Wonder Woman rode her horse triumphantly through the streets of Patagonia on the 4th of July this year.
Helen Chester, in the Wonder Woman costume she and Cindy Mohr designed, chose this role because, she said, “I was totally enamored by the new movie—by the strength in the woman, and that love was the winning power.”
Wonder Woman has enjoyed a long history, having been fighting for good for nearly 80 years. She began life in 1941 during World War II as a comic book superhero created by William Moulton Marston, his wife, Elizabeth Marston, and their friend, Olive Byrne. William wanted to design a new, more humanitarian comic book hero, one who had superhuman physical and intellectual powers but who, instead of brute force and blood-curdling violence, triumphed through compassion and love.
Elizabeth agreed, “Fine. But that means you must make her a woman.”—Marguerite Lamb, (“Who Was Wonder Woman?” Bostonia, Fall 2001)
Marston combined his vision with Elizabeth’s and Olive’s feminist ideals to create a strong, independent superhero model for women and girls. Wonder Woman continually rescued herself from bondage, rejecting the cultural demand that women always be rescued by men. In the newest movie, which premiered this summer, Wonder Woman not only defends her own life time and again, but gloriously leads battalions of soldiers to safety through the last battles of World War I. This behavior would have pleased her creators since they meant her to be an allegory not only for the ideal woman but for the ideal leader.
Marston said of her, “Wonder Woman is the psychological profile for the new type of woman who should, I believe, run the world.”—Grady Hendrix, “Out for Justice” (The
New York Sun, December 11, 2007)
When, in the late 1960s, Wonder Woman’s magical powers were taken away, Ms. Magazine came to the rescue with a lobbying campaign and restored the supernaturally powerful Wonder Woman to the mythic mind of America. Gloria Steinem put her on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1972.
Many have commented that the greatest message of the movie is not just the presence of a female superpower, but that Wonder Woman uses this power in ways that women are still rarely permitted. She does not ask permission of—or even understand—male authority. She makes her own choices, and when horrified at society’s injustices, simply goes forward by herself to eliminate them.
The movie evokes a strong visceral experience, making us feel energized by the power of Wonder Woman’s passion as we take magnificent leaps with her, deflecting barrages of machine gun fire with magical bracelets, and conquering with the glowing Lasso of Truth.
We can join with her in asking women’s eternal question: ‘Why is mankind destroying itself and the world?’ When her friend Steve muses that perhaps this tendency to destroy is innate in all of us, Wonder Woman responds, “It is not in me.”
Wonder Woman reminds all of us of our responsibility to look steadily at the harm humans are wreaking; and then, out of our profound love for all that lives on earth, act against it with every ounce of our moral and ethical courage. At the end, in her guise as secretary Diana Prince, Wonder Woman concludes that “I once thought I could save the world, but now I know it can only be saved by human love.”