Olive Byrne

Mary Olive Byrne (), known professionally as Olive Richard (February 19, 1904 – May 19, 1990), was the live-in life partner of William Moulton Marston and Elizabeth Holloway Marston. She has been credited as an inspiration for the comic book character Wonder Woman.

Byrne was the daughter of Ethel Byrne, the Progressive Era activist who opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States with her sister Margaret Sanger.

Biography

Byrne was delivered into an Irish American family by her aunt Margaret Sanger to the Byrne family in Corning, New York, 1904. Two years later her mother Ethel Byrne left a two-year-old Byrne and her three-year-old brother Jack at their paternal grandparents' home to protect them from their abusive father. Ethel visited once, when Byrne was six. She was then raised by her grandparents until they died in 1914, when she was sent off to a Catholic orphanage. In 1917, during Ethel Byrne's famous hunger strike, Margaret Sanger came to the orphanage and met Byrne for the first time in the young girl's memory to tell her of her mother and her work. Byrne met her mother for the first time in ten years when she was 16, after which she began occasionally living with Ethel and her lover Rob Parker. While staying with them she was exposed to much of Sanger's work such as Woman and the New Race, The Pivot of Civilization, and the ideas of "voluntary motherhood" and sexual freedom.

Byrne entered her freshman year at Tufts University studying medicine at her mother's bidding. By the end of the school year she had been initiated into the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. She had a distinctively androgynous appearance with a short Eton crop and was known around campus for her connection to Sanger. She worked at Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau over Christmas vacation.