It’s Women’s History Month, and time to confess that I’m inordinately interested in the daily lives of the Amazons. Not the historical/mythological Greek Amazons (although I’m somewhat fascinated at the idea of required semi-mastectomies to improve one’s archery prowess), but the DC Comics Amazons who live on Paradise Island, birthplace of Wonder Woman. In my opinion, DC has never handled the Amazons in a believable way. I suspect that’s because Wonder Woman was not consistently written nor drawn by women.
Women, left to their own devices, will develop their own language and customs, much like twins or the Amish. I know. I went to a girls’ boarding school for four years, then lived in a women’s dorm off and on when I went to a co-ed college. With some adjustments for the differences between life in classical Greece and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I can imagine what Paradise Island would really be like.
In Wonder Woman stories, we often see certain groups of Amazons. The Queen has her court of advisors. The army trains to be ready for the frequent attacks from Man’s World. The priestesses perform the rituals demanded by the gods. Doctors heal. Librarians study. Although we don’t see them, I assume there are also cooks, seamstresses, architects and engineers, cobblers and clowns and musicians.
At my school, we had girls who were interested in all kinds of things. With no boys, there was very little jockeying for male approval (although there was a boys’ school with the same faculty and administration, where girls in the upper forms often had classes). There were athletes and scholars, actresses and musicians, rebels, writers, gossips, manipulators and nerds. But, unlike the Amazons we see on Paradise Island, sometimes these roles could all be found in one girl.
There were groups of girls who were friends, who perhaps shared an interest in riding horses or choir or drugs. However, these were not cliques in the sense we see them in popular movies. It was easy for a nerd to be friends with a jock, to find some common interest they both shared, whether it was Asian history or the Grateful Dead. (more…)