The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Holloway was born in 1893 and was headstrong and independent from an early age. She was a brilliant student and did much better in law school than Marston. Together they were a formidable team, as she later helped him devise his lie detection experiments in psychology. She was a New Woman, the term used at the time for a woman seeking equality with men and a career of her own. Though she had earned a law degree, most of the jobs in law available to women then involved low-level, clerk-type work. She then turned to writing and editing, working first for an academic journal devoted to child psychology and then as senior editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Especially during the 1930s, the income from her career was what kept the Marston household afloat.

Her acceptance of the unorthodox family life they had goes further back than Olive Byrne. During World War I, Marston and Holloway were apart for some months while he treated victims of shell shock at a military camp in upstate New York. There he had an affair with Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, and when she visited the Marstons in Cambridge the next year, the three of them may have begun a three-way relationship. It’s not clear how Holloway truly felt about Marston’s ultimatum later regarding Byrne or how compelled or willing she was to accept it, but it did allow her to solve the problem of not having to give up her career to raise children. Lepore suggests that Holloway might have also been open to the idea since all of them had attended Aquarian meetings at the home of Marston’s aunt. In addition, after Marston’s death in 1947, Holloway and Byrne continued living together until Byrne’s death 43 years later.

Byrne was born in 1904 and had an unstable upbringing. Her mother abandoned the family when she was only two years old, her father died when she was young, and she was raised by her grandparents until they both died. After that, she grew up in an orphanage and only saw her mother again only once before the age of 16. Both her mother and her aunt Margaret Sanger lived in New York City and fought for women’s rights, especially in the area of birth control.

By the time she got to Tufts University, Olive Byrne had adopted some of the radical thinking of her mother, with whom she had been reunited as a teenager. The two spent time together at Ethel Byrne’s home on Cape Cod and visited Provincetown, where Ethel had friends. It was there that Olive first met gay men and women and saw some kissing. Olive became a proponent of free love and founded the Liberal Club at college, which was modeled after the club her mother and aunt belonged to in Greenwich Village. She wore her hair in short bob and dressed like a boy. There she met Marston and would have a profound effect on him.

Byrne, more than anyone, became the inspiration for Wonder Woman. When she and Marston held a ceremony to signify a kind of marriage between them, she began wearing close-fitting bracelets in lieu of a wedding ring. These bracelets were a signature part of Wonder Woman’s appearance and powers. In addition, some of the same themes later used in Wonder Woman appear in Marston’s 1932 novel Venus with Us, whose main female character is a thinly veiled version of Olive Byrne.