In other words, their power came from being sexy.īy the late 1970s, even the half-hearted attempts at championing feminism began to wane. Wonder Woman’s compromised negotiation with feminism made the character’s femininity a stand-in for her power, a tendency that the Angels sometimes shared. The later seasons of Wonder Woman tried for a similar balance, but more often than not, the message devolved into a celebration of the fundamental difference between the sexes.
Like the Angels, Diana Prince could now go undercover in a number of titillating roles, including pop star and glamorous jewel thief.īut the 1970s TV version of the Angels regularly tempered its characters’ sexualization with mainstream, women’s lib-style references to “male chauvinists,” or showed that women could do what male characters did: shoot guns, fly airplanes, and drive 18-wheelers. This shift was most directly an attempt to copy the hugely successful Charlie’s Angels. The setting was changed from the 1940s to the 1970s, and Wonder Woman became more overtly sexualized: she wore more revealing clothing, and stopped making the same explicit declarations about gender and power. The TV program’s creators were directly influenced by the character’s popularity as a feminist icon, but when the show switched networks in 1977, the story’s feminist message was diluted. Her bullet-deflecting bracelets are made from this impervious metal. Women are the wave of the future and sisterhood is…stronger than anything.”Īnd in an episode titled “The Feminum Mystique” – a play on the title of the bestselling feminist book – we learn about a mysterious, powerful matter buried deep in the earth of Wonder Woman’s Amazonian homeland: feminum. “Any civilization that does not recognize the female,” Wonder Woman warned in one episode, “is doomed to destruction. In Wonder Woman’s first season, the program was set in the 1940s – staying true to the comic’s origins – with the superheroine battling the Nazis. This super-women trifecta made clear that the winds of cultural change were influencing America’s most popular (and often most conservative) medium.
The New Original Wonder Woman premiered in 1976 alongside two other action-adventure series with female leads, Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman.
In the history of Wonder Woman on television lies a story about the ways that popular culture in general – and representations of “wonder women,” in particular – seek to reconcile feminism and femininity at different historical moments.
But in skimming over the character’s TV life, she misses a key step in her cultural significance. Lepore briefly notes Wonder Woman’s place in US television in the same period. Please purchase in confidence! Please contact me before sending an item for alteration or giving feedback.įailing to contact me immediately upon receipt of the item will imply that you have accepted the item as is.In the epilogue to Jill Lepore’s new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, we learn about Wonder Woman’s importance to the American feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
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