[from “Wonder Woman: The Weird, True Story,” by Sarah Kerr in a review of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, and Wonder Woman Unbound, by Tim Hanley, in The New York Review of Books 61.18 (November 20, 2014), p. 14:]
Wonder Woman is TM and © DC Comics
The cover of the July–August 1951 issue of Wonder Woman, by Irv Novick
To the more mysterious question of why Wonder Woman had such an aesthetic pop, she [Jill Lepore] brings a little less flair. And what if we want to know more about early feminist utopian fiction, and the art and ideas that nurtured, it? Why did Amazon imagery come to dominate? What about the seeds of Aquarian ideas that would later reappear in New Age writings? These are parts of the history; should today’s feminists feel responsible for knowing about them? (By the same token, should we feel embarrassed for forgetting the Theosophist underpinnings of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz?)”