Jill Lepore Set for Music Hall's Innovation and Leadership and Writers

The Music Hall's Innovation and Leadership and Writers in the Loft welcomes Jill Lepore, award-winning author, New Yorker staff writer, and renowned historian and professor at Harvard University, to Portsmouth on Tuesday, January 20, 2015. Ms. Lepore will discuss THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN, her highly acclaimed new work about the origins of one of the world's most iconic superheroes. The book reads like a detective novel-full of larger than life personalities, surprises, secrets, and revelations that Ms. Lepore gleaned from archives of private and unpublished papers. In this critically acclaimed work she reveals a missing piece of the history of feminism, skillfully lifting the obscure out of silence.

The 7pm event includes an author presentation and moderated Q+A, plus book signing and meet-and-greet. It will be held at the Music Hall Loft at 131 Congress Street, in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The evening moderator will be Mary Jo Brown, Board Chair of the New Hampshire Women's Foundation and President of Brown & Company Design.

Says Ms. Brown, "As someone who grew up watching Wonder Woman, I'm greatly looking forward to hearing Jill Lepore discuss the character, context, and background of the most popular female superhero ever. She sheds light on the fascinating juxtaposition of Wonder Woman's status as a girl power icon as well as her less feminist qualities - contradictions that still exist today as we struggle to find what gender equality means in a changing world."

Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the most popular female superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following. As does every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history.

Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator. Beginning in his undergraduate years at Harvard, Marston was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned from speaking on campus in 1911, when Marston was a freshman. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1930s, Marston and Byrne wrote a regular column for Family Circle celebrating conventional family life, even as they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth-he invented the lie detector test-lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman.

Lepore's surprising conclusion points to Wonder Woman as the missing link in the history of the struggle for women's rights-a chain of events that began with the women's suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ended with the challenging place of feminism a century later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her previous work Book of Ages was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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