Marston Article Published

Great Hera! My article “Love Slaves and Wonder Women: Radical Feminism and Social Reform in the Psychology of William Moulton Marston” was published in the latest issue of the new, open-access journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. Thanks to the libraries at University of Western Ontario, the article is freely available to all comers (as all products of publicly-funded scholarship ought to be).

This paper has been a labor of love for about 8 years, when I encountered Molly Rhodes’ article on Marston and Wonder Woman (“Wonder Woman and Her Disciplinary Powers: The Queer Intersection of Scientific Authority and Mass Culture,” published in Reid & Traweek’s Doing Science + Culture) while sitting in on Roddey Reid’s course on cultural studies of science in the UCSD Lit department (it is an unfortunate thing that more philosophers of science don’t engage with cultural studies of science — see Rouse).

I did a lot of the basic research in 2009-2011, and have spent a lot of time refining my interpretation and my argument. In a way, I wish I had published it before the explosion of work around 2014-2015 on Marston (most notably Jill Lepore’s book). But if I had, (a) I wouldn’t have been able to publish it in this wonderful journal, and (b) for all her book’s flaws, I wouldn’t have been able to benefit from Lepore’s incredibly rich archival research. In many ways the paper would not have been as good in 2011 or 2013 as it is today.

I do my thank yous in the acknowledgements section of the paper, but I want to reiterate my thanks to Sabrina Starnaman, who helped me refine this work over the years, and who brought me into Reid’s class in the first place. I think she even came up with the title for the paper! And also, thanks to the many audiences who listened to this talk over the years as I worked these ideas out.