Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

 Like Mary Boleyn, no one would know about Jane Franklin Mecom if not for her famous sibling. Born into poverty the youngest of 17 siblings, married at 15 to a man who may have been mentally ill and spent time in debtor's prison, she outlived all but one (or possibly two) of her eight children who survived to adulthood, as well as most of her grandchildren and many of her great-grandchildren. We know who she is because she wrote frequently to her brother Ben, and the letters which survive form the foundation of Book of Ages.

The book in question is Jane's own, the self-made pamphlet in which she recorded her children's births and deaths in an untutored hand. That, and some of her letters to her brother, are the only traces she left and like Alison Weir'sbiography of Mary Boleyn, Jill Lepore uses Book of Ages as a guide to the biographer's craft as she pieces together Jane's life through scant records. Those records show a hard life of poverty and death, with two of her sons spending time in protective custody due to mental instability and most of her children and grandchildren living short lives of ill health (Lepore speculates that several had tuberculosis which spread easily through the large family living in a tiny house-cum-workshop). The records are also incomplete, with a few of her descendants not having definite dates of death - including her son Benjamin who was reported to have died during the Revolutionary War but reappears a decade later making and selling the family soap.

Despite her hardships and rudimentary education, Jane was an avid reader, at least of her brother's works and of books he sent her. She loved to gossip (and her letters to her sister-in-law Deborah are chatty chronicles of family and friends, full of questions about Ben and Deborah's grandchildren), was deeply religious (unlike Ben), and while her brother was in Europe helped build his image as the Country Bumpkin/Untutored Genius by sending him homemade soap to distribute to those he wanted to influence. She had opinions, and in another time may have been able to act on them.

Lepore also shows how unlikely Ben's success was. He was the only sibling to get beyond a subsistence living, let alone into wealth, and yet he didn't give much support to his poverty-stricken sister, despite how close they were. Maybe he didn't want to support her husband as well, but Edward Mecom died in 1765. Would it have harmed his self-made image to give his sister more help, or was she too deep in the Puritan mold to feel she deserved it? It's something I can't reconcile as a modern person coming from a tradition that considers charity a cardinal virtue. Maybe the answer is in the letters that have been lost.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Im' not a comic book fan (which greatly limits my movie going at the moment). Wonder woman has an extra impediment. I can't erase my memories of the cheesy, cartoon-but-serious Lynda Carter series. My cousin loved it (and would strip down to her Wonder Woman Underoos in public, at least partially to embarrass me), but even at 7 or 8, I was more of an art house movie girl. I also didn't see the connection to feminism.

Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman reclaimed the character's feminist roots, which had been buried since shortly after World War II. Created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist better at self promotion than keeping a job, Wonder Woman was a strong, independent woman behind the kinky costume and frequent bondage references. He based her on his wives, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway (Betty Marston) and Olive Byrne.

Yes, wives. He was "married" to two women who supported him, Betty Financially and Olive by running the unconventional household. Both were intelligent and educated (Betty met Marston at age 13 and held an LLB and an MA in psychology; Olive was one of his grad students who dropped out of her Ph.D program to raise their children - two by each wife), and yet they spent decades catering to a man who claimed to be a feminist. It makes me wonder (as does Wonder Woman's outfit) how deep his views went, and whether they only existed as much as they could serve his interests.

Everything, though, Marston did was to his advantage, and Lepore's research couldn't untangle all the lies he told about himself. Some stories turned out to be true (he had written a few silent movies), but even then the reasons were unclear (did he need tuition money because his father's business was in trouble, or because he had gambling debts?). Marston's serial failures (businesses that lasted a few months, a decade-long slip down the academic ladder, a fraud conviction) and perpetual self-promotion don't lend themselves to a coherent story and it shows in the first half of the book. People appear and disappear, as I'm sure they did in Marston's life, leading to a disjointed narrative. Lenore's attempts to tie in Margaret Sanger's life (she was Olive's aunt) feel like padding and could have been handled in occasional paragraphs rather than chapters. Lenore also includes Marston's other claim to fame - his "invention" of a lie detector (using only blood pressure), bolstered by (probably) rigged tests gave us the Frye tests which says that scientific evidence hast o be "generally accepted" before it can be used in court.  A test which the later invented polygraph fails. To his death, he touted his invention, which, if accurate, he'd never pass.

So what about Wonder Woman? As interesting as Lepore's explanation of her creator's life was, I'd rather read about her history and influence. She was the first, and most lasting, female superhero. In  the bro culture that permeates the genre, we need her, and a better book about he.