Tag: misogyny

• 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

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• the stepford wives and the equal rights amendment

  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?

  November 19, 2025

  female rage, feminism, horror, horror movies, ira levin, misogyny, patriarchy, the stepford wives, trad wives

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