Wonder Women

June 7, 2017 1 Comments

The blockbuster movie Wonder Woman apparently is the hit of the moment – it has made more money than you can count since its recent release and is hailed by critics and audiences alike.  Below is a typical review….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cannes-and-wonder-woman-show-what-happens-when-women-challenge-archetypes–and-triumph/2017/06/01/fa57e254-46ce-11e7-a196-a1bb629f64cb_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_hornaday-730am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d0fa70bc4333

And here is a quote from an article in the Smithsonian magazine about noted psychologist Dr. William Marston, the original creator of the comic strip.

Marston was a man of a thousand lives and a thousand lies. “Olive Richard” was the pen name of Olive Byrne, and she hadn’t gone to visit Marston—she lived with him. She was also the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most important feminists of the 20th century. In 1916, Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, Olive Byrne’s mother, had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. They were both arrested for the illegal distribution of contraception. In jail in 1917, Ethel Byrne went on a hunger strike and nearly died.

Olive Byrne met Marston in 1925, when she was a senior at Tufts; he was her psychology professor. Marston was already married, to a lawyer named Elizabeth Holloway. When Marston and Byrne fell in love, he gave Holloway a choice: either Byrne could live with them, or he would leave her. Byrne moved in. Between 1928 and 1933, each woman bore two children; they lived together as a family. Holloway went to work; Byrne stayed home and raised the children. They told census-takers and anyone else who asked that Byrne was Marston’s widowed sister-in-law. “Tolerant people are the happiest,” Marston wrote in a magazine essay in 1939, so “why not get rid of costly prejudices that hold you back?” He listed the “Six Most Common Types of Prejudice.” Eliminating prejudice number six—“Prejudice against unconventional people and non-conformists”—meant the most to him. Byrne’s sons didn’t find out that Marston was their father until 1963—when Holloway finally admitted it—and only after she extracted a promise that no one would raise the subject ever again.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/origin-story-wonder-woman-180952710/

  

Timely entertainment? More like they were way ahead of their times….

 

I figured we need some everyday wonder women in our photographs today…..

 

I will soon go and watch the movie – unless I change my mind and look at wonder ducklings instead…. they are out in full force this week in the woods around Oaks Bottom……

friderikeheuer@gmail.com

1 Comment

  1. Reply

    Martha Ullman West

    June 7, 2017

    Thank you so much, I had no idea about Marston, etc. Fascinating. And I love both your “wonder women” and the “wonder ducklings”–make way for both!

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