For my second "March to Womanhood" post, I return to the well of Classic WONDER WOMAN. To be sure, this one is a good bit wackier than the last time I looked at a Marston WW story, the highly imaginative ICEBOUND MAIDENS. This time Marston, instead of producing a free flow of mythic and religious images, chose to riff on a "haywire" vision of evolution.
Kicking off the adventure is a mama gorilla who's lost her baby and decides not to go through the usual adoption process to obtain new offspring. Wonder Woman, in her Diana Prince ID, happens to witness the child-napping and pursues the angry anthropoid, who just happens to make tracks for nearby Holliday College.
The gorilla barges into the classroom of Professor Zool (short for zoology, apparently), who just happens to be giving the Holliday Girls a lecture on evolution, and about his new invention. The gorilla breaks in and tosses some students around, but the Amazon Princess outwrestles the beast with the help of the girls, who just happen to have lots of ropes lying around in the classroom. (Hey-- it could happen!) Steve Trevor, whose niece was abducted, wants to put down the damn dirty ape. Zool suggests an alternative: he can use his "electronic evolutionizer" to change the unruly critter into a human being. Presumably Zool has been waiting to come across just the right test case. Everyone's okay with it, including the zoo people, even though they stand to lose an expensive attraction.
And so we get the origin of long-lived WW foe Giganta. Though she attains a human physique, she pretty much forgets about having lost an ape-child but retains an unreasoning hatred of Princess Diana. They fight, and in the scuffle the evolutionizer is damaged, and we get William Marston's "magic wand" theory of evolution in detail.
I jest, for I'm sure Marston didn't think any evolutionary process could be turned backward, nor did he think he was infecting young minds with any such beliefs. Turning back time was just a fun way to illustrate said process, with crocodiles becoming dinosaurs and so on. Wonder Woman and her buddies, who look about the same but have supposedly devolved to cave-people, flee one of the dinos. They run into Giganta again, but the she-ape has no use for Women's Lib, and won't live with a "tribe led by a she." She seeks out a patriarchal tribe and immediately finds one in the "Tree People," so I guess the evolutionizer threw everyone back to a period when human ancestors were just starting to leave the trees for the ground, and these Tree People are the holdouts. Of course in no real-world model of ancient times were those tree-dwellers any sort of humanoids, not even "Missing Links" like the ones shown here. Apparently the Tree People, whom I presume to be modern citizens devolved by the machine, acquire a race-memory of antagonism toward "Cave People," even though the only cave-tribe they ever see is Wonder Woman's little band.
The Tree Men capture the 20th-century cave-dwellers and threaten to sacrifice them. Wondcr Woman once more demonstrates female agency by defeating a devouring dino, and that's pretty much it for the caveman fantasia.
After a few more challenging incidents, Zool gets his machine running again with a little help from Ben Franklin-style science. But with the next jaunt forward, the time-travelers appear in a period of Greek history that most moderns consider purely mythical: "The Golden Age, when the world was perfect." Naturally, for Marston this is a time when there are no hierarchies between the sexes, and one that discourages the acquisition of wealth.
Giganta, the savage who reflects the aspects of modernity Marston dislikes, allies herself to the "lower classes," who are individuals who like to accrue wealth. Giganta seduces them into wanting rulership as well, and though the Golden Age is not meant to be identical to the Garden of Eden, it's no coincidence that the rebels speak of gaining "the knowledge of good and evil." Wonder Woman eventually quells the rebellion but the queen sadly observes that, "The Golden Age is over-- people now know they can be wicked if they choose."
Moving into a new phase, but without another time-jaunt, Queen Darla's peaceful rule is challenged by male subjects who think that their superior strength entitles them to supremacy. Wonder Woman easily defeats the lead challenger, and for good measure the heroine scoffs at the man's wife for wanting to take pride in her man's might. However, the woman's perspective shows a chink in Marston's system. The author perhaps couldn't conceive that some women, not being aggressive or martially inclined, might want men to be dominant on the assumption that this made a tribe stronger-- which in a broad sense was true for most of human history.
In any case, this sort of negative "woman power" unseats Queen Darla. She and a small coterie join Wonder Woman and friends in seeking to found a new kingdom. Since they end up in a location geographically comparable to that of the Amazon kingdom, Marston probably meant Darla's voyage to be comparable to the later journey Queen Hippolyta takes to found Paradise Island. This would make Darla's group the ancestors of the Greek Amazons, despite the former's lack of martial tendencies. This is illustrated when Giganta once more activates the evolutionizer, flinging Wonder Woman's group into Greek Amazon times. In due time the heroine comes face to face with her own mother, thousands of years before Diana has been "born." Hippolyta explains that the city of Amazonia faces attack by the army of Achilles, at least partly because the Amazons sided with Troy against Greece.
Most of the Amazons are off hunting husbands-- one of the few times Marston drew on the family-making customs of the warrior women-- so Diana suggests that Hippolyta send runners to bring the fighters back to Amazonia. In the meantime Wonder Woman challenges Achilles, another representative of patriarchal rule, to single combat. She wins, the other Amazons arrive to drive off the Greek army, and the adventure gets a quick wrap up, implying that the 20th century is freed from the evolutionary backstep and that everything goes back to normal.
For some reason, though, the evolutionary erasure does not apply to Giganta, though her actual fate is left up in the air at story's end. The gorilla-girl only made one other Golden Age appearance. In that tale, it's disclosed that Giganta, like other WONDER WOMAN rogues, was sentenced to an Amazon reformatory-- until a group of lethal ladies break free to menace Princess Diana as "Villainy Inc." Given that she's a gorilla, in this story Giganta takes on an interesting "serpent in Eden" persona as Marston guided his readers through his narrative of the "rise and fall of sexual equality."
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