Despite the pride that the USA soon might have a female president — its recommendations and advice to other countries as far as women's rights, gender equality, education, and decades of struggle for economic, social, and political equality for women — the superpower has not achieved miracles. Women still make 79 cents for every dollar an average US man earns. And although the gap narrowed in the past several years, according to the US Census, women earn only 78.6 percent of what men do.  At the same time, women have a higher poverty rate. One out  three American women (42 million females and 28 million children) lives in poverty or is on the edge of it, according to the Shriver Report and the Center for American Progress. About two-thirds of  women in the US earn a minimum wage.

 

Even in US's highest echelons there is gender inequality. Jennifer Lawrence, an actress and an Oscar-winner denounced the absence of equal pay between male and female actors in Hollywood. That was revealed after the hack of Sony Pictures' emails, where it shows that Lawrence's earnings were considerably lower than her male co-stars. Looking at a different elite in the US, it is worth remembering that in 2005 Lawrence Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University, former undersecretary of Treasury and former head of the World Bank, argued that women do not have the same ability as men do to occupy the front rows in the sciences and mathematics for genetic reasons.

 

On the other hand, the US's right-wing conservatives continue to fight against basic women's rights, including control over their own bodies. Besides the continuous battle against abortion in the courts and state legislatures, they have now launched an attack on Planned Parenthood, the national organization founded almost a century ago that provides services and reproductive health education especially for women. The attack started with fabricated pretexts including legislative investigations and police operations (recently Texas authorities raided Planned Parenthood offices) and attempts to override state and federal funding for the non-profit's services that are vital especially for young women without resources.

 

Sexual violence against women is a plague in the United States. Nearly three out of every ten women have suffered rape, physical violence, or abuse by their partners — according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The same source estimates that nearly one of every five women in the US has been raped (that represents 19.3 percent). Some 38 million women have experienced physical violence from their partner during their lifetime. According to a new survey prepared by the Association of American Universities, 23 percent of female students reported that they have been victims of assault or sexual harassment.

 

The US has the highest number of prisoners in the world, where one million women are in prison or under control of some type of criminal justice system. They are the fastest growing category of prisoners (today there are eight times more imprisoned women than in 1980, with the war on drugs as its main cause). In fact, one third of the 500,000 female prisoners worldwide, are behind bars in the Unites States (ACLU statistics and the Sentencing Project).

 

It is true that Hillary Clinton might be the first woman to hold presidency and of course use this trump-card in her campaign. There is no doubt that more women are taking the highest positions in political and economic spheres in the US. There are record number of women in Congress (104 of 435 seats), although only 26 women are chief executives of the 500 top companies in the Fortune magazine chart (that represents 5% of the entire number) – according to Pew Center. But if there is no fundamental change in the political and economic structure of the country, it seems that things will not change much, even with a woman in the White House. Perhaps it requires a superhero that's a pop-culture celebrity. Wonder Woman reappears soon enough, this time in the new films of Batman and Superman.

 

 

If Wonder Woman was invented as a comic book character in 1941 by a psychologist, Harvard-graduate, William Moulton Marston, with the intention to offer a model of strong, free, and brave young woman for the younger generation. The aim was to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, because the only hope for civilization is freedom, development, and equality for women in all fields of human activity, according to the original press release, reported by The New Yorker. The origin, obviously, will be found with the mythical Amazons. Their matriarchy was defined by peace and equality until it was conquered by foreign male invaders.

 

By the way, Marston personally knew one of the feminist leaders, Margaret Sanger who in 1914 founded the magazine The Woman Rebel, where the phrase “birth control” was used for the first time. The magazine stressed the point that the right to be a mother was the basis of feminism regardless of church or State. A few years later, Sanger and her sister opened the first birth control clinic in the country in Brooklyn, which later became known as Planned Parenthood. Wonder Woman, The New Yorker reports, did not originate from the feminist utopian fiction, but was inspired by Sanger.

 

In other words, Wonder Woman represented a movement, and everything indicates that it is time for the return of the superhero, not only on the screen but on the streets of the US as well.