The STRANGE BIRTH of WONDER WOMAN

You may think the honor of being on the first cover of Ms. Magazine went to Wonder Woman.

Like many treasured beliefs, this one is wrong.

That honor went to the many-armed Hindu goddess Kali,

 holding a frying pan, a typewriter, a mirror, and other tools of the hyper-multitasking modern woman. 

Wonder Woman graced the SECOND issue's cover.

William Moulton Marston, 

the inventor of Wonder Woman, believed women were superior to men and should run the world—

and would do so in, oh, about a thousand years.

Hey, his heart was in the right place.  Ah, or was it?

{William Moulton Marston testing his lie detector in a 1922 photo}

He was an American psychologist, lawyer, inventor, and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.

Marston had a great deal of help from his wife, Elizabeth Holloway 

(we have her to thank for “Suffering Sappho,” “Great Hera,” and other Amazonian expostulations), 

as well as from his former student Olive Byrne, 

with whom he and Holloway lived in a permanent ménage à trois that produced four children,

two from each woman. 

Olive Byrne was the niece of Margaret Sanger, 

whose youthful brand of romantic, socialist-pacifist feminism was formative for Marston. 

Strange, huh?