Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) September 5, 2026: Gloria Steinem (1934-2026), a leader of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent decades, died on September 3, 2026 at the age of 92. May she rest in peace.
In various OEN articles over the years, I have noted that conservative Americans have felt under siege by American culture for decades be they reject the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and subsequent decades, and they also reject the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent decades.
Now, Katharine Q. Sellye published the longest obituary that I have seen The New York Times (dated September 3, 2026) publish about anyone about Gloria Steinem. In it, one illustration is the cover of Ms. Magazine in 1972 featuring Wonder Woman, the comic book female superhero. As a girl, Gloria Steinem grew up reading the Wonder Woman comic books. She saw the female superhero that Harvard's psychologist William Moulton Marston (1893-1947) started writing comic books about in 1941, on the brink of World War II in a positive light:
Sellye's informative obituary is based on a lengthy interview with Gloria Steinem in January 2026.
Now, Harvard's American historian Jill Lepore has written a fascinating history about Wonder Woman titled The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
Decades ago, superheroes originated in comic books. If somebody has written about why superheroes originated in comic books, I have not seen that study.
As television sets in American homes became more common from about 1960 onward, superhero television shows emerged on television - often based on superheroes in comic books.
In any event, at this remove in time, we may wonder what exactly the appeal of superheroes is - both male superheroes and female superheroes. It appears that both male superheroes and female superheroes are now here to stay.
Superheroes have special powers that set them apart from mere mortals - and that set them apart also from heroes in ancient, medieval, and modern Western literature.
Ah, but what is going on here? I would suggest that both male superheroes and female superheroes are designed to appeal respectively to the four masculine archetypes of maturity and the four feminine archetypes of maturity that the Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in psychology and religion, University of Chicago, 1975) writes about in his complete theory of the eight archetypes of maturity in the human psyche, each of which is accompanied by two bipolar "shadow" forms.
As I explain below, I base this interpretation on my own experience of feeling wonderfully exuberant for about ten weeks in the fall of 2024.
Now, with Douglas Gillette as his co-author, Robert Moore published a series of five self-help books about the four masculine archetypes of maturity in the male psyche in the early 1990s:
(1) King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (HarperSanFrancisco/ HarperCollins, 1990);
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