By Peg Strobel

By Peg Stobel

The author poses with a Wonder Woman action figure.

I never read a Wonder Woman comic nor saw the 1970s TV show, but as a feminist and a historian I was intrigued by the very idea of Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman –even before it won the New York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize. Those not prepared to read all 297 pages of the book can read the New Yorker excerpt or find the main points in the 16-page color insert that features panels from initial 1941 sketches to Wonder Woman’s appearance on the cover of the first regular issue of Ms. magazine in July 1972. (Casual readers can ignore the 109 pages of sources, notes, indices.) Like Superman (1938) and Batman (1939), Wonder Woman (1941), never out of print, helped launch the Golden Age of comic books.

Source: (Re)viewing Wonder Woman