It seems that Wonder Woman has been given a pair of trousers and new back-story for the twenty-first century. Should we be glad that she’s covered herself up?

Below is a sizeable chunk of a marvellous and thought-provoking article by Shelby Knox for womensmediacenter.com:

“…This isn’t the first time DC Comics has tried to “modernize” the Wonder Woman character, which debuted in 1930 as the creation of psychologist William Marston. Marston, with the encouragement of his wife Elizabeth, designed her as a “new kind of superhero, one who would triumph not with fists or firepower, but with love.” Wonder Woman, her creator said, was “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”

As such, Wonder Woman, alias Diana Prince, was introduced as a protégé of the classical goddesses and, like her male crime fighting counterparts, possessed a variety of powers and tools, including superhuman strength, agility and cunning, the ability to fly, bracelets that made her invincible and a “Truth Lasso” that barred those bound by it from uttering lies. Unlike her male counterparts, however, she sought to rid the world of evil by first employing logic and mutual human understanding before breaking out the fire power.

A generation of role-model starved women, finally presented with a truly powerful heroine, proved themselves a reliable comic book fan base—at the height of her early popularity, Wonder Woman had a readership of ten million, appeared in four comic books, and a daily newspaper comic strip, reported Philip Charles Crawford in School Library Journal.

Yet, social progress for women wasn’t correlated with the evolution of their superhero. In 1968, DC Comics debuted a “modern” version of Diana Prince who’d lost her goddess heritage and all her superhuman powers, gained a male mentor and his martial arts skills, and developed a propensity for the domestic arts. She also came equipped with a new “mod” costume: a pantsuit with no “W” emblem, no flags, and no invincible bracelet cuffs.

Feminist outrage at the devolution of their heroine was quick. A group of activists, led by Gloria Steinem, leaned on DC Comics to scrap the “new” Wonder Woman in favor of the more powerful original—and they won, convincing the company to restore Wonder Woman’s powers and history during the next version of the series. They understood that along with equal pay and childcare and the right to hold credit in their own name, young women need to be able to see themselves in strong pop culture role models in order to fashion themselves into the real life versions.

Here we go again, it seems. Wonder Woman donning what looks like skinny jeans is being spun as a direct result of the successes of the Women’s Liberation movement, a reaction to requests that female superheroes do a little less baring of buns and a lot more kicking them. Yet in stripping Diana of her overt sexuality the new writers have missed the reason Wonder Woman was a feminist heroine in the first place. As originally portrayed, Diana Prince was sexy not because of her bare legs and cleavage but because her personhood wasn’t defined by them and her powers not derived from fashioning herself for the male gaze. She could work a 9 to 5 job, hold down a relationship, subvert international conspiracies and toss the villains in jail, and perhaps, as the first cover of Ms. magazine suggested in 1972, even be president—and the way she looked was, as it should be, simply an aside.

While it’s yet to be seen whether this costume change signals an intent to again strip Wonder Woman of her super powers, it’s disconcerting to learn that the writers are creating a new back story for the character that deprives her of her upbringing on Paradise Island with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, and her Amazon sisters in favor of being smuggled out of her homeland as a baby as it was destroyed. Wonder Woman’s original feminist creator’s intent in giving Diana the Paradise Island upbringing was to insinuate she knew gender equality existed because she’d lived it and that her powers were derived from living with and learning from her sisters. In effect, all women could become “Wonder Woman” if they tapped into the feminine power around them and strived for a gender just world that, we know from real live history, really did and can exist. Is this rewrite an attempt to impose the myth of “post-patriarchy” on the character, in which she no longer needs to dream of and fight for equality because she’s achieved it…?”

Full article here.