The Wonder Woman Label
The press nickname “the wonder woman” that was applied to Bessie Blount during the period of her rehabilitation work is a striking detail that deserves examination.
Wonder Woman — the DC Comics superhero — had been created in 1941, only a few years before Blount received this press designation. The character was widely recognized in American popular culture by the mid-to-late 1940s.
The application of the “wonder woman” label to Blount was presumably celebratory: she was being recognized as someone with superhuman capabilities, specifically in the rehabilitation medicine context. She could teach veterans who had lost hands to write with their teeth and feet. She could build a feeding device in her kitchen. She was impressive.
But the label also carried a subtle diminishment. “Wonder woman” locates exceptional Black female achievement in the realm of the superhuman — something wondrous and unusual — rather than in the realm of the ordinary professional accomplishment that deserves straightforward institutional recognition.
When a white male physician creates a medical device, it is typically described in terms of his professional accomplishment. When Bessie Blount created one, she became “the wonder woman.” The language of wonder implies that what she accomplished was surprising, exceptional, outside the normal category of what someone like her was expected to do.
The recognition was real. The framing was a symptom of the era.