Dorothy Gale, a farm girl from Kansas, leads a ragtag band of men through a dangerous landscape, confronts a “Great and Terrible” wizard, assassinates a fearsome Wicked Witch, and goes on to form a long-term, mutually supportive sisterhood with the female leaders of this strange land. A few decades later, Princess Diana, popularly known as Wonder Woman, leaves behind a race of Amazons on Paradise Island, a land of peace, prosperity, and equality, to fight for “America, the last citadel of democracy and equal rights for women” (Marston, “Introducing Wonder Woman”). Dorothy Gale, of Kansas and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Wonder Woman, the “Amazing Amazon” of comic book fame, are two of the most beloved female characters of twentieth-century American culture. The two have much in common; as the biographers of their creators have ably shown, L. Frank Baum, the creator of Oz, and William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, both identified as feminists, and each man was personally influenced by strong familial ties with women who rejected the traditional gender norms of their times. But there is also an unacknowledged connection between these two sets of female-driven narratives: their theoretical foundations are identical, as both texts are based upon the same branch of American feminist theory known as matriarchalism.(1003)
