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UN Drops Wonder Woman Campaign after Protests

By Alice B. Lloyd

America’s favorite Glamazonian wonder goddess didn’t fit in at the United Nations. She’s a powerful agent unafraid to defend the free world against encroaching evils. She gets the job done and she looks good doing it.

It’s unsurprising, then, that officials at the drab and indecisive intergovernmental body scrapped a girl-power campaign centered on super heroine Wonder Woman after just two months. Protesters, both in person and via online petition—U.N. employees among them—declared they couldn’t stand the sight of her: “a large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions.”

Reuters reported Wonder Woman’s removal on Monday:

The move came after the Oct. 21 appointment of the superhero to fight for gender equality sparked heavy criticism, with nearly 45,000 people signing an online petition asking U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to reconsider selection of the character. “Although the original creators may have intended Wonder Woman to represent a strong and independent ‘warrior’ woman with a feminist message, the reality is that the character’s current iteration is that of a large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions,” the petition read. […]Dozens of U.N. employees protested at the U.N. headquarters in New York City on the day of the appointment when Diane Nelson, president of DC Entertainment, said the Wonder Woman campaign would feature various initiatives “over the course of the next year.”


Wonder Woman just had her 75th birthday in early October—making her four years and two weeks older than the United Nations. And, with a forthcoming movie on the horizon, we’ll be seeing a lot more of her. If the re-upped franchise is a hit, her influence might also easily surpass the U.N.’s.

As with many powerful women, much of Wonder Woman’s backstory remained shrouded in mystery. Her comic book debut in 1941 coincided with a pop-cultural campaign to buck up American girls and women holding down the fort on the wartime home front.

But she was conceived by a psychologist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, who presented his idea for a liberated super woman to the creator of Superman and Batman, Maxwell Charles Gaines. At the time Dr. Marston pitched Wonder Woman, Gaines was facing pressure to clean up comics’ public image—too much sex and violence.

A Smithsonian magazine review from 2014, of Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, delves into her development and debut:

In February 1941, Marston submitted a draft of his first script, explaining the “under-meaning” of Wonder Woman’s Amazonian origins in ancient Greece, where men had kept women in chains, until they broke free and escaped. “The NEW WOMEN thus freed and strengthened by supporting themselves (on Paradise Island) developed enormous physical and mental power.” His comic, he said, was meant to chronicle “a great movement now under way—the growth in the power of women.” Wonder Woman made her debut in All-Star Comics at the end of 1941 and on the cover of a new comic book, Sensation Comics, at the beginning of 1942, drawn by an artist named Harry G. Peter. She wore a golden tiara, a red bustier, blue underpants and knee-high, red leather boots. She was a little slinky; she was very kinky. She’d left Paradise to fight fascism with feminism, in “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”

Wonder Woman’s recent brush with censorship is hardly her first. Shortly after her grand debut, the National Organization for Decent Literature condemned Wonder Woman, deeming her a little too liberated. Seven decades later, the U.N. follows their lead:

It seemed to Gaines like so much good, clean, superpatriotic fun. But in March 1942, the National Organization for Decent Literature put Sensation Comics on its blacklist of “Publications Disapproved for Youth” for one reason: “Wonder Woman is not sufficiently dressed.”

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