Wonder Woman

If you ask me, there’s no better day to begin writing a Wonder Woman blog than the fourth of July; Independence Day in the US. There was no one more patriotic than Wonder Woman. Even Superman, created in 1939, didn’t fight for the “American Way” until 1942. Wonder Woman’s mandate from Athena and Aphrodite themselves was to fight alongside Captain Steve Trevor for American Democracy. Even her original outfit, with its blue, star-spangled skirt and gold eagle spread across her chest, incorporated symbols of the United States.

It was 1941 and war was raging in Europe and Asia. Hidden behind it’s shield of fog, Paradise Island received its first male visitor. Captain Trevor’s plane had crashed. Princess Diana saved him and won the right to fly him back to the United States. She came on a mission to bring peace to the world by fighting alongside Trevor against German and Japanese operatives determined to sink America’s might before it could join the war.

We’re all fighting for American Democracy now. Well, those of us who believe in the promise of what the United States can become. We’ve been working these last two decades to understand the many ways we’ve fallen short. Racism, sexism, heteronormativity, misogyny, violence, and ableism have all flourished here. They flourished in the original comics as well. Although Wonder Woman was to be a feminist hero, it was a 40s feminism that still thought of home and motherhood as a woman’s highest calling.

Wonder Woman is a problematic figure in the way we all are: we’re human. She may have had super strength due to her Amazon training, she may have been fast for the same reason, and she may have had the gifts of her gods – including her magic lasso, but after all she, too, was human. Some of the predicaments she gets herself into are due to her own carelessness or miscalculations. No, Wonder Woman is not the perfect woman, in spite of the expressed intention of her creator, William Moulton Marston. Wonder Woman was, in his words, “psychological propaganda for the type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”

The wonder women in the title of this blog do not refer to women who are perfect in any way. Rather, they are women who used what they had in the service of their families, their country, their god(s), or their communities. Women who fought racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, misogyny, and violence in their own backyards. There are a lot of them out there. Join me as I go in search of them.