Some kind of wonderful

Maybe it was ever thus. "You could read Hemingway when you were a kid," Jill Lepore recalls, "you could read David Copperfield. You could read every other thing, and it's a boy who's in charge of his destiny and trying to make sense of the world. And the girls were just wallpaper. You don't have a lot of choices when you're a girl." Lepore is professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her own childhood heroine was, she says, Nancy Drew.

Things have changed. A little. If you were a kid in the 1990s, you had Buffy The Vampire Slayer. If you're a girl now you have Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. And, all being well, in 2017, the original superheroine Wonder Woman will get her own big screen adaptation (some years after a second stringer like Green Lantern, let it be noted, but even so).

That is something. Isn't it? It depends. It depends on what you expect from your role models. Lepore's new book is evidence of that. The Secret History Of Wonder Woman is the story of utopian ideals bumping up against the inevitable contradictions of popular culture and the secret flaws of the humans behind it. In her time, the Amazon Princess has been a feminist icon and a chauvinist's plaything. She was created by a man who wanted to see a feminist icon but who also had a rather unsettling interest in chaining her up, and one of the models for her look was the Alberto Varga 1940s cheesecake pin-ups for Esquire magazine. And yet her name has become media shorthand, a label to pin on any successful woman. "She's our go-to, catch-all, symbolic figure for strong women," argues film-maker Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, whose film Wonder Women! The Untold Story Of American Superheroines has just been screened at Glasgow Women's Library, "and yet she was created by a man and written by men her entire career." (Not quite actually, but very close)

As a culture we've long worried about the fact that boys don't seem to read. But do we also need to ask what books girls are reading? Do we consider what role models they are being offered? Does it matter that JK Rowling wrote a series of books about Harry Potter and not Harriet Potter? And if she had, as one of the commentators in Guevara-Flanagan's film asks, would they have been as successful? And who are the gatekeepers? And what messages are the female heroes we offer giving our daughters? The character of Wonder Woman is, in some ways, a perfect case study to address these very questions.

In 1972, Gloria Steinem decided to put the character on the cover of Ms Magazine. "Looking back now at those Wonder Woman stories from the forties," she said at the time, "I am amazed by the strength of the feminist message." She might have been thinking of the cover story of Wonder Woman issue number seven (winter 1943) which saw the Amazonian heroine on a soapbox on the cover beneath the legend, "Wonder Woman For President". At the bottom of the page a banner slightly qualified the masthead: "Wonder Woman 1000 Years in the future".

Six years earlier, Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, had caused a stir by holding a press conference to state that women in general would become world leaders within the next millennium while promoting a self-help book entitled Try Living. He knew how to make a splash. His words were picked up by the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. But they also came from the heart.

A psychologist who helped develop an early version of the lie-detector test, he was himself a feminist heavily influenced by the 19th-century suffrage movement. Marston's wife, Sadie Holloway, was an ardent advocate of female equality. "A great movement [is] now under way - the growth in the power of women," he wrote in February 1941 while submitting his first Wonder Woman script.

Yet Marston was also living in a house with his wife and his live-in housekeeper Olive Byrne (who was also mother of two of his four children), and for long stretches it was Holloway who supported the family financially. It wasn't, as Lepore points out, much of a matriarchy.

For years now critics have also been scratching away at the fact that Marston kept chaining Wonder Woman up. Is it possible to read them as bondage comics? Lepore says: "If you look at those comics where Wonder Woman was always chained up and roped up and gagged and then you read the scripts where Marston was giving these minute instructions like 'the chain should be three inches thick, they should be 5ft long, they should go around her waist', you think, 'OK, this is bondage, this is a fetish. That is clear. It's explicitly and obviously about that.

"But then you read what Marston says about the comic book. He says it's an allegory for the emancipation of women, therefore she needs to be chained up so she can emancipate herself. And when you really look at the iconography of suffrage he's not making that up.

"That is actually the single set of images for suffragists, feminists and birth control that is most commonly used [in the 1910s and 1920s] because for decades in the United States at least they'd been trying to compare their situation to slaves. And so, in the United States, women in suffrage parades marched in chains. They're just using the stuff all the time if you look at it. So then you have to look back and say maybe part of what's going on in the comics is what he says it is. What's tricky is you kind of wish that it was only that."

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan suggests that subliminal sexuality was almost inevitable back then. "If you look at those old comics, they're all filled with this interesting repressed sexuality because it was just a more repressed time period and the sexuality comes out in innuendos and in weird ways that aren't straightforward sex scenes because that's how a repressed culture deals with their sexuality. They bury it in some plot lines. I think you see some interesting stuff with male heroes at that time and a lot of homoerotica."

That, of course, was what Dr Fredric Wertham was seeing in his notorious book Seduction Of The Innocent, which saw comics as a corrupting influence on children and led to a very public attack on the comic book in the US and eventually in the UK. Batman and Robin were, Wertham claimed, "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together".

Well, maybe it was - if the reader was gay and looking for any reflection, however distorted, of his own desires. But how many kids saw it that way? How many kids saw chains in the Wonder Woman strips and thought "S&M role play"?

Separate intention from reception in all of this and we get to a more interesting question: Why do we need stories in the first place? What do we take from them?

"For young children these fantasies about slaying your villains are really important and vital ones," suggests Guevara-Flanagan. "That's why children like to rehash these stories over and over again to conquer their own fears and to model their own victories, and I think if we don't provide a form for girls to see that, we're not giving them these opportunities that are a really important part of childhood development.

"I did a little research on young children and violence and how parts of it are important for that to rehash and re-enact, and we don't see a lot of opportunities for young women really to fantasise in that same way about conquering their own villains."

That is an interesting qualifier to concerns that female heroes who resort to violence are not necessarily good role models for girls (though the same complaint could be levelled against male ­superheroes too, of course).

Wonder Woman comic strips. Wertham suggested, encouraged girls to hate men, although in truth, by the 1950s, with Marston dead and the character under the stewardship of Robert Kanigher whose feminist credentials weren't quite as well developed, Wonder Woman was a much more conventional character desperate to marry her boyfriend, Steve Trevor. Steve would also regularly rescue her from danger rather than the other way round as in Marston's era.

In this way, the character reflected the standing of women in American society at the time. Guevara-Flanagan's film is acute on how the status - and indeed visibility - of the female hero rises and falls in popular culture depending on what is happening in the culture at large. If the fifties were conservative, then Wonder Woman had a short-lived rise again during second-wave feminism at the end of the sixties as women like Steinem looked for role models to celebrate. By the eighties, hypermasculinity - in the shape of Stallone and Schwarzenegger - muscled women out of the picture almost entirely before Buffy came along to right it.

But it is that question of visibility that rankles. It's striking just how few female role models there have been down the years. And so girls have had to seek them out and take what they could. "If you go back and read Nancy Drew stories now I don't think you'd be knocked out by what a tip-top feminist she was," admits Lepore. "But I remember really loving Nancy Drew because they were the only thing there was.

"She was at least kind of in control of her own destiny. She was helping people, she was smart, she could find clues and solve mysteries, so as much as that might look lame now, relative to everything else that you could find in your town library when you walked over there Nancy Drew was actually pretty good. My thinking was that even Kanigher's Wonder Woman was rescuing people and trying to seek justice in the world."

Guevara-Flanagan says: "The eighties were specifically a backlash to the women's movement. You see men having to redefine themselves in confrontation with a woman's movement that had redefined itself. We were in a time of few great roles for women in the media, but I think we're emerging out of there. I think there have been strong female characters at the box office."

And in the bookshop too, of course - that's where Katniss Everdeen was first seen, after all. There may be a problem in the comic shops, though. Look at superhero comics and it can be difficult to avoid the perception that they are aimed specifically at a hormonally-­challenged audience of teenage boys.

"It's really exaggerated," argues Guevara-Flanagan, "not just what they [the women] are wearing, but the poses they strike - in every single panel is a sexual pose, even when they're supposed to be really empowered or strong or confident or kicking ass."

Last month, The Mary Sue, a pop culture website that concerns itself with representations of women, reprinted an article by Molly Jane Kremer in which she complained that the latest team working on the Wonder Woman comic - artist husband and writer wife David and Meredith Finch - pander to the male gaze ("with breasts as big as her head, and a waist thinner than her thigh"). The headline read "The New Creative Team On New 52 Wonder Woman Turns The Comic Into An Utter (Sexist) Disappointment".

Fair or not, Wonder Woman as an ongoing character with more than 70 years of history that could never live up to Marston's feminist intentions. Whether Marston lived up to his own intentions is arguable after all. But at least she's always been there to be a role model of some kind.

Lepore points out that, in the 1940s, children's psychiatrist Lauretta Bender was approached by Wonder Woman's publisher who, unlike Wertham, was very positive about the comic. Aggression, she said, was resolved. They served as mental catharsis for children seeking ways to solve problems. And what was the alternative, after all? Snow White in the Walt Disney animated film, looking after the house while waiting for the seven dwarves to come home from work?

Maybe we should end where we began. We can argue about the quality of our female role models, but there is no argument about the lack of quantity.

The fact is, over the years you can count the number of heroines who have come to prominence in popular culture on your two hands (and maybe toes). We have starved girls of role models, made them search to seek them out, at times sexualised them. But then should that be a surprise? The President of the United States has a First Lady. We've never had a First Gentleman.

Then again, in Scotland we've now got a female First Minister. Who is to say that in 2016 we will not have another President Clinton? At which point, who wants to start a book on how long it takes for someone to call her Wonder Woman?