<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nOf course, writes Sarah Kerr, \u201cthere was that moment in every show\u201d where nurse Diana Prince (Wonder Woman\u2019s undercover disguise) \u201cwould spin and transform herself into Wonder Woman. A cautious symmetrical whirl, it was too slow to suggest physical power. But there was something dumbly hypnotic about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can view innumerable video clips of Lynda Carter\u2019s famous whirls\u2014and other scenes from the television series\u2014 on YouTube. They will make you smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, Wonder Woman is back \u2013 and just in time. We need her badly, just as we needed her in 1941, when she was first created as a comic book character by a real character named William Moulton Marston, a Harvard alum, psychology professor, and kinky feminist who invented the lie detector test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Harvard historian and author Jill Lepore, Marston loved smart, strong women (he had a wife with a Ph.D. and also a mistress, and they all lived together\u2014allegedly happily\u2014with their four children). He decided to invent the Wonder Woman character as \u201can explicitly feminist creation\u201d that would help turn the tide during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As originally conceived by Marston, Wonder Woman helped military intelligence officials catch spies, including some who were working for Adolf Hitler. Her gleaming bracelets could repel bullets, and she was so muscular and strong\u2014not to mention curvy\u2014that she could easily break the chains that she was invariably tied up with. (According to Lepore, the chains were a nod to the early 20th-century suffragettes who fought for women\u2019s right to vote; the suffragettes often chained themselves to fences as part of their protest strategy.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wonder Woman was not the only hero fighting for \u201ctruth, justice, and the American way\u201d in the 1940s, but she certainly was the only superhero who was demonstrably female.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the early 1970s, when Wonder Woman made her first resurgence (her likeness was on the cover of the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine), women of my generation were making strides against the discrimination that plagued us then. Despite some progress, however, it plagues us still: women continue to be paid less than men and are promoted less than men. We don\u2019t have government-sponsored child care, as women do in every other firstworld country in the West. We don\u2019t have even a single day of guaranteed paid vacation, of course, neither do men. And women are still the predominant victims of domestic violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So it\u2019s past time for Wonder Woman to return to the arena. And thanks to authors Jill Lepore ( The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Knopf, 410 pp., $29.95) and Tim Hanley ( Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World\u2019s Most Famous Heroine, Chicago Review Press, 320 pp., $18.95), the Amazon princess is back in business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She has her work cut out for her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s less than a week \u2019til Christmas, but there is still time to rush around and buy a Wonder Woman doll or other Wonder Woman paraphernalia online or at your local toy store! There is an upsurge of interest in this venerable female super hero, probably because two new books about the Amazon princess have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}