The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Some quotes:
“In 1914, Greenwich Village feminist Margaret Sanger founded a magazine called the Women Rebel. The “basis of feminism,” Sanger said, had to be a woman's control over her own body, “the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.” ~ p 21

“In Angel Island and Herland, men have to be taught that if they want to live with women - if they want to marry them and have children with them - they will be allowed to do so only on terms of equality. And for this to happen, there has got to be a way for men and women to have sex, but without the women getting pregnant all the time. The women in Gilman's utopia practice what at the time was called “voluntary motherhood,” a subject Gilman approaches with a certain primness. “You see they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless, involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another,” Gilman wrote, “but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.” ~p86

“IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC's editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.
Batman had debuted in Detective Comics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman's organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR's solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.”~ p 183-4

“With war devastating Europe, the disarming of the dark knight was Detective Comics' deferral to a cherished American idea about the division between civilian and military life. Superheroes weren't soldiers; they were private citizens. And so, late in 1939, one of Batman's writers drafted a new origin story for him: When Bruce Wayne was a boy, his parents had been killed before his eyes, shot to death. Not only did Batman not own a gun; Batman hated guns.” ~p184