The Secret History of Wonder Woman

This chapter begins by introducing Marjorie Wilkes Huntley. Born Marjorie Wilkes in Atlanta, she is described by Lepore as “tough as nails and thin as a twig” (56). In her early twenties, she demonstrated for suffrage, got married, and started working as a librarian. Shortly after, she left her husband and was working as the librarian at Camp Upton in New York when Marston was assigned there. They began a six-month affair that lasted until he was discharged from the army on his 26th birthday in May 1919. Not long after he returned home to Cambridge, Holloway became pregnant and shortly after that Huntley came to visit. It seems that the three began a relationship at this time. Also in May, the amendment to allow women the right to vote passed the House of Representatives and in early June it passed the Senate.

That fall, both Marston and Holloway continued their studies. He began a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard, and she enrolled at Radcliffe to work on her master’s degree. In early January 1920, Holloway’s pregnancy ended in a stillbirth. They continued their studies, in part together: they took some of the same classes given by the same professor. Although there were no doctorate programs for women at Harvard, Holloway liked to think she had earned one as much as her husband had.

Both completed their degrees in 1921. Holloway had trouble finding work despite now holding an M.A. and a J.D. Eventually, she became a clerk in court. Marston had begun several new ventures the last year he was at Harvard: cofounding an engineering company, acting as treasurer for a fabric company, and cofounding a law firm. All failed. Trying to capitalize on his lie detector work, he wrote a press release with a photograph of him conducting such a test and distributed it to newspapers. Soon he left for Washington, D.C. to work at American University. 

In Chapters 8 and 9, the author describes Marston’s work at American University and the murder case he became involved with that caused him to give up his interest in the law. Chapter 8 begins with an experiment that Marston conducted with his class of graduate law students at the university. In the middle of a lecture in early 1922, there came a knock on the door, and Marston opened it to let in a young man who had a message for him. A seemingly routine series of interactions followed, and the messenger left.

When Marston turned back to his class, he announced that this was part of an experiment: his students were to assume the messenger would be charged with a crime and they were all witnesses. He instructed them to write down everything they saw and heard. In designing the class, Marston had counted 147 possible details regarding the messenger; his students correctly noted an average of 34. At one point, the messenger had pulled out a pen knife, but not a single student noted that in their written statements.

In part, Marston was studying how reliable testimony was, but he also wanted to learn about women’s participation in court. Despite gaining the vote, women were still largely barred from juries. In his experiment, Marston created two juries—one all men, the other all women, and enlisted three judges, two men and one woman. He submitted his students’ “eyewitness accounts” to the juries and concluded that women did a better job: “They were more careful, more conscientious, and gave much more impartial consideration to all the testimony than did the male juries” (66). Likewise, the female judge was more thorough and accurate than the two male judges.

In spite of this notable result, Marston lost interest in the subject when he was caught up shortly afterward in a murder case. The trial was for a man named James Alphonso Frye, who was accused of murdering Dr. Robert Wade Brown the previous summer. Frye had confessed to police when questioned but later recanted. The two young lawyers representing Frye were Marston’s students, and Marston thought this might be his chance to prove his lie detection methods. Frye agreed to undertake the procedure, and the results led Marston to believe he was innocent. Frye’s lawyers attempted to introduce Marston as an expert witness, submitting to the judge various documents describing Marston’s credentials, including his Ph.D. dissertation. The judge, however, was unmoved by what he considered an unproven theory and method, rejecting Marston’s bid to testify. Frye was found guilty of second-degree murder.

Frye’s lawyers filed for an appeal based on the fact that Marston should have been able to testify. Marston hoped it would go all the way to the Supreme Court to set a precedent in his favor. Shortly afterward, Marston was granted tenure at American University, made chairman of the Psychology Department, and promised a research lab that would be the first to concentrate on psychology and legal studies together. 

In late 1923, the appeals court denied the request by Frye’s lawyers. This set a new precedent: in short, any new scientific principle had to be deemed generally accepted in the field before evidence based upon it could be used in court. Complicating the appeal was the fact that earlier that year Marston had been indicted for fraud.

Lepore notes in Chapter 7 that several ventures Marston had undertaken while finishing his Ph.D. had failed. One of them, the fabrics company, came back to haunt him. The case revolved around the assertion that Marston had purchased fabric knowing that his company was in dire financial shape but concealing this fact. As Lepore writes, “The irony—expert at deception arrested for lying—wasn’t lost on anyone” (74). Marston retained a friend from law school as his attorney, but while the case was pending he was fired from all his posts at American University. Marston’s lawyer got all the charges dropped in early 1924, and the case never went to trial. However, it was enough to turn Marston away from the law for good.