Sex, Lies, and Wonderwoman

Comic book superheroine Wonder Woman was known to extract confessions from criminals by ensnaring them in her golden Lasso of Truth. Charles Moulton and his wife Elizabeth created the Wonder Woman character. Its no wonder that psychologist William Moulton Marston, comic book writer Charles Moulton's real name, also invented an early version of the polygraph.

Marston was a genius with many different sides. He received his law degree and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard; then taught at American University and Tufts University. He was an attorney, a psychologist, an inventor, and a comic book writer; an unusual group of skills, to say the least.

A PACK OF LIES

In 1913, as a Harvard undergraduate, Marston invented his lie detector, which was actually a new usage of systolic blood pressure testing. Marston used this testing as a way to detect his subjects' truthfulness via blood pressure reactions to questions with simple "yes" or "no" answers.

When at Harvard Law School, Marston met his match, a Radcliffe law student named Elizabeth Holloway. They married and she helped him promote and conduct experiments with his lie detector. Marston wrote "The Lie Detector", a book describing his research results and advocating the passage of legislation that made lie detector test results admissible evidence in courts.

TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY

To help publicize his book, he accepted a 1938 offer from a Detroit ad agency. They hired him to appear in a magazine advertisement endorsing Gillette razor blades. In the ad, Marston conducted lie detector tests on a select group of people who had tried Gillette and several other razor blade brands. Of course, Marston claimed in the ad that the vast majority preferred Gillette.

Unfortunately for Marston, the ad succeeded mostly in piquing the interest of the local Detroit FBI office and then the Washington DC office. In the FBI report, William Moulton Marston was labeled "a phoney (sic)." This officially made his eccentricities a part of public record.

GIRL CRAZY

Needless to say, William Marston's lie detector failed to achieve the legal and scientific respect that he intended. A few years later, Dr. John Larson's polygraph, a more complex device, became the acknowledged legitimate choice for suspect and witness interrogation in police procedure.

But, all wasn't lost. Marston's experiences with lie detector testing soon served as the inspiration for his co-creation of the Wonder Woman character. His years of monitoring test results enabled him to determine that women as a group tested more truthful and more competent than men. These test results also served to inspire a strong interest in feminist views in him, which ultimately led to discussions with wife Elizabeth about female superiority over men and the fantasy concept of a supreme matriarchy ruling the world. These beliefs were highly unusual when compared to most American male academics in the 1930s.

THREE'S COMPANY

Marston loved women so much that he moved Olive Byrne, his student at Tufts, into his home with him and wife Elizabeth. This unusual household arrangement went beyond ménage a trois. Each woman bore Marston two children. Even stranger, an observer once remarked that they all lived together like "one big family."

William Moulton Marston died in 1947.

During the fifties crackdown on suggestive comic book content, Wonder Woman comics were condemned for its alleged "lesbian overtones."

Marston's two women continued to live together beyond his death and until Olive Byrne's death. Elizabeth Holloway Marston, co-creator of Wonder Woman, lived to the age of 100.

RESOURCES:

William Moulton Marston, URL: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Moulton_Marston)
Elizabeth Holloway Marston,
URL: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holloway_Marston)
Marguerite Lamb, Who Was Wonder Woman?, Bostonia Magazine,
URL: (http://www.bu.edu/alumni/bostonia/2001/fall/wonderwoman/)
Polygraph, URL: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph)
Nick Gillespie, "William Marston's Secret Identity", URL: (http://www.reason.com/news/show/28014.html) Reason Magazine 2001
Jim Fisher, The Polygraph Wars, URL: (http://www.edinboro.edu/cwis/polisci/jimfisher/forensics/polywar1.html)
FBI file on Marston, URL: (https://antipolygraph.org/documents/marston-fbi-file.pdf)