Tag: horror

• afterlives of the stepford wives

  The reception of the horror-satire of The Stepford Wives in 1975 was mixed, to say the least.

  Betty Friedan herself—whose ideas about the dangers to women of suburban life in The Feminine Mystique clearly inspired both the novel and the film—roundly condemned the film, seeing it as a mockery of feminism.

  Apparently, she stormed angrily out of the screening room when she saw it.

  Feminist Lois Gould called the movie “junk” but said flippantly that she’d be happy to have a robot housekeeper.

  But not all 1970s feminists had the same reaction. Feminist critics Gael Greene and Eleanor Perry praised the film for what they judged to be its obvious feminism. To them, it satirized and villainized men for wanting women to be automatons who served them snacks and sex.

  Mainstream critics like Roger Ebert also saw it as a feminist triumph, noting that “[The actresses] have absorbed enough TV, or have such an instinctive feeling for those phony, perfect women in the ads, that they manage all by themselves to bring a certain comic edge to their cooking, their cleaning, their gossiping, and their living deaths.”

  Even the film’s crew insisted the film was, if anything, “anti-men” and not “anti-women.”

  The Stepford Wives is a story set in a town where women not only lack equal rights, but any rights at all. They have no autonomy over their bodies, no choices, no nothing, because they are dead and replaced by robots. By devising a world in which women are stripped of their rights entirely and replaced by robots, Stepford Wives takes the fantasy that the anti-ERA proponents seemed to believe in—women were wholly satisfied by domestic life and labor, satisfied to live at the pleasure of their husbands—and makes it horrifying and dehumanizing.

  Alas, the horror of Stepford, both novel and film, was prophetic. It presaged the ultimate failure of the ERA in 1982. By then, even with a three-year extension on the original timeline to ratify, a group of states stood firm in their opposition: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia. Despite its wildfire approval in the heady early days of 1971-73, the ERA withered on the vine and died. It withered and died in part because Americans just couldn’t get comfortable with how women’s equal rights might change how we live our lives, might change the role of women in the home, and might undermine the power that men have over women. Better a bot than an equal citizen before the law.

  If that doesn’t strike you as horror, you need to look around, because this retrograde mania is ongoing. It took until 2020 for the required thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, but as of early 2025, the American Congress has still not made the amendment into law. The reasons?

  First, the original deadline for ratification had lapsed years before. Second, several states have moved to rescind their own prior approval. We are still living in the aftermath of 1970s feminism, however much we might want to believe we have moved beyond it. We are still living in a culture that is profoundly ambivalent about the fundamental question of whether to grant women equal rights under the law. We are still living in Stepford. 2025 is looking a whole lot like 1975.

  Now, again, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the trad wife phenomenon speaks hauntingly to that truth. Honestly, when I see trad wife content on TikTok or YouTube, I often think they must have studied Bryan Forbes’s film in order to cultivate the vocal traits they exhibit in their voice-overs. It’s uncanny. Trad wife influencers speak in dulcet and strangely robotic tones to narrate their processes of making jam or breakfast cereal from scratch, just like the women of Stepford. Also like them, the trad wives lionize and fetishize domestic labor as the be-all and end-all of what it is to be a woman. Trad wife media also fetishize female sexual pliancy and physical beauty as things that married women owe to their men, as a constitutive part of their contribution to the functioning of the family. On top of that, they often dress in pioneer-chic clothing, looking very similar to Bobbie or Charmaine after they are roboticized. By trying to seem like the ideal, peaceful, beatific, and perfectly coiffed wives and mothers, these influencers have found a way to market a vision of a “lost” family culture now newly resurrected in a modern America that is aching for moral absolutes. They sell wholesomeness and homespun lifestyles by packaging those ideas every bit as prettily and tidily as the Men’s Association packaged its renovated “women.” Eerily, these influencers often have hundreds of thousands—and sometimes millions—of views and likes.

  Trad wives are creating a culture of spectacle around the domestic sphere and around old-fashioned modes of cooking and living. Trad wives don’t want equal rights. They want only those privileges that are attendant upon being the helpmate and servant of the heads of their households. They want to embody the values of the Men’s Association in Stepford. And they are gaining popularity day by day, inaugurating a new pioneer frontier for women’s rights, which is the right to have no rights beyond what rights are offered up through the generosity of the male head of household. We are living, right now, in a social media deluge of regression-which, in itself, reflects the very now, in a social media deluge of regression – which, in itself, reflects the very real political regressions we’re living through simultaneously. And we, like Joanna, should be screaming and trying to get out. Because it is absolutely the case that, when the domestic sphere is radically divided according to sex and gender like this, the rates of gender-based domestic violence and sexual assault in the home skyrocket—as the film makes plain with Walter’s assault on Joanna on the stairs.

  In fact, throughout most of American history, the idea that a woman lived under the rule and rod of her husband entailed the idea that she owed him sex on demand. This idea was so utterly baked into American social and legal culture that it was not possible to convict a man for raping his own wife.

  Instead, the going assumption in culture and at law was that a man had a right to sex from his wife, and that if he had to extract sex from her by force, that was unproblematic. This “marital exemption” for the husband from being prosecuted for rape remained on statutes books in the United States until 1993, although individual states started revoking the marital exemption as early as about 1980.

  If we really want to fetishize an old-timey domestic power dynamic, in which the wife is subordinate to the husband and obedient to him, we need to be very clear about what we’re endorsing. We’re endorsing the sexual and domestic automatism of Stepford, and we run the risk of returning to a world in which a women couldn’t even bring a suit for sexual violence against her husband, let alone have a prayer of winning it.

  Making jam from scratch may seem a far cry from sanctioning marital rape-and, on its own, it is. But when the making of jam gets conflated and confused with a sexual subordination ideology about what a woman owes a man in the domestic sphere, well, at that point, the distinctions start to get a little blurry. And that’s what Ira Levin knew in his novel, and what Bryan Forbes amplified in his popular film:

  Making the jam and keeping house are fine and good so long as they don’t come with a rider about being an automaton who exists only for the pleasure and satisfaction of a man. Once that starts happening, you’re living-again—in the dystopian domestic horror of Stepford.

  November 20, 2025

  domestic abuse, equal rights, era, horror, horror movies, misogyny, patriarchy, the stepford wives, trad wives

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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

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