Wonder Woman (LAW 1918)

BU Law alum said to be model for first female superhero.

Wonder Woman, Warner Bros latest incarnation of the DC Comics female superhero, opens nationwide today, the most anticipated film of the summer, according to a recent survey by Fandango, besting other anticipated blockbusters like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnarok. The film is expected to gross as much as $90 million this weekend, likely making it the most successful female-focused superhero film of all time.

And while much of the buzz has been centered on its star, Israeli actor Gal Gadot, few are aware that the original Wonder Woman is believed to be modeled on BU alum Elizabeth Holloway Marston (LAW 1918), who graduated nearly a century ago. When Harvard-schooled lawyer and academic William Moulton Marston was planning to build a comic book series, it was Elizabeth Marston who suggested to her husband that the superhero should be a woman. William Marston, who was already famous for inventing the polygraph, chose the nom de plume Charles Moulton for the comic book, and in 1941 he published the first episode of Wonder Woman, which had the immortal 5,000-year-old Amazon princess, daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta, in her alter ego of Diana Prince, rescue a US Army Intelligence officer.

Elizabeth’s daughter, Olive Ann Lamotte, has few doubts that her mother was the model for the first female superhero. In a 2001 Bostonia article, she described her mother as “a small package of dynamite,” and points out that she lived to be 100 (she died in 1993).