Ms. Magazine’s 40th Anniversary Issue Cover-Stars Wonder Woman

In a year where the “War On Women” has become a major political issue, the choice of the feminist magazine Ms. to celebrate its 40th Anniversary by cover-featuring Wonder Woman raises a skeptical eyebrow – at least from this commentator.

Ms.’ inaugural issue of 1972 featured the Amazing Amazon, drawn by Murphy Anderson, bestriding the landscape like a maternal colossus, literally converting a war-torn landscape into a vista of peace and prosperity, but doing so from a perspective of Olympian detachment, far above the ant-like humans.

In Mike Allred’s 2012 cover, she’s flying down to join a group of multi-ethnic women on their level, lending her power to their struggle in sisterhood and solidarity, rather than distant patronage. It’s an inspiring image, and much more in keeping with the character’s original ethos of empowering her entire gender, with the oft-repeated message that “every woman can be a Wonder Woman”.

However, her appearance – in a version of her classic costume, not the official New 52 look, which would be meaningless to the wider public – is doubly ironic.

Firstly, because the goals which actually seemed attainable in 1972 – of true equality and liberation – are seemingly further away than ever, in an American socio-political climate where reproductive rights are being progressively deleted, the status of women is being prospectively reduced to that of property to be controlled (while, paradoxically, corporations are being elevated to the legal status of people to be protected!), and even the definition of rape is undergoing some strange, and occasionally delusional, permutations.

Secondly, because the popular, iconic version of the Wonder Woman character portrayed on this cover no longer exists. Following the New 52 reboot, Diana of Themyscira is not a spirit wrought from clay, the result of the divine interventions of goddesses, but  the result of a tacky one-night stand her mother had with Zeus. Now a demi-goddess, she is no longer first among equals, but, owing to her Olympian heritage, capable of far more than her Amazon sisters – let alone any mere human women – could aspire to. And the rich, though admittedly often misdirected, history and background of the character has been stripped away and replaced by something that’s kind of Xena via Tarantino, her message of love, peace and freedom overwritten by blood, giblets and snapping bones. It’s not actually a bad comic, but it’s Wonder Woman in name only.

The juxtaposition of a Wonder Woman who no longer exists with a very real and contemporary struggle for the basic rights of women today – rights which ought to have won so long ago that they should be part of history – reinforces the lack of headway made by both the iconic character and the feminist movement; how can true progress be achieved when the same struggles have had to be fought, over and over again, for decades?