CHAPTER 3
Trad Wives Forever: The Stepford Wives and the Equal Rights Amendment
Welcome to Stepford (1972)
In 1972, Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby, published his second domestic horror novel: The Stepford Wives. Levin flags it as a feminist work early on, opening with a lengthy quotation from iconic feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
The quotation describes how women are imprisoned by men and seek to escape, but men won’t let them go. Starting from this premise, Stepford – much like The Exorcist, which was in production when Levin’s novel was released—is a horror story that takes the rise of the liberated woman as a provocation. Or, rather, it takes the reactionary responses to the liberated woman as a provocation. This book was met with a huge audience, leading Bryan Forbes to direct it as a film that hit theaters in the winter of 1975.
Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives is a New York City novel, albeit more obliquely. In the first pages, we learn that a young family is moving from Manhattan to a town called Stepford in the Connecticut suburbs. The town is quiet, with generously proportioned houses, sprawling emerald-green lawns, and lots of space between neighbors. Ideal and picture-perfect Americana. The mother of the family, Joanna Eberhart, is at peace with the move. Her relationship with her husband, Walter, is initially loving and mutual; their sex life is happy, they share political and specifically feminist values, and they’ve decided together that a move to the country will make life easier for them and for their children. Once they’re in Stepford, he’ll be the primary breadwinner; she will largely shelve her aspirations to be a professional photographer. But she won’t entirely jettison her liberated values. She tells a woman in her new town, “I’m a semi-professional photographer… And I’m interested in politics and in the Women’s Liberation movement. Very much so in that. And so is my husband.” Not subtle, the feminism of this woman. But all of the novel’s seeming feminism is a setup for the abject domestic horror yet to come at the hands of the Stepford men who have had it with all this talk of women’s lib.
Soon enough, Walter announces that he’s “joining the Men’s Association” in Stepford, though he assures Joanna that he’s done so only to change the archaic organization “from inside.” As Joanna meets her neighbors, she realizes that the women in the neighborhood are all housewives. She also comes to understand that they are all docile, almost aggressively pretty, and quite vacuous as conversation partners. She determines that she won’t become “a compulsive hausfrau” nor an “asking-to-be-exploited patsy,” so she teams up with the other outwardly liberated woman in town, Bobbie Markowe.
They spend their days together talking and bonding over the extreme political backwardness of Stepford.
Doing some research at the local library together, they discover that there used to be a women’s organization, too, in Stepford, but that it disbanded for mysterious reasons.
Bobbie and Joanna begin to get nervous that something’s wrong with Stepford. As Bobbie puts it, “A few years ago, they were applauding Betty Friedan, and look at them now… There’s something here, Joanna! I’m not kidding! This is Zombieville!”
Something bad happened in Stepford, something that chastened or corralled all the liberated women, just as the demon had chastened and corralled Chris in The Exorcist. But this time, the demon isn’t a supernatural demon. Here, the demon is simply the men of Stepford.
The conversion of the town’s female residents happens, we later learn, because the Men’s Association records the Stepford women’s physical appearances and voices and uses those two things to build robotic replacements for the women of the town.
The entire novel is a meditation on what it would be like if women were turned into the robotic domestic servants that reactionary groups in the 1970s wanted them to be— entirely at the sexual and domestic beck and call of their husbands.
It’s a thought experiment, really, about the trad wife movement, but fifty years early.
Like the internet-famous trad wives of the twenty-first century, the Stepford wives voice nothing but happiness in their domestic life, centering all their sense of self around their children and husband. There is no arena beyond the home that they care about; they have no being beyond that of homemaker.
In his film adaptation of Levin’s novel, director Bryan Forbes revises the plot in subtle but important ways. He takes great pains to show us that our protagonist, Joanna Eberhart (played by Katharine Ross), is ambivalent about the move from Manhattan to the suburbs from the get-go—it’s almost like she knows how much she’s going to be giving up by leaving the city. She’s unsmiling in the opening shots; we see her staring at herself in a mirror in her newly emptied apartment—a visual anticipation of what’s to come at the end of the film when we find her empty, robotic doppelgänger staring blankly into a mirror. We see that her husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), is highly dissimilar to Levin’s realization of him in the novel.
In the film, Walter tends to be flip and dismissive of others, and he likes to pick fights with Joanna. He’s not the loving husband and reflexive feminist ally of the beginning of Levin’s novel. Instead, he’s kind of a boor. He’s also the one who pushes for the move from the city to the suburbs, while Joanna voices her wish to move back to Manhattan. And her instinct is entirely correct: For her, the city means freedom; it’s the move to the suburbs that puts her in danger.
When the family arrives in Stepford, everything is organized around Joanna’s point of view. From the car window, we see what she sees. She appears tense and ill at ease when they arrive. We see Joanna’s reaction to her bizarre and old-fashioned, perfectly coiffed and domestic-goddess-like neighbor, Carol Van Sant; Joanna is confused by her, put off balance, perhaps even slightly repulsed.
When she’s interviewed by a local reporter about her feelings about her new home, Joanna says she misses the noise of the city, and, indeed, there really is a lot of quiet in the film, a lot of scenes where Joanna isn’t talking but simply witnessing the strange social practices in her new town.
In one scene, she sees her neighbor Carol being groped by her husband in their yard; Joanna is shocked and somewhat aroused, it seems, by what she sees. She goes home and tells Walter about it; he responds by telling her about the Men’s Association that exists in Stepford and reveals that he’s already joined it. Joanna spins around to stare at him in shocked disappointment, saying, “I give up on you… You pretend we decide things together, but it’s always you, what you want.”
In the book, by contrast, they discuss it together, both acknowledging that it’s weird and sexist that women aren’t allowed to join; Forbess film makes Walter more obviously scheming and traitorous from the start. In so doing, Forbes makes the precariousness of Joanna’s situation clearer from the beginning. He sees the panicked feminism of the novel and doubles down on it.
Soon thereafter, Walter goes to his first meeting of the men’s club.
Whatever he learns there shakes him up. He comes home to swear to Joanna,
“I really love you. Do you know that? I really do.” It sounds very much as if he’s trying to convince himself that this is true. By the end of the film, we’ve worked out that, at that initial meeting, Walter was offered the opportunity to have Joanna replaced with a sexy, passive, domesticated robot Joanna—an exact replica of her but empty of thoughts, feelings, or desires. In retrospect, Walter’s protestation that he really does love Joanna strikes the viewer as evidence that he has already decided to replace her with a robot but feels some degree of guilt or remorse about it.
In the next scene, Joanna meets and befriends Bobbie (Paula Prentiss). As in the novel, she is liberated, sassy, and fun; she comments constantly that she doesn’t hold with the hyper-domesticated, passive, servile women of the town any more than Joanna does. “Given the freedom of choice,” she says, in reference to the local wives’ obsessions with commercial products for the domestic sphere, “I don’t wanna squeeze the goddamn Charmin.”
Both Joanna and Bobbie resist the commodification of homemaking. That resistance gets extra sharpness in her phrasing, “given the freedom of choice”: Bobbie parrots the logic of the pro-choice movement. Bobbie and Joanna celebrate their new friendship, and its resistance to the gravitational pull of domestic servility, by eating Ring Dings and drinking scotch during the daytime at Joanna’s kitchen table.
Over the course of the film, Bobbie and Joanna become increasingly restless in their town. Bobbie is eager to avoid being turned into a Charmin-squeezing automaton of domestic consumerism. Joanna wants to be taken seriously as an artist; Bobbie wants, it seems, to have fun.
What the film and novel showcase is how two liberated women—women who want to have at least some kind of life separate from their husbands and children, separate from the domestic sphere—try to come to terms with the misogynist and consumerist culture in which they live.
For the rest of the film, we build up to a crescendo of imperiling women’s rights that, pointedly, ends in violence.
But as is the case with domestic violence in real life, things start slowly and gradually.
Walter invites the Men’s Association over for dinner, despite Joanna’s extreme disappointment that he joined their number in the first place. At the party, Joanna appears to be the object of everyone’s gaze: clad in a clingy flesh-toned dress, she almost appears naked as she attempts to converse with the men as an equal. They, of course, are less interested in her words than her appearance.
One of them, in fact, creates a sketch of Joanna, and it’s disquieting how accurately the sketcher captures her likeness, because it makes her seem somehow vulnerable to actual, bodily capture.
Another one of the Men’s Association guests gets her to agree to having her voice recorded for some experiment he’s doing. The viewer doesn’t yet know why, but Joanna’s bodily freedom is being compromised, recorded, and controlled.
In the coming weeks, Joanna and Bobbie continue to commiserate over their town and decide to form a Women’s Association, not so much to compete with the Men’s Association as to provide some kind of response to it.
Despite their efforts, they soon find out that, although many of the women in their town used to be high-powered, career-oriented women, they’ve all been somehow domesticated – judges, scientists, politicians have all just become housewives. They also find out that there used to be a Women’s Club in the town, but that it has mysteriously disappeared.
Bobbie and Joanna visit many of the other women in the town, and when they meet them, Joanna and Bobbie consistently find that the women are somehow blank in their expressions, ambitionless in the public sphere, and wholly focused on the trivialities of domestic life-folding towels, finding the best cleaning supplies.
In one scene, Bobbie, Joanna, and Carol Van Sant are sitting in a sanitized, white room, while Carol speaks in smiling platitudes about how silly and useless the Women’s Club had been and says the women disbanded it, being bored with it.
Carol is wearing a white dress—-pioneer-like in cut and length, only cleaner and brighter. She’s literally rolling up balls of yarn in an antiquated-looking wicker basket as she fields Joanna’s questions about what she did when she was president—president, mind you—of the now-defunct Women’s Club.
She talks at length about how her husband’s career and her children’s well-being have improved since she’s “always here” at home. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m happy,” she affirms, in a soft, breathy, lilting voice that conveys no passion, no conviction, no substance, and no self.
This evacuation in the local women of any ambition, any sense of purpose or self, outside the domestic sphere is pervasive-and seemingly contagious.
They visit another friend of theirs, Charmaine (Tina Louise), who had in earlier scenes been grumpy in her marriage, brash and opinionated like Joanna and Bobbie, and a huge lover of tennis.
When Joanna and Bobbie arrive at Charmaine’s house, they see that her precious tennis court is being ripped up, while Charmaine’s husband surveys the scene, gloating. When they enter the house, Charmaine isn’t wearing her usual brightly colored athletic causals but a white and floral pioneer dress – she looks as if she just stepped off the set for Little House on the Prairie. Her vocal patterns have changed to match all the other domestic goddess neighbors of Stepford: She’s soft-spoken, mild-mannered, smiling, with a musicality to her voice that sounds false and hollow. Charmaine confirms that she’s done loving tennis, and that all she wants to do now is please her husband. “I can’t get my mind operating!” she notes, adding that she’s “swamped with work” because she’s fired their housekeeper and needs to focus on her husband.
Bobbie and Joanna are scandalized, watching from above as Charmaine’s husband guts the tennis court, their mouths literally hanging open in shock while Charmaine blithely smiles and waves down at her lord and master.
Joanna and Bobbie are increasingly convinced that something is seriously wrong with the women of Stepford, and that dark forces are somehow to blame.
How could their town possibly be populated exclusively by beautiful, soft-voiced, ambitionless, vapid women, whose entire existence revolves— supposedly happily-around cooking, cleaning, raising children, and sexually satisfying their husbands? In 1975? Weren’t they in the era of women’s lib?
Hadn’t everyone read The Feminine Mystique? What the hell was going on?
hexafu 