Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women

The Mutual Admiration Society was a group of friends with literary aspirations who entered Sommerville College before World War I and were later among the first women to earn full degrees from Oxford. Shaped by the Great War and their upper-middle to upper class backgrounds, they went on to push the expectations laid out for their lives without quite breaking them. Sayers is the best known now, both as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and as a scholar and translator, and I suspect Mo Moulton focused on her because of this. For the most influential, however, I'd choose Charis Frankenburg, who became a midwife and wrote books on birth control and childrearing, before becoming one of the first female magistrates in the UK. Other MAS members became academics, playwrights, and secondary school teachers while maintaining ties of varying strengths to their old friends. Moulton's book gives us a glimpse into their lives, but stayed a bit too much on the surface. I'd prefer a deeper look into the individual women but this serves as a good primer on their cohort.

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.

The Good Girls' Revolt

We've made progress since 1970, but how much.  40 years after female "researches" sued Newsweek for employment discrimination, the hard sexism of job restrictions (Seven Sisters educated women with reporting experience stuck in jobs as fact checkers for Ivy League men with no experience) was replaced with the soft sexism of frat boy patter. In 2010, three young Newsweek reporters, Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison,and Sarah Bell were fed up with having to fight for what was handed to their male colleagues, and putting up with broism on top of it. so they wrote about their experiences for Newsweek, and while researching, found out that 40 years earlier, 46 women sued the magazine for workplace discrimination.

Lynne Povich was one of those women. Although her father was a reporter (Shirly Povich, legendary sports columnist for the Washington Post), she'd never thought about being a writer.  She just wanted to live in France, and a secretarial job with Newsweek's Paris bureau was how she could achieve that. After two years, she landed in New York City,, where women (some of them later famous, including Nora Ephron and Jane Bryant Quinn) collected clippings and checked facts for men who got bylines. It was tradition, and by 19645 it was illegal.

Led by Judy Gingold, Margaret Montague, and Lucy Howard, the group grew through ladies' room conversations and lunches at The Women's Exchange. On the day Newsweek published a cover story (written by an external writer because Povich was one of only two women writers, and neither had the experience for a cover story) on the women's movement, the 46 women filed their suit. ACLU attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton negotiated a settlement, but two years later, all that had happened was there were men in the research department and a few women and been set up to fail in their trials as writers.  Since Holmes Norton was now on the New York Human Rights Division, the women turned to Harrie Rabb and the employment clinic at Columbia University. This time, they won lasting concessions which led to, among other things, Povich becoming the first female editor at Newsweek and Eleanor Clift the first woman to cover the White House for a major news organization.  Not all of the women became writers or remained in the media, but those who did (and those who didn't) opened the door a crack.

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

No one objects to my wearing trousers.

That sounds silly, doesn't it?  But in 1960, Lois Rabinowitz tried to pay her husband's parking ticket while wearing slacks and the judge threw her out of the courtroom.  The judge later lectured Mr. Rabinowitz on what he should do to control his wife.  55 years ago, in a world we'd mostly recognize, and a woman couldn't wear pants to traffic court.  It's a small victory, but I think that's why Gail Collins chose to open When Everything Changed with that story.  We've made great (although not complete) advances in women's place in society, but some of the "little things" have major day-to-day impact.

From 1960, Collins travels to 2008, blending oral and traditional history to illustrate how American women fought against discrimination within the Civil Rights movement, earned the right to have unchaperoned (and co-ed) dorms, made inroads into professions other than teaching and nursing, forced and dealt with changing standards of beauty and fashion, became able to hold credit in their own names, died for their country, and pushed towards more a equal division of home duties and codified family support.  Collins's tone is a bit more serious than in her New York Times columns, but still very enjoyable, and she allows both famous and ordinary women to tell their own stories.  It's definitely worth reading (although because of its structure, hard to review).