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Women issues to Wonder Woman
Contributions made by the
students of Hugo Munsterberg
166
Leon C. Prieto
College of Business Administration, Savannah State University,
Savannah, Georgia, USA
Abstract
Purpose – This article seeks to depict the pivotal role Hugo Munsterberg, the great pioneer in
industrial psychology, played in the lives of his students, some of whom were feminists regardless of
his own chauvinistic opinions. The article aims to examine the contributions made by Mary Calkins,
Ethel Puffer, and William Marston, all former students of Munsterberg, who went on to make valuable
contributions in psychology, women’s issues, the polygraph, and the creation of the first and most
famous comic book super heroine.
Design/methodology/approach – Synthesizing articles from history journals, writings about the
figures of interest, published works by the figures themselves and other resources, this paper
illustrates how Hugo Munsterberg impacted the scholarly careers of Calkins, Puffer, and Marston who
all made valuable contributions to academia and popular culture.
Findings – This paper concludes that Munsterberg’s influence was evident in the works of Calkins,
Puffer, and Marston in areas as diverse as the psychology of beauty to the detection of deception.
Despite his own chauvinistic views Munsterberg had an amicable and productive relationship with the
aforementioned students, which sometimes extended beyond a professional relationship.
Consequently, they initiated a research agenda that was greatly influenced by Dr Munsterberg.
Originality/value – This article highlights Dr Hugo Munsterberg’s influence on Calkins, Puffer, and
Marston, who made valuable contributions in women’s issues, as well as the development of DISC
theory, and the super-heroine Wonder Woman.
Keywords Mary Calkins, William Marston, Hugo Munsterberg, Ethel Puffer, Wonder Woman,
Influence, Students, Psychology, Women
Paper type General review
Journal of Management History
Vol. 18 No. 2, 2012
pp. 166-177
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1751-1348
DOI 10.1108/17511341211206834
Dr Hugo Munsterberg was probably the most prodigious, industrious, and provocative
psychologist in the world at the turn of the twentieth century (Porfeli, 2009). The
Harvard philosopher-psychologist William James had recruited him in Germany in
1892, when Munsterberg was only 29, to take over Harvard’s pioneering work in
experimental psychology (Business Week, 1966, p.20). In a letter William James wrote
to his brother, he described Munsterberg as the “Rudyard Kipling” of psychology,
because like Kipling, Munsterberg was a prodigy (Porfeli, 2009). At 28 years old,
Munsterberg was regarded as one of the most accomplished psychologists in Germany
( James, 1920). Munsterberg was arguably among the most productive psychologists of
his era, with a vita including more than 20 books and numerous articles produced
during a 17-year period (Hale, 1980; M. Munsterberg, 1922).
Despite his brilliance, Munsterberg was criticized by many because of his
impetuous personality and moral rectitude that antagonized many of his colleagues
(Spillman and Spillman, 1993, p. 327). Professor Munsterberg was also disliked for his
views on women. He felt that it was unfortunate that American women controlled the
higher culture and ideals because men were too preoccupied with their occupations
(New York Times, 1910, p. 5). Munsterberg also felt that if an artificial equality was
kept up through women’s higher development, American intellectual work will be kept
down by the women (Munsterberg, 1901, p. 163). Munsterberg also managed to enrage
suffragists when he reported that he would be satisfied with the jury system as long as
women were kept out of it. He came up with those conclusions during an experiment he
conducted with students from Harvard and Radcliffe in which he tried to determine
what the essential mental processes were during trial by jury (Munsterberg, 1922,
p. 435). Despite his pre-eminence, his abrasive personality, his view on women, and
unpopular politics (his support of Germany in the First World War) led to his work
being largely ignored in the twentieth century (Porfeli, 2009).
Dr Munsterberg, despite his views on women, still managed to attract a plethora of
female and male students (Munsterberg, 1922, p. 61). The focus of this paper will be on
three of his students, namely Mary Calkins, Ethel Puffer Howes, and William Moulton
Marston, who were all enthusiastic about learning under the German professor. The
writer will discuss the irony in which a male chauvinistic professor had a significant
impact on the professional careers of the three aforementioned students who
contributed to the field of psychology and women’s rights in their own particular way.
The writer will first discuss Mary Calkins, her professional and cordial relationship
with Munsterberg, and the influence he had on her work. Second, the writer will discuss
Ethel Puffer and the contributions she made in the advancement of women. Third, the
writer will discuss William Moulton Marston, the influence of Munsterberg on
Marston’s psychological work, the polygraph, and Marston’s interest in the feminism
which played a factor in him creating the well known super-heroine, Wonder Woman.
Mary Calkins
Mary Calkins (1863-1930) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the eldest of five children,
and grew up in Buffalo, New York, where her father was a protestant minister. Calkins
left home in 1882 to attend Smith College in an era when higher education for women
was still an unproven experiment (O’Connell and Russo, 1990, p. 58). Her father Wolcott
Calkins arranged for Mary to have an interview with Wellesley’s president, Alice
Freeman. Mary Calkins subsequently joined the faculty. Later, when Mary sought a
PhD in psychology from Harvard, which did not admit women, Wolcott petitioned the
Harvard Corporation to admit his daughter as a special visitor (Palmieri, 1983, p. 198).
Calkins and Munsterberg
Mary Calkins considered Hugo Munsterberg to be one of her great teachers, the others
being, William James and Edmund Sanford (Calkins, 1930, pp. 31-33). In Munsterberg’s
early years at Harvard he began his cordial relations with Calkins, in whose career he
had a lifelong interest and for whose creative work he had a great admiration; and he
spent many evenings over at Miss Calkins’s parents (Munsterberg, 1922, p. 63). There
was once an incident at Harvard where Dr Munsterberg had planned a lunch meeting
of the Committee of the American Psychological Association, in which Calkins was a
member, at the Harvard Union, but the head waiter denied them entrance stating that
women were not allowed, but Munsterberg almost by main force gained his point and
the Committee its lunch (Calkins, 1930, p. 34).
Calkins admired Munsterberg who she noted as a man of deep learning, high
originality, and astounding versatility, interested alike in systematic psychology, in
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the setting and solution of experimental problems. She worked with him for three years
in the Psychology Laboratory of Dane Hall (Calkins, 1930, p. 33). In 1894, she published
the first of a series of reports on work she had done in Munsterberg’s laboratory:
experiments on the pair associate technique, which she had invented. In October 1894,
Munsterberg wrote to the president and fellows of Harvard College inquiring if there
was a chance that Calkins might be admitted as a candidate for the PhD. The following
is an excerpt from his letter:
With regard to her ability, I may say that she is the strongest student of all who have worked
in the laboratory in these three years. Her publications and her work here do not let any doubt
to me that she is superior also to all candidates of the philosophical PhD during the last years.
More than that: she is surely one of the strongest professors of psychology in this country.
The Harvard PhD attached to the name of Mary W. Calkins would mean not only a well
deserved honor for her, but above all an honor for the philosophical department of Harvard
University (Furumoto, 1979, p. 352).
The Harvard Corporation records for 29 October 1894 note that Munsterberg’s request
was considered and refused (Furumoto, 1979, p. 352). In the spring of 1895, Calkins
presented her thesis entitled “An experimental research on the association of ideas” to
the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. The thesis was approved by the members of
the department, and after conducting an informal and unauthorized PhD
examination of the candidate; her examiners forwarded a communication to the
president of Harvard College (Hanus et al., 1993). These efforts failed and there
remained the possibility that Radcliffe College, as the women’s college equivalent to
Harvard, with only Harvard instructors on its faculty, should confer the degree of
philosophy on her who had won it within the Harvard walls. Not until May, 1902, when
three other women had also passed their PhD exams, was it decided that the Radcliffe
doctorate was actually the form of the Harvard degree for women. Munsterberg tried
his best to persuade Calkins to accept the PhD at Radcliffe College and he wrote
(Munsterberg, 1922, p. 76):
We are all very anxious that you do so, as just by the cooperation by you four prominent
women with you as acknowledged leader, the new degree would command at once highest
respect in the whole academic world, certainly superior to the degree or similar degrees. It will
be the Harvard degree. Of course it will be too late for correspondence. You must cable a word
to Radcliffe; be sure and cable: “Yes!”
However, Calkins remained firm and refused. Her graduate studies successfully
accomplished, except for the lack of degree, she returned to Wellesley College in the
autumn of 1895 as Associate Professor of Psychology and Philosophy.
Calkins’ professional work
Over the next five years, there appeared in the psychological literature a steady stream
of studies from the Wellesley College psychological laboratory communicated by
Calkins; she was a passionate educator and believed that psychology, in the hands of a
teacher who lays stress on verbal definitions and on traditional groupings, may
become a mere text book subject, a memorizing of verbal statements and
uncomprehended schedules (Calkins, 1907, p. 674). She also published some papers
reporting the results of her work in Munsterberg’s laboratory, including the work that
would have been her doctoral thesis. In 1900, there appeared the first series of papers in
which she developed her ideas about psychology as a science of self, and the following
year, her first book, An Introduction to Psychology, was published (Furumoto, 1979,
pp. 352-353). Her publications of the 1890s, primarily reports of experimental work,
were supplanted after 1900 by theoretical and philosophical papers.
For the period after 1900, Calkins’s major contribution to psychology was the
development of a system of self psychology where she was concerned that the self was
often left out of psychology on the ground that scientific introspection has failed to
discover it (Calkins, 1915, p. 495). Calkins was also concerned in showing the
possibility of such a psychology of selves by considering, in the first place, the essential
distinction between philosophy and science (Calkins, 1900, p. 491). She published
prolifically in both psychology and philosophy; four books and well over a hundred
papers are divided evenly between the two disciplines. Her work in psychology tends
to cluster in the first half of her career, whereas her concern with philosophy was a
continuing thread. The shift in emphasis is reflected in her election to the presidencies
of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and the American Philosophical
Association in 1918 (Furumoto, 1979, p. 353). Calkins acknowledged the influence of
Hugo Munsterberg on her conception of the double standpoint in psychology, which is
the theory that every experience may be treated alike from the atomistic and from the
self psychological standpoint (O’Connell and Russo, 1990, p. 61).
Concluding notes on Calkins
In the 1890s, Calkins challenged the work of a colleague, Joseph Jastrow. In his study,
he asked college students, both male and female, to write down 100 words as fast as
possible. He found “that women repeat one another’s words more than men” and “there
is less variety among women than among men” (Furumoto, 1979, p. 353). After
analyzing these lists he concluded, “that the feminine traits revealed are an attention to
the immediate surroundings, to the finished product, to the ornamental, the individual,
and the concrete; while the masculine preference is for the more remote, the
constructive, the useful, the general, and the abstract” (Furumoto, 1979, p. 353). Calkins
was infuriated by his findings and responded on the impossibility of making valid
distinctions between masculine and female intellect when one cannot eliminate the
effect of the environment.
Mary Calkins had a long and distinguished career as a psychologist and educator.
She overcame the obstacles faced by women to receive a higher education and won the
respect of her professors, especially Munsterberg, who acknowledged her as one of his
most outstanding students. In 1891, she founded one of the earliest psychological
laboratories in the United States at Wellesley College, where she served on the faculty for
40 years. Her contributions to psychology include the invention of the paired-associate
technique for studying memory and the development of self-psychology. She was
elected to the presidency of both the American Psychological Association and the
American Philosophical Association, the first woman to be accorded this honor by either
organization (O’Connell and Russo, 1990, p. 57).
Ethel Puffer Howes
Ethel Puffer (later Howes) (1872-1950) was born in the eastern Massachusetts town of
Framingham (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 75). On both sides of her family,
several generations of her ancestors had been native New Englanders (Furumoto and
Scarborough, 1987, p. 75). Her father George attended business school in Boston, where
he worked as a railroad station master. After completing high school, Ethel Puffer
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herself traveled across the state of Massachusetts to attend Smith College, graduating
in 1891, when she was not quite 19 (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 75). Puffer
took a teaching job at a high school in New Hampshire as an instructor of Mathematics.
When she was at Smith College, she became very interested in psychology, and, in
1895, Puffer set out for Germany (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 75).
170
Puffer and Munsterberg
In Puffer’s classes, she met a young Canadian who had completed a PhD in psychology
at Harvard while Hugo Munsterberg was there on a three year appointment, and
through him, she was able to arrange an interview with Munsterberg, who was at the
time teaching at the University of Freiburg. She was interested in aesthetics, one of
Munsterberg’s areas of specialization, and had attended a course of lectures on the
topic in Berlin (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 78). Much to Puffer’s delight,
Munsterberg showed real interest in her, offering to direct her research and to let her
work in his private laboratory. Munsterberg even assured Puffer that his wife would
help make her stay in Freiburg a pleasant one. Adopted into the Munsterberg family,
Puffer thrived on the holidays, parties, cultural events, and outings that were an
integral part of upper middle class life in southern Germany (Furumoto and
Scarborough, 1987, p. 79).
Puffer was a diligent worker in Munsterberg’s laboratory where he invested his
time and attention on her, individually supervising her research. Working on a
problem in the psychology of beauty, she investigated the role played by symmetry in
making a work aesthetically pleasing. For her study, Munsterberg prepared about a
thousand pictures to test and measure for symmetry, and they spent mornings together
working on her project. To allay any concerns her mother might have about the
propriety of this arrangement, Puffer wrote: “Don’t be alarmed. Mrs Munsterberg
paints at the other end of the room and inquires when she does not understand our
meaning” (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 80).
Munsterberg considered Puffer’s research so promising that he encouraged her to
pursue it as a dissertation topic and to submit the work already completed in the
competition for a graduate fellowship to be awarded by the Association of Collegiate
Alumnae (ACA), which was a group started in Boston to raise standards for women’s
higher education. Ethel Puffer took Munsterberg’s advice, applied for an ACA
fellowship, and won it. Munsterberg submitted a letter of recommendation and stated
that Puffer was the only American woman he had ever met whose abilities matched
those of Mary Calkins. The award provided her with support for a year of work on her
dissertation (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 80). Awarded the ACA’s American
fellowship for the academic year 1897-1898, Puffer returned to New England,
accompanying the Munsterberg family. Hugo Munsterberg had decided to return
permanently to Harvard, where Puffer continued her dissertation work with him.
She completed the requirements for the PhD by the end of the year and found herself
in the same degree limbo as Mary Calkins, whose work had been finished three years
earlier. Her situation was different from Calkins’s, however, in that by the time Puffer
began studying at Harvard, Radcliffe College existed and Puffer was officially a
Radcliffe student. She received only a certificate from the Philosophy Department,
documenting that she had successfully carried out work equivalent to that of
candidates for the Harvard PhD. Copies were sent also to Radcliffe and the Harvard
Corporation. After waiting three years, Puffer wrote to the dean of Radcliffe inquiring
whether the college was willing to confer the PhD. As a result of Puffer’s overture, four
women who had completed graduate work at Harvard over the previous several years
were offered the Radcliffe PhD in spring 1902. They were divided, however, among
themselves about the wisdom of setting this precedent. Ethel Puffer was one of the two
women who accepted the degree; Mary Calkins was one of two who declined
(Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 81).
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Puffer’s professional life and work on women issues
For a decade after her doctoral studies were completed, Puffer remained in the Boston
area, dedicating herself to a career in psychology. During this time, she held positions
at Radcliffe, Wellesley, and Simmons colleges and published a book, The Psychology of
Beauty in 1905, based on her research in aesthetics; she credited Munsterberg for his
philosophical theories and scientific guidance, which largely influenced her thought
(Puffer, 1905, p. vii).
She was also being courted by a young graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology who was a native of Keene, New Hampshire, where they met when Puffer
taught high school there. In August 1908, then in her mid-thirties, Ethel Puffer married
Benjamin Howes, an event that brought her career in psychology to a halt (Furumoto
and Scarborough, 1987, p. 82). Puffer lived in an era where academic hiring practices
viewed married women as inappropriate candidates for teaching positions.
In 1922, Puffer published two articles in the Atlantic Monthly, spelling out what she
saw as an inherent contradiction in the notion that a woman could combine marriage
and a career (Howes, 1922a, 1922b). Puffer claimed that for years the reality of the lives
of educated married women had been generally ignored (Furumoto and Scarborough,
1987, p. 84). Job discrimination was only one of several obstacles confronting the
married professional woman. Even if every woman had the right to marry and go on
with her job, Puffer maintained, she would still face several stumbling blocks to
success in a career. She believed that what was beyond the grasp of the young, married
professional woman was the possibility of mental concentration, of long-sustained
intensive application, of freedom from irrelevant cares and interruptions, which every
professional man knows is a dire necessity, if he is to touch success (Howes, 1922a,
p. 446). Puffer felt that women are both inevitably impelled to and interdicted from,
marriage, children, careers (Howes, 1922a, p. 452). As long as the culture defined
careers as all consuming, and as long as women were assigned all the responsibility for
the nurturing of children, there could be no solution to the dilemma (Furumoto and
Scarborough, 1987, p. 87).
In her second Atlantic Monthly article “Continuity for women”, Puffer rejected the
suggestion that the talents of educated women could find adequate expression within
the home, asking whether an entomologist would find the full expression of his science
in keeping his household free from insect pests. Would he continue to be an
entomologist at all if that were the extent of his activity? (Howes, 1922b, p. 733). Puffer
challenged women to forego careers in a traditional sense in favor of professional work
that could be accomplished on a flexible timetable as their primary responsibility of
mothering permitted (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, p. 87).
A grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund in 1925 financed the Institute for
the Coordination of Women’s Interests at Smith College, with Puffer as director. During
the three-year grant period, while her two children were still in elementary school,
Puffer commuted from her home in New York City to western Massachusetts. In the
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three-year grant period, aided by the institute staff, Puffer carried out an impressive
array of projects. One of these was a survey of 500 Smith alumnae, identified by the
institute as successfully coordinating family and work responsibilities (Furumoto and
Scarborough, 1987, pp. 87-89). Another project included developing a cooperative
nursery school and a food service that delivered hot meals to families. These
demonstration programs were designed to reduce women’s domestic responsibilities,
thus freeing them for other work (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, pp. 87-89).
The institute also conducted research to identify occupations that would meet
women’s needs for flexible schedules, singling out among others, free-lance journalism
and domestic and landscape architecture (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, pp. 87-89).
While working with Gertrude Lane and Myra Reed Richardson, editors of Woman’s
Home Companion, Puffer launched a popular campaign for women’s home service
clubs in 1923 that outdid all of the Ladies’ Home Journal’s previous efforts to promote
kitchen-less houses and community kitchens in 1919 and 1920. Puffer first visited
cooperatives such as the Evanston Community Kitchen, and wrote about them in the
Woman’s Home Companion and she and her colleagues encouraged readers to tell
them about everyday problems, resulting in over two thousand letters about
housewives’ isolation, overwork and depression. Throughout these campaigns Puffer
warned women that commercial labor saving devices were not a solution to their
problems and she identified women’s larger need, for true and substantial happiness
that had been the avowed aim of the Seneca Falls Convention (women rights
convention) in 1848.
The Institute for the Coordination of Women’s Interest became the base camp for
Puffer’s broad campaign in favor of socialized domestic work between 1926 and 1931
and she marshaled historians to research the experience of managing careers and
homes, career guidance specialists to design new strategies for conquering employers’
prejudice against women, a housing expert to study the architectural implications of
employed women’s needs, and home economists and child care experts to demonstrate
the feasibility of services to assist employed mothers (Hayden, 1981, pp. 269-271).
Puffer even brought in Lillian Mollner Gilbreth as a visitor to the institute to explain
how housewives could “efficiently” do all their own work at home (Hayden, 1981,
p. 275).
Yet, despite the productivity of the institute and the fact that it appeared to be
addressing a matter of real concern to many women, its funding was not renewed; as
the 1920s drew to a close, it was phased out of existence (Hayden, 1981, p. 275). The
Rockefeller Fund did not renew its grant. Presumably, this occurred because, in the
foundation’s view, the institute had devoted its efforts too much to applied research
and not enough to developing a theoretical framework for coordinating women’s
interest (Hayden, 1981, p. 275).
In her late 50’s when the project was terminated, Puffer turned her attention to other
interests, ending her professional involvement with the issue of coordinating educated
women’s needs for intellectual as well as personal fulfillment. In her Atlantic Monthly
articles of 1922, when she expressed the inherent contradiction for women in
combining marriage and motherhood with careers, Puffer’s way of resolving the
dilemma was to redefine careers for women, rather than to suggest redefining marriage
and motherhood (Furumoto and Scarborough, 1987, pp. 89-90). In her last public
utterance on the marriage versus career issue in 1929, Puffer did seem to be calling for
just that, a redefinition of women’s traditional role to eliminate forever what she
referred to as the “intolerable choice” (Howes, 1929, p. 6).
William Moulton Marston
William Moulton Marston (1893-1947) was born in Saugus, Massachusetts. Over the
course of his career, he wore many hats and was known as psychologist, a feminist
theorist, an inventor, and comic-strip writer. He obtained an AB from Harvard in 1915
and then a law degree in 1918 and a PhD in psychology in 1921. He began working
on his blood pressure approach to deception in 1915 as a graduate student under
the direction of Hugo Munsterberg in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory
(Moore, 2003, p. 292).
Marston and Munsterberg
Hugo Munsterberg had an impressively broad spectrum of interests, including
psychotherapy, pedagogy, philosophy, aesthetics, mysticism and cultural psychology,
but it was the detection of deception that one of his undergraduate students, William
Moulton Marston, found most fascinating (Bunn, 1997, p. 95). The ambitious young
psychologist would extend and develop Munsterberg’s scientific lie detection research
program, and would do so in a manner reminiscent of his teacher’s exuberant style
(Bunn, 1997, p. 95) that allowed some to view Marston as the illegitimate heir of
Munsterberg. Having received an LLB in 1918 and a PhD three years later, Marston
immediately set about manufacturing his reputation as the inventor of the lie detector
(Bunn, 1997, p. 95).
Marston, the lie detector and other professional work
According to Marston, deception may be tested by means of the measurement of
the systolic blood pressure of a suspect while he is testifying and the success of
this method was reported by him working under Professor Munsterberg in 1915
(Marston, 1921, p. 552). Having performed experiments with the instrument, and after
testing it on suspected spies during the First World War, in 1923, Marston
unsuccessfully attempted to get the lie detector admitted as evidence in a court of law
(Bunn, 1997).
During the early 1920s, Marston devoted himself to empirical research on the
detection of deception and the measurement of systolic blood pressure (Bunn, 1997). In
1924, he traveled to New York City to work with the National Committee for Mental
Hygiene, and then to Texas, where he analyzed every prisoner, male and female, in the
state penitentiaries according to his theory of emotions. The latter half of the decade
saw him develop his theoretical ideas (Bunn, 1997). He advanced an unusual psychonic
theory of consciousness, promoted materialism and vitalism with equal vigor, and
speculated on the relationship between primary colors and primary emotions
(Bunn, 1997).
After the First World War, Marston moved for ten years from one academic post to
another, including stints at American University, Columbia University, New York
University, and Tufts University (Moore, 2003, p. 292). It was during this period that
Marston developed his theory of emotions, borrowing from related literature, and
developed his own personality test to measure four important personality factors
(Moore, 2003, p. 292). The factors he chose were called dominance, influence,
steadiness, and compliance, from which the DISC theory takes its name. In 1926,
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Marston published his findings in a book entitled The Emotions of Normal People,
which included a brief description of the personality test he had developed
(Moore, 2003, p. 292). Then, in 1929, he left academia, and traveled to Universal Studios
in California, where he spent a year as director of public services (Moore, 2003, p. 292).
Like Munsterberg, Marston was quite a publicist and he appeared in magazine
photo-stories attempting to resolve marital difficulties with his lie detector, and he even
appeared in a 1938 Gillette advertisement, which used a lie detector test to discover
men’s “true” feelings about various shaving aids (Saturday Evening Post, 1938).
In 1940, when he was serving as an educational consultant for Detective Comics, Inc
(now known as DC Comics), Marston asked why there was not a female hero. Max
Charles Gaines, then head of DC Comics, was intrigued by the concept and told
Marston that he could create a female comic book hero – a “Wonder Woman” – which
he did, using a pen name that combined his middle name with Gaines’s: Charles
Moulton (Moore, 2003, p. 295).
Marston, feminism and Wonder Woman
Marston did not regard dominance and submission as strictly being masculine and
feminine categories. In fact he thought it quite legitimate for men and women to adopt
either dominant or submissive behaviors depending on the particular circumstances
(Bunn, 1997, p. 104). In a 1937 New York Times interview, Marston predicted that
within 100 years the country will see the beginning of a sort of Amazonian matriarchy;
within 500 years a definite sex battle for supremacy would occur, and after a
millennium, women would take over the rule of the country politically and
economically. Marston felt that men would eventually lose the sex battle for supremacy
because they adhered to the misguided doctrine of material success, whereas happiness
was the female criterion for success. Although his academic psychology and his
popular psychology had both attempted to win the battle for womanhood, Marston’s
most enduring contribution towards the creation of a sort of Amazonian matriarchy
was a comic book character (Bunn, 1997, pp. 105-106).
Wonder Woman first appeared in a nine-page center spread in the
December-January 1941 issue of All Star Comics (Moore, 2003, p. 295). Then, in
January 1942, she debuted in Sensation Comics number one, with a full version of her
origin and her first adventure, armed with her bulletproof bracelets, magic lasso,
and her Amazonian training (Moore, 2003, p. 295). Wonder Woman’s magic lasso
(a device that compelled all encircled by it to tell the truth) is her most notable
possession and a link to the original and modern myth of the invincibility of the
polygraph (Moore, 2003, p. 295).
In many ways, Marston was the perfect designer of the first female comic book
superhero (Bunn, 1997, pp. 106-107). He had feminist ambitions, an enthusiastic and
populist sensibility, and an expertise that lent credibility to the project (Bunn, 1997,
pp. 106-107). But whereas Wonder Woman provided him with far more powerful
opportunities to promote his ideas about feminine equality than psychology ever had,
he nevertheless drew heavily on psychology for inspiration (Bunn, 1997, pp. 106-107).
The super-heroine embodied many of the psychological themes Marston had
developed throughout his career, but above all, Wonder Woman was informed by the
meta-principle that had fascinated him for 20 years: dominance-submission
(Bunn, 1997, pp. 106-107).
Because the Amazon universe as Marston conceived of it was a place of female
freedom that was ultimately dependent on the absence of men, it was a freedom defined
by submission (Bunn, 1997, p.107). Like the philosophy expounded by Wonder Woman
herself, freedom was not an absolute quality but was rather subject to essential
restrictions. Wonder Woman was therefore an expression of Marston’s philosophy of
freedom through servitude (Bunn, 1997, p.107). The route to male freedom was through
constraint too: because masculine power was destructive, it must be held in check by
feminine “love allure”, which is the power women possess in dominating men by using
their feminine wiles (Bunn, 1997, p.107).
Marston’s family life
Marston’s personal life was every bit as unconventional as his ideas about matriarchy;
if nothing else, the details make one wonder about his fixation on liberated women
(Gillespie, 2001). In 1915, the same year he graduated from Harvard, Marston married a
Mt Holyoke graduate named Elizabeth Holloway, who went on to earn an MA in
Psychology (Radcliffe College) and law degree (Boston University), and to assist him in
his psychological research. In the late 1920s, when teaching at Tufts University,
Marston met a student named Olive Richard, who moved in with him and his wife
(Gillespie, 2001). Marston had two children by each woman and he and his
wife formally adopted his children by Richard. “It was an arrangement where they all
lived together fairly harmoniously”(Gillespie, 2001).
A business associate vouched for Marston’s offbeat arrangement, remembering him
as “the most remarkable host, with a lovely bunch of kids from different wives all
living together like one big family – everybody very happy and all good, decent
people” (Gillespie, 2001). These living arrangements, unusual now, and extraordinary
in Marston’s day, may have accounted for some of his career changes (Daniels, 2000).
Few colleges would have countenanced a professor who was living with two women
and having children with both of them, so Marston may have sacrificed his academic
opportunities out of affection for these two women, who apparently were friendly
enough to name their kids after each other (Daniels, 2000).
Unfortunately, Marston was unable to enjoy his happy home life for long, as he first
contracted polio and then succumbed to cancer in 1947, reportedly continuing to write
from his deathbed (Lyons, 2006). After Marston’s death, his widows continued to live
together for another four decades until Olive’s death in the late eighties (Lyons, 2006).
As Byrne Marston (son of William and Olive) described it, “It’s kind of crazy, but it
worked out and they got along quite well (Lyons, 2006). They were just a pair from
then on until they died.” Elizabeth Marston died in 1993, at the age of 100 (Lyons, 2006).
Marston’s legacy continues
The legacy of William Moulton Marston will continue to live on even though time has
relegated him to near obscurity. His contributions to science and popular culture are
still very much present even though different writers have re-imagined and re-tooled
Wonder Woman because of their lack of understanding or interest in his views of
dominance-submission. As the creator of the systolic blood pressure test used to detect
deception, Marston’s pioneering work has become one of the components of the modern
polygraph.
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Conclusion
Hugo Munsterberg was a complex individual; even though he demonstrated that he
was a bit of a chauvinist, probably due to the masculinist German culture that he was
raised in. The difficulties caused by Munsterberg’s pro-German attitudes and behavior
were compounded by his personal style (Landy, 1992). He was condescending to all but
Germans and had made his position clear from almost his first day in America (Landy,
1992). At the time of his death Munsterberg was an object of public scorn and was well
on the way to professional ostracism due to his controversial views and his persona
(Landy, 1992). However, he still exhibited many admirable qualities. To the students
who came to him for training in new methods of experimental psychology, he gave
freely of time and interest, and his fertile mind supplied many and varied problems for
investigation (Science, 1917, p. 82). Virtually all the students who came in contact with
him idolized his creativity, warmth towards them, and energy (Landy, 1991).
Some of those students were Calkins, Puffer and Marston, who ironically all
possessed feminist ambitions, but nevertheless had a amicable and productive
relationship with their professor, which sometimes extended beyond a professional
relationship, but a cordial one. Munsterberg’s influence was evident in each of their
works, in areas as diverse as the psychology of beauty and the conception of the double
standpoint, to the detection of deception. Even though the names of Calkins, Puffer,
Marston, and Munsterberg are somewhat lost in the shadows of time, they are still
admired by the writer for illuminating the world with their presence by the
contributions they made.
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About the author
Leon C. Prieto, MBA, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Management at Savannah State
University. His research and teaching interests include social entrepreneurship, human
resources, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, personality and management history.
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