Female Representation in Wonder Woman

While it really bothered me that Wonder Woman’s stories revolve so much around Steve Trevor, I really appreciated that (at least as the series went on) there were a lot of women featured, even if mostly as secondary characters. This was a great contrast to Superman and Tintin, who rarely featured any female characters at all. Even if his portrayals of women at the beginning of the series were a little shallow, as the series went on, the female characters began to get a little more depth. In Wonder Woman no. 3, the plot of the story revolves around Steve Trevor’s secretary, Lila Brown, and her spy sister, Eve. In the process of helping Eve and Lila, Wonder Woman is even helped by Etta Candy (a more problematic portrayal of a woman), and a bunch of female students from Holliday College.

Also important is the presence of female villains – the presence of women that are not highly moral goes against a lot of the conceptions of women at the time, and while it seems obvious today that women could do bad things, not too long before Wonder Woman’s time it was a widespread notion that while women were naturally moral beings, men were naturally immoral. All in all, although the representations of women in Wonder Woman are sometimes flat or clichéd, I think it’s definitely an improvement over having no female representation.