Women in superhero franchises have had mixed luck. In the '80s Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Supergirl both bombed at the box office. In the '90s Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns was a complicated enough anti-heroine to offer hope of more female comic book characters getting their moment in the spotlight. Come the 2000s Jennifer Garner's Elektra didn't fare quite so well (brave attempt, Jenn). Halle Berry's Storm in the original X-Men trilogy had her moments but the women in the films (including a fundamentally disempowered Rogue portrayed by Anna Paquin, a barely seen Ellen Page as Kitty Pride and an extremely good Rebecca Romijn as Mystique) took a backseat to the male stars. Let's hope some of that continues to be corrected with the First Class-Original Trilogy hybrid Days of Future Past due out this spring. I won't even mention Scarlet Johansson as the token female Avenger, Black Widow: we get it, you can fit into a leather onesie but what did she actually do in the film?

For all Wonder Woman's fashion forward bustiers, thigh high boots and short-shorts, the character has never been just about sex appeal. What greater defender could the character ask for than a real-life fighter for woman-kind, feminist icon Gloria Steinem? Steinem choose an image of Wonder Woman for the first cover of Ms. Magazine in 1972 and famously criticized a character reboot in the '70s that saw a de-costumed and de-powered Wonder Woman using karate to fight foes. Her argument: why take away the powers and iconography of one of the few female heroes available to young girls and grown women? Please keep that in mind, Hollywood: for those of us, male and female alike, that grew up looking up to the character, a redesign, reboot or reinvention is not necessary. I'll give Ms. Steinem the last word on the subject.

"Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women's culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream: strength and self-reliance for women, sisterhood and mutual support among women, peacefulness and esteem for human life: a diminishing both of 'masculine' aggression and of the belief that violence is the only way of solving conflicts."

By Athena's sword, no one could say it any better.

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