Wonder Woman Unbound (21 page)

One of Wonder Woman’s signature catchphrases also hinted at lesbianism. She regularly exclaimed “Great Hera!” or “Merciful Minerva!”—referencing deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon like those with a Christian background say “Good Lord!” or “Oh my God!” These deities were some of the most powerful goddesses in the pantheon; Hera was the wife of Zeus, the chief god, and Minerva, the Romanized form of Athena, was the goddess of wisdom and the daughter of Zeus. Wonder Woman had a long list of expressions, and all of them had a similar origin: “Shades of Pluto!” “By Neptune’s trident,” and “Thunderbolts of Jove!” were just a few of her favorites, and all of them were connected to Greco-Roman gods.
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But another of Wonder Woman’s signature catchphrases, “Suffering Sappho!” didn’t reference any deity at all.

Sappho was an ancient Greek poet from the sixth century
BCE,
best known for her poems in which female protagonists extolled their love for other women. Her home, the island of Lesbos, was the basis of the term “lesbian” when it was coined in the late nineteenth century, and the terms “lesbianism” and “sapphism” both referred to an erotic relationship between women until “lesbian” became the commonly used term in the early twentieth century. This was an unusual name for Wonder Woman to reference, to say the least. Hera and Minerva make sense as part of a go-to phrase, but Sappho was best known for poetry concerning love and attraction between women. To mention Sappho was to make a very specific reference to this type of attraction; Sappho wasn’t really known for anything else. If Marston or Kanigher were looking for alliteration, they could have referenced Selene, the goddess of the moon, or perhaps Semele, the mortal mother of the god Dionysus. “Suffering Sisyphus!” would have made a lot of sense. Mentioning Sappho only had one connotation and she was mentioned often, though not by Marston.

There’s one Sappho reference that was undoubtedly Marston, when he had Wonder Woman exclaim “By Sappho’s stylus!” in
Wonder Woman
#6. Sappho wasn’t mentioned again until a few years later in some Joye Murchison stories. In
Comic Cavalcade
#12, the Amazons watch a movie in Sappho Hall, and then Wonder Woman said “Suffering Sappho!” for the first time in
Wonder Woman
#20 in November 1946. The expression appeared a few times after this in stories attributed to Marston, but this is a gray area for credits. Marston was very sick at the time, so his scripts were likely coauthored or tweaked by Murchison or Kanigher, if he even wrote them at all.

When Kanigher took over full writing and editing duties for the series with
Wonder Woman
#30, “Suffering Sappho!” became a staple of Wonder Woman’s vocabulary. From Kanigher’s first issue in 1948 to when he revamped Wonder Woman in 1958, “Suffering Sappho!” was exclaimed over 160 times, or almost 2.5 times an issue.
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You have to dig into Marston’s work to see hints of lesbianism in his Wonder Woman, but Kanigher was much more direct. He mentioned Sappho frequently, and decades later in an interview with Trina Robbins he stated outright that all of the Amazons were lesbians. While Kanigher never had Wonder Woman engage in any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with another woman, it’s hard to get much clearer than that.

As much as we’ve been critical of Kanigher, it’s possible that he was subverting his own comic book. On the surface, Wonder Woman was all wrapped up in her relationship with Steve and wished she could settle down and become a housewife. However, the constant referencing of Sappho undercuts this heterosexual focus. In fact, the more romantic the comics got, the more Wonder Woman exclaimed “Suffering Sappho!”

Sensation Comics
got a makeover late in 1949. The logo switched to a softer, more flowing script, and the series got a new cover artist. Instead of Wonder Woman battling bad guys and deflecting bullets, the covers showed Steve carrying Wonder Woman across a brook or bringing her flowers.
Sensation Comics
suddenly looked like a romance comic more than a superhero book. Before this change, Wonder Woman said “Suffering Sappho!” occasionally during Kanigher’s run on the book, about 0.5 times per issue. After the new romantic style began, Wonder Woman said it nearly three times as often, at roughly 1.4 times per issue. More romance with Steve equaled more references to a lesbian poet. Of course, this could just be coincidental, but maybe this was Kanigher’s way of hinting at Wonder Woman’s true sexual leanings.

So was Wonder Woman a lesbian? To answer that question we have to go beyond the comic book itself and really read between the lines. Going purely by the comic book, Wonder Woman wasn’t a lesbian. There was nothing in the books that specifically identified her as such, and it’s unlikely that her young readers were familiar with
Emotions of Normal People, Venus with Us,
or Greek erotic poetry from the sixth century
BCE.
Ultimately, Wonder Woman was a fictional character and her life only consisted of the panels on the page. We can’t make any claims about Wonder Woman’s sexuality because it just wasn’t addressed. If anything, through her flirtations with Steve, and their dating in the Silver Age, the comic books implied that she was simply heterosexual. There were no overt references to Wonder Woman being attracted to women.

What we
can
say is that in light of Marston’s other work and Kanigher’s later interviews and references to Sappho, it’s fairly reasonable to interpret Wonder Woman as either bisexual or lesbian. Based upon the evidence, we can’t make any definitive statement about Wonder Woman herself, but we can state that due to Marston’s proclivities and the hints in his comic books, there may have been a bisexual or lesbian subtext to the series. It’s similar to Wertham’s claim that Batman and Robin weren’t gay but could be read as gay, except that in this case the evidence is far more compelling; I’m not aware of Batman’s creators writing any books that endorsed a homosexual lifestyle. As for Kanigher’s time on the book, it seems that he saw Wonder Woman as a lesbian, and he regularly hinted at this fact. In the end, Wertham was inadvertently onto something, in terms of both the Holliday Girls and Wonder Woman herself. His research was poor and his evidence laughable, but he accidently stumbled upon a conclusion that had some merit.

Regardless of the veracity of his claims, Wertham’s allegations and the subsequent fallout prompted great changes throughout the comic book industry, including
Wonder Woman.

The Changing Content of
Wonder Woman

One of Wertham’s problems with Superman was his invulnerability, which made him an unstoppable agent of violence. It’s probably not a coincidence that Kryptonite, an element poisonous to Superman that rendered him powerless, appeared far more often and in different forms in Superman comic books in the years following the publication of
Seduction of the Innocent.
A more blatant example that’s been noted by many historians involved Batman’s supposed homosexuality. The addition of Batwoman to the Bat-universe in 1956, followed by Bat-Girl in 1961, is often seen as a direct response to Wertham’s allegations of homosexuality. These new romantic interests for the Dynamic Duo made the pair part of a nuclear family instead of two single fellows who enjoyed each other’s company almost exclusively. The changes
Seduction of the Innocent
prompted in
Wonder Woman
were more subtle, but there were clear shifts after 1954.

In his very short critique of Wonder Woman, Wertham singled out the Holliday Girls as evidence of Wonder Woman’s supposed lesbian nature, but they hadn’t been a part of the series for years. The chart on the previous page shows the frequency of the Holliday Girls appearances by year for the entire Golden and Silver Ages. While the Holliday Girls were a staple of Marston’s tenure, appearing in every single issue, the beginning of Kanigher’s run in 1948 brought a speedy decline, and they disappeared for eight years starting in 1952. The Holliday Girls did come back sporadically after 1960, but never seemed to catch on. Kanigher wasn’t one to put a great deal of thought into his comic books, so their disappearance and subsequent reappearances were probably entirely random. The most likely explanation is that he just forgot about them for eight years. We can definitively state that Wertham had no effect on the Holliday Girls whatsoever, even though he mentioned them by name.

Although Wertham didn’t mention Wonder Woman’s Amazon sisters directly, he talked about Wonder Woman being surrounded by women, so the chart below shows the frequency of the Amazons’ appearances. They were a regular part of the Marston years, dropped a bit once Kanigher took over, and then began to appear more frequently once the CCA started and Kanigher kicked off his new direction for the series. Quantitatively, this is the opposite of what we’d expect to see. After Wertham’s comments about relationships with other women, you’d think that the Amazons would appear less frequently after 1954. But graphs don’t always tell the whole story.

Although Amazons appeared more often than they had before, how they appeared had changed. Before 1954, particularly during the Marston years, Wonder Woman associated with many different Amazons, like Mala, the warden of Reform Island. They all had competitions together and played bondage games, and there was an atmosphere of general camaraderie. After 1954, the Amazons became background players who barely said or did anything, and Wonder Woman interacted almost exclusively with her mother, Queen Hippolyta. The other Amazons were around, but Hippolyta was the only one with any dialogue or participation in the stories.

This shift might have been spurred by Wertham. His claim that “mother-love is entirely absent” may have led DC to show Wonder Woman in a more familial environment to counteract Wertham’s lesbian accusations. After 1954, many of Hippolyta’s appearances involved her giving Wonder Woman advice about what to do with Steve. Similarly, a lot of Kanigher’s Wonder Girl stories had scenes where Hippolyta counseled her daughter on love, life, and beauty. Kanigher’s “Impossible Tales” teamed up everyone, with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, and Wonder Tot going on fun family adventures. Paradise Island became solely family oriented for Wonder Woman. A nice visit with your mother and bondage games with other young women were two very different things, and after 1954 Wonder Woman’s Amazon interactions were limited to the former.

There were stark changes to the use of bondage imagery in
Wonder Woman
after 1954 as well. The chart on the next page shows every issue of Wonder Woman from 1952 to 1958, or
Wonder Woman
#51–102, in terms of the percentage of panels containing bondage imagery in each issue. In the early 1950s, the bondage totals were up and down, as we’d expect from the inconsistent Kanigher. His bondage totals were never as high as Marston’s, but it remained a fairly regular part of the book. The publication of
Seduction of the Innocent
didn’t do anything to halt the roller coaster of bondage totals, but things changed soon after the CCA was implemented.