read super-hero comics, because they don't typically buy superhero comics, and therefore publications in that genre aren't typically made for girls. Needless to say, it's a tired cycle that many fans (and several creators) are still working to break.
Movie representations of superwomen historically haven't fared much better than their four-color sisters of the printed page. In the 1980s and early 1990s, action heroines Sarah Connor of the Terminator films, Ellen Ripley of the Alien franchise, and arguably, to an extent, Charly Baltimore of The Long Kiss Goodnight and Nikita of La Femme Nikita, were the proud few to infiltrate what continues to remain a male-dominated genre. Each of these characters left her mark in a revolutionary way, and yet each was also limited by socially accepted gender stereotypes that kept her from being radically progressive. To this day, superhero movies still focus on male characters, with women in the supportive roles of nurturer and love interest.
The few superhero films that do feature female leads have failed miserably at the box office; infamous examples Elektra and Catwoman were received with great negativity. But unlike Spider-Man, X-Men,or Superman Returns, these films were poorly, shamefully, and embarrassingly produced. Regardless of the lack of attention to the source material (which is often problematic to begin with), it's the lack of monetary success that captures a studio's attention, framing further disinterest in committing proper resources to female-centric projects. As in the comics industry, the powers that be assume audiences aren't interested in superwomen when, in fact, they just aren't interested in subpar movies about superheroes.
This lack of heroic female role models in popular culture can be distressing for a little girl, as well as for a grown woman. We're shown too many images of us as beauty queens, femme fatales, vixens, girlfriends, mothers, and damsels in need of rescuing. We can be these things, but we can also be more.
In the late 1990s, two serendipitous things happened on a personal level that led to the book you hold before you. I came to realize that even if they appear scarce, superwomen do exist—and not just as someone's expendable love interest or second-rate sidekick.
The first was that I met my husband, a man who had grown up fascinated by the stories surrounding both comics and their creators—something that as a woman I hadn't had much exposure to. Sure I'd watched Wonder Woman, and other television series based on comics, but my own experience with print comics was limited to the Archies tantalizingly placed at child's-eye level in the checkout line at the supermarket.1
So whenever we watched a superheroic film, be it X-Men, or Spider-Man, he would give me the full background mythos of the various characters. I learned what happens to a man when he has been bitten by a radioactive spider, and about the crucial difference between organic and manufactured web-slingers. I heard stories about the mutant threat and the dangers of angering a man who had previously been exposed to gamma rays. Listening to the stories he told, with their themes of loss, love, and redemption, I began to appreciate these tales on a new level and finally recognized that superhero stories are American culture's modern expression of myth.
Modern myth serves a function similar to that of ancient myth, namely, telling and hearing stories helps us make sense of our lives. Narratives reflect the world and comment on it as they document events and also imagine them. Stories meditate on human behavior and interrogate the meaning of big ideas: Good and Evil, Morality, Spirituality, Justice, Relationships, Community, Power, and Love. The same basic themes our ancestors contemplated, crafted to be relevant to their particular and specific time, place, and cultures, are continually revisited through the ages, part of humanity's endless search for meaning.
Myths can be fantasy and they can be real, and sometimes, they are reality wrapped in metaphor and thus used as a way of teaching values. Recognizable character types such as the Hero, the Mother, the Father, the Sidekick, the Trickster, and the Villain—which according to Carl Gustav Jung were a global phenomena embedded in the human unconscious—give us ideas about who we are, and who we do or do not want to be. When these archetypes—as Jung termed them—are used in stories they can teach us about our socially appropriate roles, how we fit into our communities, and about our human potential, both terrible and great.2
Archetypal themes and big ideas may retain their significance for any given culture, but the ways stories are told and characters presented must evolve as a particular society does. For example, myths were once part of an oral tradition, and then they were expressed through the written word. Later, we were able to experience the wonder of the world through cinema, radio, comic books, and television—and all of these are where we can find our modern mythology.
In light of this, it was troublesome to me that although women's roles have evolved, and in fact, female and male roles have changed, modern hero stories, like those of classic world myth, continue to focus on male experience and fantasy; and that women in these stories continue to fill the supporting roles of mothers, wives, temptresses, and goddesses. Additionally, because heroism is often confined to power fantasies, there is little room for female experiences to be considered heroic.
Now, not every audience will be able to identify with Star War's Luke Skywalker in his quest—even though he follows the archetypal hero's journey. But, we all need to be able to imagine that we are capable of destroying the Empire and saving the galaxy from oppression. Certainly, many humans have at times felt powerless, perhaps, to use an ancient example, like the mythic David, small and standing up against a world of Goliaths. We want to believe we are capable of phenomenal acts and we need stories to teach us that, indeed, no matter our gender, race, sexual preference, or physical challenges, we can be heroes.
As my curiosity was piqued, serendipity again stepped in. The second marker on my path to this book was that female superheroes began to appear on television screens in numbers I hadn't seen since I was a little girl. First came Xena, Warrior Princess, and soon after, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Both had (and continue to possess) cult appeal, but the characters were also impressive enough to make their way into a larger social consciousness. They became icons, with a popularity and marketability that enabled the presence of even more female heroes in popular entertainment media.3
A combination of watching these innovative series and contemplating the stories my husband had shared led me to wonder about the history of superwomen in modern mythology. Buffy and Xena may be relatively well-known, but who are the overlooked, or at least quietly celebrated, characters? Where can we find stories about female agency and adventure? What about our feats of physical strength and our personal growth?
Wanting answers, I began to chronicle a history, which ultimately became Section I of this book, “Standing on the Shoulders of Amazons.” This begins in the late 1930s and highlights characters from American popular culture, as well as a few British and East Asian influences, all the way from Lois Lane and Wonder Woman up to the currently running (at time of writing) superwomen of television's Heroes.
This history, of course, cannot be all-inclusive. Throughout the book, when I have addressed a television show or film series, I have generally included the entire series as a complete text (and when I haven't I've noted otherwise). When I've mentioned a comic character, it has been in terms of a particular incarnation, story arc, or writer to make a point about a larger theme.4 Those who are sticklers about canon will note that “retcons”—a narrative tactic that retroactively alters a previous story arc to change current continuity—may negate or alter a point that I have made. This is why I want to stress that while a character's history may be addressed, this book is about common narratives that recur in representations of heroic women. And there is always room for more histories, revised editions, and so on— especially as I hope this book inspires women to go out and study modern mythic women, as well as create them.
So, what is a superwoman?
She can be a spy, a secret agent, an assassin, a detective, a witch, a reporter, or a superhero. She becomes super by surpassing the limits of the human body and mind, either through rigorous training, an industrial accident, by virtue of being an alien, mutation, or advanced evolution.
Sometimes a woman is destined to be super. She can be prophesized and called to duty, or she can be created in a lab. She can be an Ink-stained Amazon gracing the pages of comics, or a warrior woman of the digital or silver screens.
For the purposes of consistency in this book, each of the characters I've chosen have, more often than not, met at least two of the four criteria, discussed in the following sections.
Many serials, be they print, digital or film, have complex mythologies that appropriate and blend classic tropes, legendary quests, and symbolic archetypes.
Wonder Woman and Xena, Warrior Princess borrow from a combination of ancient Greek and Roman mythology to create hybrids of classic tales and modern politics, while series Alias and Heroes strive to establish their own unique mythos, with much less overt reliance upon the stories of our common past.
Regardless of the source material, these mythic stories transcend everyday experience. They tap into a larger tradition of storytelling that for millennia has allowed humans to fantasize about our potential. We see recognizable characters that are often the embodiment of an idea or an ideal, and because we so readily identify with them, their stories allow us to vicariously experience the extra-ordinary.
Superwomen generally are involved in paranormal, mythic, or magical circumstances. It's important to note that in these types of stories “magic” is often translated into, or conflated with, science.
Agent Dana Scully of The X-Files frequently encountered fantastic circumstances. The extraterrestrial phenomena, religious mysticism, telepathy, extrasensory perception, and other acts of transcendence, which were the foundation of her investigations, forced her, and us, to suspend disbelief and engage with the extraordinary.
On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow Rosenberg was adept at both science and magic. Though she was not the lead character, her contributions to the good fight were just as important as Buffy's.
Buffy herself had prophetic dreams, and Veronica Mars of Veronica Mars had slightly paranormal, if haunted, dreams that aided her investigations.
The birth of Alias's Sydney Bristow was prophesized in the fifteenth century by the fictional Milo Rambaldi—a combination of Nostradamus and Leonardo da Vinci.
As noted above, superwomen are uncannily good at something that allows them to accomplish their tasks—often with flourish. Their capabilities are usually achieved through a combination of innate ability and intense training.
Each of the Potentials on Buffy could become the Slayer—a warrior girl of superstrength, precognitive dreams, and accelerated healing. But it is the skills they gain by rigorous practice that see them through their greatest battle.
CIA agent, Sydney Bristow, has a preternatural capacity for language, but was also schooled from an early age in espionage. Dr. Catherine Gale and Mrs. Emma Peel are extraordinarily intelligent and champions in martial arts. And though often the damsel-in-distress, Lois Lane's trademark moxie, and skill with the written word, has made her name practically synonymous with “investigative journalism.”
Finally, a superwoman must use her skills for good, otherwise she has the capacity to become a supervillain.5 As Roz Kaveney points out in her book Superheroes!, “The mission is an important defining characteristic, as much so as [a superhero's] powers.” It is this devotion to the mission that enables us to cast our widest net when identifying superwomen, because, as Kaveney notes, people who lack the traditional powers associated with superheroes are still generally considered superheroic if they share a commitment to the superhero mission of fighting for “truth, justice, and the protection of the innocent.”6
This mission can be the altruistic teachings of Wonder Woman, or Sarah Connor protecting the savior of humanity (who also happens to be an innocent—her child). It can be Ororo Munroe and Jean Grey of the X-Men, offering their services at the very school that taught them, or The Powerpuff Girls saving the world before their bedtime.
***
Having identified the characters that meet these essential characteristics, and thus providing a comprehensive history of superwomen from the 1940s to the present day, we can better see the events that sparked their arrival, as well as the effects they did—or didn't—have on popular culture and consciousness. It's a fascinating question: How do stories reflect a changing society, and what effect do representations of gender have on social consciousness? Eccentric psychologist William Moulton Marston believed that young women needed to see a heroic image of themselves, and so created Wonder Woman. Sixty years later, writer, director, and feminist activist Joss Whedon said, “If I made a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me and it can only be done in a popular medium.”7
Whedon believes, as Marston did, in changing men's ideas about women, and women's ideas about what they are capable of, by using the power of storytelling. But both Wonder Woman and Buffy Summers were also enabled by the political trends of their time. Wonder Woman symbolized women's participation in the American homefront industry during the Second World War—a time when superheroes were the embodiment of American patriotism. But after the Rosie the Riveter era, post-war women, both mythic and real, were returned to the domestic sphere. And Buffy both grew out of, and spurred on, the Grrrl Power movement of the 1990s—a part of what some refer to as the Third Wave of Feminism.
Clearly, there have been progressive flows tempered with regressive ebbs in representations of superwomen in popular culture. But when chronicling characters in a linear history, a cyclic pattern appears of a progression, followed by the inevitable attempts to capitalize with copycats. Then there is typically a regression, or even an outright backlash, then an absence, again followed by the appearance of one or two influential characters and a repeat of the process.
Section II of this book, “Journey of the Female Hero,” explores themes that are consistently present in representations of superwomen. The common narratives, motives, and character attributes addressed are the results of numerous and varied influences, including tropes from ancient storytelling, archetypal images, politics, cultural stereotypes about sex and gender, and occasionally, zeitgeist.
Themes to be covered in these chapters include feelings of love and acts of compassion. Be it maternal, romantic, or platonic, love has often been the motivating impetus for women. And it is perhaps because of this that female heroes are often shown working in tandem, either as a team, or as the sidekick to the professionally superior male (i.e., Dana Scully to Fox Mulder on The X-Files). This could easily be interpreted as a way of containing women's power by only depicting them in more traditional roles, that is, “mother,” “love interest,” or “assistant.” It could also be suggested that a solo woman warrior is still too outrageous to be taken seriously and therefore requires assistance in her heroic ventures.
While readings like these may occasionally be the case, superwomen have also revolutionized depictions of collaboration in contemporary heroic narrative for women and for men.
Generally, teams of male heroes are brought together by chance (The A-Team) or because of convenience (The Justice League of America). They participate in missions together, simply because it's pragmatic to combine their skills. But women's desire for companionship (as with Xena and Gabrielle) and tendency to support and nourish the skills of those around them (as with Buffy) has raised the status of cohorts, teammates, and side-kicks. As scholar and educator Sharon Ross has noted, modern superwomen “are not heroes for other women so much as they are heroes with them.”8
Whether these traits are innate or not, my purpose is to argue for deeper, more complex, and even multivalent readings. Our relationship with how gender is represented in popular culture will probably never be comfortable—and it most likely shouldn't be. But just because an image isn't progressively satisfying, it doesn't mean there isn't pleasure or empowerment to be found. Conversely, just because a character may have liberatory potential, it doesn't mean she, or he, shouldn't be met with critical engagement.
“Journey of the Female Hero” also examines the role of parents—who are just as dominant a presence in the hero's life as they are in ours. As fathers and mothers often have a separate and unique influence over us, each unit will be addressed in a separate chapter.
Single fathers and their superdaughters is an oft-recurring theme in the mythic origins of superwomen, many of whom are the product, or perhaps, result, of single fathers who work for the police or the military. Their mothers are almost always either dead, alcoholic, clueless, unmentioned, insane, or otherwise emotionally unavailable and out of the picture.
While mothers are absent from the female hero's life, they do play a valuable role in the journey of the heroic male. Because behind every great man, there's a great mother figure, right? John Connor has Sarah, Clark Kent has Martha, and Mulder, at least symbolically, has Scully—whose role as a maternal figure was explored throughout the series and took center stage with the character's pregnancy through much of season eight.
But can motherhood be heroic? Or is it always just a way of containing women's potential power by showing what sorts of heroism are socially appropriate for them? The lioness protecting her child is perhaps more palatable to a general audience than vigilantism for its own sake. Indeed, women are often shown nurturing the savior of people, rather than protecting the community as a whole.9
While mythic moms are almost always kept in minor, secondary, or behind-the-scenes roles, several mother–daughter relationships are notably exceptional, as we'll see in Chapter 7, where we'll also look at images of women mentoring women. This is invaluable because when all we see are images of superwomen—even extremely talented and capable ones— receiving their training from only male teachers, gurus, sensei, and sages, it assumes that intellectual and physical power is masculine and that female knowledge has no value.
Section III, “The Mythmakers,” looks at men and women in the USA and Great Britain who have created modern myths with a strong female presence.
While women writers, artists, and directors may have the potential to change how superwomen are produced or received, many shy away from outright statements that they are intentionally creating strong or feminist characters. Jane Espenson, who has worked with Joss Whedon, and Gail Simone, a former hairdresser who now writes for DC Comics, have both stated that they just write characters, not specifically female characters. But they are women, and it's difficult to escape being gendered. Female-produced myths often have a slightly different flavor, taking on different issues, or exploring possibilities overlooked by male authors.10
Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons' teen comic book series Go Girl! has a functioning relationship between a mother and a daughter—a rarity in myth, while Gail Simone's run on BirdsofPrey depicts women who actually talk like women. In movies, Angela Robinson's campy spy-fi film D.E.B.S. provides a feminist alternative to Charlie's Angels.
The “Conclusion” ponders the future of superpeople, and looks optimistically toward more complex myths where a range of identities is represented.
Reflecting back on those joyously dizzying pirouettes that made me believe I was becoming a superhero, I'm happy to say that my journey as a superwoman continues. I may not have a magic lasso, or even a tiara, but because of an Amazon Princess named Diana, I was able to recognize the hero in myself at an early age. I grew from a shy, geeky girl, into a confident, compassionate woman.
Wonder Woman's journey continues too. Once the sole warrior woman to fight gender stereotypes, she is now surrounded by an army of slayers, princesses, witches, mutants, and meta-humans. These women not only collaborate with one another, but with men as well. They are complicated, fleshed-out, damaged, driven, intelligent, and resourceful. Some are endowed with powers. Some are simply human. But they are all super.