The Beginnings

Warner Brothers recently announced that Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel) will write and direct a big-screen adaptation of the Wonder Woman story in 2006. If you read the IMDB listing for the movie, you'll see that next to Whedon's name there's another writer listed - William M. Marston. He created Wonder Woman back in 1941, but was also an attorney, a psychologist, an educational consultant and an inventor. Among other things, he can claim a leading role in the development of the polygraph lie detector and the systolic blood pressure test.

Photo courtesy DC Comics

Marston's psychological specialty was gender theory, and he held some views which would be as radical today as they were in the 1940s. Depending on your perspective, you might consider him a crackpot or a proto-feminist.

The Wonder Woman Pages puts it this way:

"During his lifetime, Marston championed the causes of women of the day."

Another source puts it a bit differently:

"Among Marston's theories was that America would become a Matriarchy, and in many of his writings he espoused the view that women could and would use sexual enslavement to achieve dominance over men."