Welcome to the 962nd installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. In honor of the passing of Gloria Steinem, the first legend in this installment is a look at the impact that Steinem had on Wonder Woman’s history.
Right off the bat, let me note that probably THE hardest legends to prove are legends that involve a confluence of events. Person X might do something, and because they did something, they think that they were the reason Event Y occurred, but in reality, Event Y was going to happen, no matter what, because of a totally unrelated reason. So when Person X later recalls the situation, they will legitimately BELIEVE that they are the reason for Event Y, whether they are or not.
And the fact of the matter is often that more than one thing is the reason for any given decision, so Person X might very well have had AN impact, but it is unclear whether it was THE main impact. This is a roundabout way of saying that when it comes to the impact that Gloria Steinem had on Wonder Woman regaining her superpowers and costume in 1972, it is very hard to decipher the truth from the events that Steinem, the iconic feminist writer and activist who passed away yesterday, herself believed to have occurred.
Why Did Gloria Steinem Believe That She Caused DC to Return Wonder Woman’s Superpowers and Costume?
As I noted in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed, in the late 1960s, Mike Sekowsky (initially under Jack Miller as editor, but then Miller just gave way to Sekowsky editing himself) decided to dramatically change Wonder Woman’s title, taking away her powers and costume and making her simply Diana Prince…
The series was bi-monthly, so this lasted a few years despite only lasting roughly 25 issues. Sekowsky’s stories involved Diana and her mentor, I-Ching, going on various adventures…
Sekowksy’s original intent was driven by a desire to do a more feminist take on Wonder Woman, but through the eyes of a dude in his late 40s in 1968, so the comics did not always match Sekowsky’s ostensible original vision (I mean, right around the time of the Stonewall Riots, Wonder Woman fights a group of women who are clearly intended to be lesbians. Stuff like that.).
In the early 1970s, Gloria Steinem cut a deal with Warner Communications to help finance a new feminist magazine called Ms. The cover of the first “official” issue (there was a previous issue that was included in an issue of the New Yorker in early 1972) featured Wonder Woman on it. The magazine was released in 1972…
Steinem also did a book about Wonder Woman around this time that reprinted classic Wonder Woman comic book stories.
By the end of 1972, Wonder Woman was back to her classic costume and had regained her superpowers (in a comic written and edited by Robert Kanigher, who had been replaced on the title by Sekowsky in the late 1960s)…
In 2017, Vanity Fair ran an interview that Professor Marston and the Wonder Women director Angela Robinson did with Steinem, and Robinson directly asked about Steinem’s impact on Wonder Woman changing her costume back.
Angela Robinson: Can you tell me about why you decided to mount a campaign to restore Wonder Woman’s superpowers? What did the campaign consist of? Did you lobby DC Comics?
Gloria Steinem: We lobbied DC Comics publicly, by putting Wonder Woman on the cover [of Ms.] and reprinting some of her Golden Age stories, so girls plus women younger than I and Joanne Edgar, also a founder of Ms. who grew up on Wonder Woman, could see what they were missing. [We] also [lobbied] privately by lobbying Dick Giordano, who was then running all the DC Comics superheroes—with artists I always imagined chained by the ankle to drawing boards, churning out story after story—to stop making her into a powerless 1950s car hop. I remember him finally calling me at Ms. and saying something like, “O.K., she’s got her magic lasso back to make people tell the truth, she’s got her bracelets back to repel bullets, she’s got Paradise Island back as her origin story—and a black Amazon sister named Nubia. Now will you leave me alone?”
Seems simple enough, right?
But it’s probably not quite that simple!
What did the creators of Wonder Woman at the time say about the reasons for the change?
My pal, the great comic book and TV historian, Andy Mangels (check out his website to read more cool stuff from him), wrote an article about this era of Wonder Woman for TwoMorrows’ Back Issue #17.
I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed years ago about how the great science fiction writer, Samuel Delany, had just started a six-part spotlight on “women’s liberation” issues, which was going to include a plot involving an ABORTION CLINIC even before the whole thing was squelched, and the story abruptly had Kanigher return Wonder Woman to her roots (I-Ching is summarily killed off in the process).
In 1979, Gary Groth interviewed Delany about the story (which was only seven years old at the time):
Gary Groth: I read that you had scripted Wonder Woman. I wasn’t aware of that. How did that come about?
Samuel R. Delany: For two issues, I think. This was back when National was at the end of its “relevant” phase. They’d been trying to do the relevant bit with a number of standard titles: Green Lantern (with Green Arrow) was, of course, the great success. But now they were trying the same thing with Wonder Woman. Only it wasn’t working. Mainly that was because the people they had writing it just didn’t have much of a feel for the women’s movement. Short of getting a woman writer for the series who did (Don’t ask me why they didn’t put some energy in that direction!), nobody could come up with anything. So at one point I said to Denny [Dennis O’Neil]: “I think I have more of a sense of this thing. Why don’t you let me do a couple?” So I did. A couple.
Gary Groth: This was while Denny was editing it?
Samuel R. Delany: Yes. From those two issues there was actually some very nice feedback. But then there was a big change. National decided to put Wonder Woman back into her American flag falsies and bring back the bullets and bracelets bit. For the previous ten years, basically she’d been wearing a gi and was a super karate expert. It was a lot more realistic and a lot more amenable to stories with some social bite.
But there was this nostalgia surge to take her back to her fifties incarnation. D.C. used a chance comment Gloria Steinem dropped while being shown through the National offices to throw out all of Wonder Woman’s concerns for women’s real, social problems. Instead of a believable woman, working with other women, fighting corrupt department store moguls and crusading for food cooperatives against supermarket monopolies — as she’d been doing in my scripts — she got back all her super powers … and went off to battle the Green Meanies from Mars who were Threatening the Earth’s Very Survival. …
I wasn’t interested in that. So I pulled out.
Note that in 1979, Delany believed that DC was really just using Steinem as a pretext. In Mangels’ article, Denny O’Neil noted:
I was not consulted, nor would I have expected to be. There was no reason for anybody to talk to me about that. It was an experiment, and I think at the time we realized it was an experiment. Whether or not Ms. Steinem had anything to do with that or whether she was brought in because they thought it was time to revert back to an earlier inception of the character, I don’t know.
Dick Giordano (who almost assuredly was not the guy who rudely told Steinem to stop complaining. That was also definitively Kanigher, who had invented Nubia and wrote and edited Wonder Woman #204) also told Mangels, “My guess would be that sales of the de-powered version had more to do with its demise then any pressure brought by Ms. Steinem. Carmine [Infantino] would not have changed his mind because of statements made outside the editorial or business offices of DC. Besides, the Teen Titans got their costumes and powers back at about the same time, without pressure from Steinem.”
Note that Ms. Magazine’s debut issue also involved an article about Wonder Woman where it noted that Wonder Woman was gaining its first female editor, Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk, and she was planning on a reboot of the character, “Ms. Woolfolk also plans to decrease violence in the plots and return our heroine to the feminism of her birth. And maybe to politics, too?” I have no doubt that Woolfolk DID tell Ms. magazine that in 1971, but by the time that the article came out, Woolfolk had actually been hired AND fired on the book six or so months earlier, replaced by the aforementioned Denny O’Neil.
Gloria Steinem cared a lot about comics. She was a true believer in comics. She treated comics with a lot of respect. However, I don’t believe that she was necessarily following the exactitudes of the comics at the time, as noted by the announcement of Woolfolk taking over in an article that was published seven months after Woolfolk’s last issue (of two issues).
In Kanigher’s return to the character, he also has the same sniper that kills I-Ching kill a stand-in for Dorothy Woolfolk, who is a “woman’s magazine editor”…
I find it hard to believe DC was too concerned about feminist magazine editors at the time when Kanigher’s return opens up with the killing of one.
Steinem was a great writer and activist, and the world will greatly miss her. I just think that her impact on the return of Wonder Woman is probably overstated enough (from her perspective, though, I’m sure she felt that’s precisely how it went) that I’ll go with a “false” here, but only when stating it as if she was the SOLE reason Wonder Woman returned to being her classic self.
I am sure that she DID have some impact on the decision, just not quite the level that has been attributed to her. But hey, she still had a major impact on Wonder Woman regardless! And she made a major impact on American society period. Rest in peace, Gloria Steinem.
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In the latest TV Legends Revealed – See how a tragic plane crash indirectly led to the creation of Designing Women.
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