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the stepford wives -the equal rights amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment: Reality and Spin

Forbes’s commentary wasn’t coming out of nowhere. Between the novel’s publication in 1972 and Forbes’s film’s release in 1975, America had witnessed the bizarre, disorienting, and demoralizing trajectory of the Equal Rights Amendment, which had seemed poised to sail through Congress in 1971-72 but had fallen on hard times by 1974-75.

The Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution is per-haps the single most important and most often forgotten aspect of American women’s history in the 1970s.

Readers who lived through the 1970s likely remember it; but many of my own under-graduate students have never even heard of the ERA and certainly have no concept that it was on the congressional docket for a decade and in American public discourse for the same period of time – from its rapid and almost uncontested passage through the two houses of the US legislature in March 1972 to its slow, death-by-a-thousand-cuts rejection by state legislatures in 1982.

The text of the Equal Rights Amendment is shockingly modest and short.

It has one clause that is substantive, two that are logistical. In its entirety, it reads,

1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. (ERA, March 1972.)

That is the whole thing. As the renowned feminist scholar Jane Mansbridge has pointed out, the ERA guaranteed equal legal rights but did not guarantee any specific new rights or privileges to women. It did not challenge any specific traditional roles, practices, or social institutions. It was an extremely modest piece of legislation whose short-term effects would likely have been minimal.

Partially because it was a relatively modest rights bill, it sailed easily through the House of Representatives.

On October 13, 1971, the front page of the Times ran an article announcing that the Equal Rights Amendment had passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 354-23. A landslide, bipartisan victory. American women—and men—could see clearly and plainly that their government was in almost unanimous support of the equal legal rights of women and of amending the United States Constitution to reflect that support. But the very next day, buried on page 39 of the Times, was quite a comedown: because the Senate had a lot of urgent business to attend to, its own vote on the ERA would have to wait until 1972.

Equal rights for women may have been a good idea, but it was just not, well, urgent in the minds of legislators. The article also noted that proponents of the ERA worried that trying to pass it in an election year (1972) rather than immediately after its landslide win in the House (late 1971), would significantly hurt its chances.

This pattern, in which women’s rights seem to be going in a positive direction, making major, unambiguous strides, and then being curbed, limited, or threatened immediately thereafter, would continue throughout the early 1970s, producing a whiplash effect for Americans. To understand how this happened, we have to dig deeper into the controversies that surrounded the ERA, and the patterns and trajectories by which states approved or denied the legislation. First, we need to think about what women thought they might be getting (or losing) if the ERA passed. Obviously, they thought they would be getting equal rights under the law—and that would have been true. But between 1972 and 1975, the most public and politicized parts of the debate on the ERA were not focused per se on equal rights in the eyes of the law. They were focused instead on specific lifestyle issues—issues on which the ERA’s eventual impact was hard to discern.

The element of the ERA that most threatened core American ideology was the idea that it would increase job opportunities for women outside the home.

Even though other contemporaneous legislation rendered ERA’s potential protection and expansion of women’s jobs essentially irrelevant, the popular perception was that women had a great deal to gain (proponents of ERA) or lose (opponents) by the passing of the amendment. Many opponents who adhered to the traditional, patriarchal values that fetishized a man’s right and responsibility to protect and provide for his wife found the idea of promoting women’s status in the economy of extra-domestic work threatening and destabilizing-both to women’s and men’s gender roles.

That perception of threat wasn’t entirely unfounded, considering the changing state of American domestic culture. According to censuses and polls from the 1970s, many fewer women chose to work exclusively in the home by the 1970s than had in the 1950s, and many fewer ranked housework as an occupation they enjoyed. This idea that housework was unfun and undesirable is reflected on nearly every page of Ira Levin’s novel, and in nearly every scene of the Stepford Wives film. The devaluation of domestic work was a frightening and destabilizing notion for many women who valued homemaking as their exclusive work and saw it as the key to their social status. Jane Mansbridge has pointed out that part of the ERA’s problem was that it seemed to differentially affect women of different educational classes:

The more highly educated the woman, the likelier she was to want to work outside the home and the likelier she therefore was to benefit from what the ERA promised. By seeming to offer greater employment opportunities for women, however, the amendment seemed implicitly to devalue domestic labor. When the ERA rolled in, the implicit statement that it made was that women, now about to receive equal legal rights with men, would surely not want to make their lives in the domestic sphere anymore.

Both sides of the aisle jumped on the domestic lifestyle changes the ERA seemed poised to usher in.

On the left, Bella Abzug penned a crackling op-ed in The New York Times in favor of enforcing equal employment opportunities, setting up federal childcare, and passing the ERA.

In 1971, a Times article came out that a team of legal scholars supported the passage of the ERA and noted that these lawyers advocated women’s participation in the military, education, and employment; these scholars also acknowledged that the ERA might change women’s preferential treatment in family law. The article clearly both advocated for the ERA and saw it as powerful enough to quickly and substantively change traditional sex roles assigned to women, as well as women’s position in the domestic sphere.

Meanwhile, right-wing opponents of the ERA were making noise in the press as well. On October 24, 1971, the Times ran a letter to the editor that attacked the ERA full force, seeing it as legislation that endangered “traditional roles in a family structure.” The author of this letter, a doctor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine, pointed out that the weakening of the family would, in his view, lead to “increased rates of alcoholism, suicide, and, perhaps, sexual deviation.” This doctor lampooned women’s equality in the law as dangerous to mental health and what he saw as American sexual mores.

Before the public’s eyes, a rights bill was clearly and decisively being repackaged—not just by liberals but also by conservatives—as something much more exciting and much more threatening: a lifestyle bill.

Despite the ambivalence in the United States about the bill and about the lifestyle changes it seemed to promise and/or threaten, it flew through the US Senate. First, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 15-1 on February 29, 1972, in support of the ERA. Then in mid-March, the Citizens Advisory Council on the Status of Women implored President Richard Nixon to voice his support for the ERA; their pleas seem to have had an effect, because Nixon spoke up in favor of the ERA the weekend before the Senate vote was to take place. Finally, on March 22, “the 49-year struggle of feminists to get the amendment through Congress ended at 4:38 p.m. when the 84-to-8 vote was announced.” Eighty-four to eight: fewer than 10 percent opposition. It was another landslide.

As the ERA ratification shifted over to individual states, Hawaii became the first to ratify.

The Times noted a broad perception that the bill would achieve the ratification of the required thirty-eight states for its inclusion in the US Constitution. Within a week, five more states had ratified the amendment; Kansas became the seventh on March 28. But that first heady week that envisioned a rapid-fire, landslide success for the ERA came to an end on March 29, when Oklahoma shot down the amendment, citing fears about changes to child welfare, marriage law, women’s susceptibility to the draft, and their ability to take on jobs that would require them to lift heavy objects.

In the following week, a group of housewives spoke out in the Times against the ERA. The group’s representative is quoted in the Times saying,

“Our daughters are being taught in school that there is no joy or accomplishment in being a wife and mother… As real women, we want to defend our homes… [and] want to be loved and protected by our men.”

In the Ladies Home Journal of 1975, a prominent opponent of the ERA named Phyllis Schlafly said, “The Equal Rights Amendment is the biggest fraud that has come down the pike since Charles Ponzi promised investors he would double their money every 90 days.”

The proto-Stepfordians were already taking center stage, shooting down the idea of equality because, somehow, it seemed to undercut women’s importance in the home and their respectability and lovability in the eyes of their husbands.

Between 1972 and 1975, the ERA lurched painfully up and down in public sentiment, like an unending and senselessly volatile roller-coaster ride.

In a 1975 Gallup poll, 58 percent of surveyed Americans favored the ERA. When broken down into categories, that 58 percent contained slightly more men than women (63 percent vs. 54 percent), more Easterners than Westerners, more Northerners than Southerners. That is, three years into the labored effort to pass the ERA, a significant majority of American men and a slightly less significant majority of American women favored the passage of the ERA.

And yet, somehow, it just wasn’t passing—at least not by 1974. Which was the year in which Bryan Forbes began shooting The Stepford Wives in Connecticut.

That “somehow” had quite a lot to do with the aforementioned Phyllis Schlafly. Although my undergraduate students very rarely even recognize her name, Phyllis Schlafly is the ultimate, original, and most influential trad wife in American history, having initially come to prominence in 1964, when she published a conservative book called A Choice Not an Echo, and then running an unsuccessful but highly visible campaign to be president of the National Federation of Republican Women in 1967. An article from The New York Times in December 1975 opens “Phyllis Schlafly, the 50-year-old conservative Republication who heads the nationwide crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment,” and goes on to describe her as “immaculately groomed… with streaked blonde upswept curls who stands 5 feet 7 inches and weighs 135 pounds—’the same I weighed before my six children were born.”

At the head of her “troops” of 1970s trad wives, Schlafly urged them to deploy “femininity tactics” on lawmakers as well as on the American public:

“Her supporters wear long dresses and hand out such things as homemade bread, apple pies, and jam to legislators.” She weaponized traditional femininity and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the entrenched gender conservatism of mainstream American culture, it worked like a charm.

Schlafly characterized feminism as an “antifamily movement” that refused to see that “most women find their major fulfillment in the home.” By far her most famous “contribution” to American politics, however, came in her successful grassroots dismantling of the ERA.

In large part through the action of Schlafly and her “troops,” the momentum that had made the ERA seem like a legislative slam dunk in 1971-72 simply died.

By 1975, American women had come to grips with the very painful reality that not all Americans—and in fact, not all American women— wanted equal rights for women.

By the time The Stepford Wives hit theaters, moviegoers were well aware that there was a very real chance that the liberated and often urban women of American might very well be stopped in their tracks by the domestic goddess suburban “hausfraus,” who were painfully successful at keeping their men satisfied, happy, and secure in their status as heads of household. So, even though The Stepford Wives was and is a horror movie, and a horror classic at that, it also hit theaters and communities very much as a sociopolitical satire.

November 20, 2025

equal rights, feminism, horror, horror movies, misogyny, patriarchy, reproductive rights, the stepford wives, trad wives
the stepford wives and the equal rights amendment – cont.

Truly, if you have ever spent time going down the algorithmic rabbit hole of Ballerina Farm or other influencers, simply channel those memories, then imagine those women moving into every house in your neighborhood, and you can intuit some of the vertigo Joanna and Bobbie are feeling by this point in the film. And for good reason: The walls of domestic horror are closing in on them faster than they know.

Joanna tries to assert herself throughout the film, to have a voice, to make images that are all her own. She tries to drum up more interest in her photography work; this effort succeeds, and she visits a gallery in Manhattan, where the gallerist tells her that her work has real potential. As he evaluates her, she appears nervous and insecure, watching him scrutinize the evocative shots of domestic life in Stepford that she’s brought with her to show him.

She pleads with him, “Don’t say anything bad!”

When he admires them, she responds,”You’re not just telling me that because you’re scared I might be a crazy lady?”

Stepford, it’s clear, has broken her confidence.

When the gallerist asks her what she wants, she says that she wants someone, somewhere, to see a photograph and say, “That reminds me of an Ingalls.” She goes on: “Ingalls was my maiden name.” What she wants, then, isn’t just fame but a durable individual identity that doesn’t originate from her marital status.

The movie offers up this scene as a shining possibility that Joanna will be able to break out of her town and make it on her own somehow—”to be remembered” as an Ingalls, not an Eberhart.

Meanwhile, Bobbie goes away for a weekend with her husband and returns transformed. Her breasts are larger; her hair is perfectly coiffed. She wears heavy makeup and a risibly frilled pioneer top and apron, a startling contrast to her previous uniform of shorts and T-shirts.

Like Charmaine, Bobbie now confirms that she loves housework, wants to live for her husband, and is no longer worried about what’s going on in Stepford. She says that her husband, after working hard all day, used to come home to “a slob,” and she’s not going to do that to him anymore, so she’s wearing dresses and makeup full-time.

Rather than swearing and huffing, Bobbie speaks in the same dulcet, singsong voice that Charmaine and Carol use.

Joanna is horrified and tries to figure out how her brassy, sassy friend became this way overnight. She now is convinced that she herself is in danger of being transformed, like Bobbie, into a captive of domestic, suburban consumerism.

She knows the Men’s Association has something to do with it, though she doesn’t know how, why, or what.

Soon thereafter, Joanna goes to see a female psychiatrist. Rather than dismissing or pathologizing Joanna’s concerns, this psychiatrist empathizes with Joanna’s feelings. She notes that any women with interests outside the family, upon moving from the city to the suburbs, would be rattled, saying the suburbs can “seem like a jaunt to Siberia.” The psychiatrist then intuits that there’s something Joanna’s not telling her, and this is where Forbes’s film builds on Levin’s novel.

Joanna admits, “I think the men are behind it… all of them. All of them in the association. My husband, everyone.” She goes on to describe how she thinks the men somehow make the women change, noting that she sounds insane. She says, “They draw our pictures and they take our voices,” recognizing the Men’s Association’s visit to her home as something dangerous, something she wishes hadn’t happened.

Joanna sounds incredibly paranoid, almost maniacal. But, shockingly, the doctor sympathizes with her and believes her. She kneels on the floor in front of Joanna and takes her hands in her own, urging her to leave: “I’ll give you a prescription, which you’ll fill, then you gather up your children, and you get the hell away! Don’t tell your husband, don’t tell anyone. Just go. Wherever you feel safe.” She validates Joanna’s reality as reality.

With the chintzy 1970s décor of the doctor’s office, Joanna’s halting and emotional speech, and the psychiatrist’s heartfelt advice, it’s not a particularly artful scene, but I must tell you, it’s the scene in the film that brought me to tears—because, for one hot second, Joanna wasn’t alone with the horror closing in on her; someone was bearing witness to and confirming her reality. A reality in which women simply didn’t deserve to be full people, a reality that women should run from like the death sentence it is.

Validated and empowered by her doctor, Joanna goes home to get her children and flee. She finds her house dark; the camera is trained tightly on her. We feel her anxiety, her claustrophobia, her sense that someone who poses danger to her lurks nearby.

She soon sees that Walter is in the living room, so she sneaks up the stairs to find her children. We hear thunder booming outside. Walter creeps up on Joanna on the stairs, making her gasp.

“They’re not here,” he says, realizing of course whom she’s looking for.

“They’re fine,” he keeps repeating, his voice slurred from drinking. Terror seizes Joanna’s face, which we see from a steep camera angle looking down the stairs at her. Only her panicking face is illuminated. But, empowered by her shrink, she says that she’s taking the children and leaving Walter.

Now, the gloves are off as Walter shouts in her face, “Go upstairs and lie down! Now!” She refuses, and then we watch as Walter gets physically violent with Joanna.

He throws a glass, and it shatters against the wall. He then battles her on the stairs, grabbing her by the wrists and trying to drag her back down. In this moment, the assaults on women that have been implied throughout the film become explicit and explicitly physically violent. In doing so, the film makes a quiet claim about the relationship between controlling behaviors – capturing women’s voices, capturing their images, limiting their choices and freedoms—and frank physical abuse.

Joanna screams, breaks away, and runs upstairs, locking herself in her bedroom as Walter tries to break through the door, screaming, “Joanna! Open this goddamn door!” Eventually, realizing he isn’t strong enough to break the door down, Walter retreats back downstairs.

Joanna slips out. Now it’s pouring rain outside, so she heads back to Bobbie’s, thinking her children are likely there. Upon Joanna’s arrival, we see Bobbie swanning around her home in a powder-blue-and-white pioneer dress and smock. Seemingly inured to Joanna’s urgent pleas, she prattles on about making coffee. Joanna is stunned and horrified by Bobbie’s transformation; her mouth open and her eyes wide, Joanna simply can’t believe that her sassy, fun-loving, free-spirited, shorts-wearing friend is clad in pioneer frills and spouting platitudes about hot beverages. In her shocked desperation to remind Bobbie of who she is and of her own humanity, Joanna slices open her own hand to show that she’s a human who bleeds. In the process, Bobbie gets stabbed with a kitchen knife, and then fails to bleed, instead spiraling into a massive system crash where she keeps repeating, “I was just going to give you coffee.” Joanna’s fears are confirmed: Bobbie is gone, replaced by a robot clad in almost absurdly traditional “female” garb. Joanna knows that unless she finds her children and escapes, she’ll be next.

Joanna heads back to her house to find out where her kids are. The house is still dark, and Walter lies in wait, nursing another glass of liquor. He keeps stopping and listening, as if he hears something in the house. The camera is tightly trained on him until a flicker of light and shadow passes over his face, and we see that Joanna is coming up behind him, a fireplace poker held aloft in her hands. She brings it down hard on his head, screaming, “I want my children!”

In a daze, Walter reveals that he has taken them and hidden them in the Men’s Association building. Joanna is now in Walter’s and the Men’s Association’s thrall because her children are on the line.

Like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, this film manifests a strong awareness that a woman’s love for her children is part and parcel of her entrapment in the prison of violence that is her domestic life.

This is a crucial scene for the film’s politics, and one that chimes loudly with Rosemary’s Baby.

It’s Walter’s wish to coercively control Joanna—to control her body, mind, and soul, to limit her whereabouts and determine what she wears and how she behaves—that puts her in gravest danger.

Like the earlier movie—which, of course, is also based on a novel by Ira Levin— The Stepford Wives reminds viewers that denying women’s rights, and specifically denying them the right to have a life and selfhood outside the home, is intimately connected to domestic abuse. It echoes and modifies the politics of Rosemary’s Baby; there, we saw the connection made between coercive control and reproductive violence. Here, it’s between coercive control and physical violence more broadly.

Joanna, seeing the rapidity with which her husband’s controlling behavior edges over into battery and seeing how far her husband and the Men’s Association will go to literally dehumanize her, wants to get out of the domestic prison altogether. And she wants to bring her children with her.

At the Men’s Association building, Joanna finds herself trapped in a dark Victorian mansion: inside, it’s gloomy, archaic, labyrinthine. In the bowels of the house, she hears the voices of her children yet cannot find them— again, echoing Rosemary’s Baby, when she hears the sound of her baby crying through the wall.

The camera angles on Joanna are very steep, suggesting that she is being watched or spied on from above. She hears her children calling for her. They sound afraid, desperate. Her fear and desperation escalate: The camera pauses on her half-lit face, wet with a combination of rain and sweat, and her eyes, wide with fear. She follows the sound up the huge, dark staircase as thunder claps outside. When she finally throws open a door, she sees a recording device is the origin of her children’s voices. She stops dead in her tracks, comprehending suddenly that she’s been deceived. Technology has been used against her, again, this time as a tool of manipulation and coercion.

When the head of the Men’s Association, Dale Coba (Patrick O’Neal), who’s been sitting there waiting for her, starts to chide her, she says, simply, “Where are my children?” The greatest power an abuser can wield over a woman is the power he wields over her children’s physical safety. She is trapped by her love for them; she knows it, as does Dale.

He speaks to her calmly, confidently, telling her to ready herself for @another stage.” “We’ve found a way of doing it that’s just perfect. It’s perfect for us, and it’s perfect for you.”

Realizing her children are not there, Joanna tries to run, but all the doors are locked as Dale stalks her through the house.

She finds herself, eventually, in a bedroom that uncannily resembles her bedroom at home. It becomes apparent to the viewer that this is some kind of staging area. In the room, she meets her counterfeit, the robot who will replace her: a creepily black-eyed, large-breasted replica of herself, brushing her hair and staring at herself vacantly in a mirror. The robot woman stands, and she carries a sash that she seems prepared to use to strangle Joanna. The scene fades to black; Joanna is no more.

In the final scene, we are in a grocery store. The scene is brightly lit and colorful. We hear an old-timey slow dance song playing in the background.

The store is almost entirely populated by robot wives. We see Charmaine, clad in a huge sun hat, a prairie top, and a long floral skirt. She greets the other bot-women in the same exaggeratedly soft, lilting voice we’ve gotten used to by now as the lingua franca of the Stepford Wife.

The Joanna-bot and the Bobbie-bot greet each other, and in their absent gazes, it is clear: Men’s desire to control women has won out in Stepford. The real women are gone; the trad wife robots will have their day. It’s a powerful, unsettling scene, the final touch on director Bryan Forbes’s quiet but powerful commentary on women’s rights under threat.

November 19, 2025

domestic horror, feminism, horror movies, misogyny, patriarchy, scream with me, the stepford wives, trad wives

the stepford wives -the equal rights amendment

the stepford wives and the equal rights amendment – cont.