Who's Afraid of
a Little Feminism?
by June Pulliam
Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. Perennial Press. 2002. p.
Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives was written in 1972, during the beginnings of second wave feminism and a year before Roe v. Wade. Although it has been out of print for quite some time, it was recently reissued in 2002 in time for its 30th anniversary, as its basic plot remains relevant even thirty one years later.
The novel tells of how low taxes and good schools lure Gothamites Walter and Joanna Eberhardt to Stepford Village, a place they believe will be more conducive to properly raising their family than the urban jungle of New York City. Like many young modern educated couples of their time, Walter and Joanna believe that marriage is an equal partnership. The couple is involved with feminist activities, and Walter, at least in theory, sees his wife's photography as her vocation, not just a hobby she can pursue after the children have been put to bed and the house cleaned. But Walter begins to change when they move to Stepford.
Walter is immediately pleased to be part of the mysterious male only men's association, which keeps him away from home on so many nights. Joanna, however, doesn't find Stepford as fulfilling. The women are placid, serene housekeepers, too busy baking and cleaning their magazine perfect homes to visit and discuss the topics of the day. Joanna believes the women have all been brainwashed by oppressive husbands, and attempts to organize a consciousness raising group to liberate them, but apparently housekeeping agrees with the wives of Stepford. They are all young and beautiful, the living embodiment of the housekeepers pictured in women's magazines. Soon Joanna discovers what she believes is the reason for their contentment with being Donna Reeds: they're not women at all, but robotic replicants.
The movie version of the novella is excellent (I've used it with great success in my women in horror class), but it eradicates the subtleties of the original story. In Levin's novella, Joanna only suspects that the women of Stepford have all been replaced with remarkably convincing androids who are far more interested in waxing the floor than discussing Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and fears a similar fate awaits her. This fear is made explicit in the film, where we actually see the robots, who experience technical difficulty after a mere low impact car crash (another fine Microsoft product?). And at the end of the film, we watch Joanna meet her end at the hands of her robotic Doppelganger (who has had breast augmentation). The new Joanna is seen once more at the end of the film, leisurely wheeling her cart down the supermarket aisles, attired in the same neo-Victorian hostess gown worn by nearly all the townswomen.
If such a thing as a canon exists for the horror genre, The Stepford Wives surely deserves to be placed alongside other more august standards such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, as it does two very important things. First, it addresses the issues of its day. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein addressed the implications of the blind pursuit of knowledge at the expense of the human race. Bram Stoker's Dracula dealt with Victorian xenophobia in the face of increasing Eastern European immigration on the eve of the 20th century. The Stepford Wives likewise deals with the very real fears of women (educated, middle class ones, anyway), that living the lives of their mothers necessarily means losing their identities. It's not important, finally, whether or not the women of Stepford are being replaced with more compliant, gravity-resisting robotic doubles, or if this is just a paranoid fantasy on the part of Joanna. What is important is that this is what it feels like to be an American woman in 1972.
The women of Stepford suffer from "the problem with no name," as identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, which described how the gender identity foisted upon American women by "The Experts" causes everything from clinical depression to suicidal tendencies. To remain inside the home most of the day in a suburban environment without an extended network of friends and family, the typical situation of most m iddle class women from the 1950s through the 1980s, is in itself enough to make any woman angry, resentful, depressed, and questioning of her own judgment. But in 1972, instead of believing that these feelings are caused by one's own personal failure to embrace one's natural gender role, American women were becoming more educated and were soon to realize that the problem lies with assumptions about sex that are based upon anything but a natural order of things.
The Stepford Wives also describes the feelings of many men when they are confronted by women who are no longer content with being docile helpmates. Unlike their mothers in the 1950s, American women in the 1970s were a great deal more independent. Griswold v. the State of Connecticut (1962) and Roe v. Wade made it easier for them to control their own fertility, and Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then the formation of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission gave them equal access to education and employment. Thus many of the factors that kept their mothers economic slaves weren't barriers for them. They could pick up and leave an unsatisfactory marriage, thanks to liberalized divorce laws, and they had an easier time of supporting themselves. If these men are no longer the undisputed kings of their castles, then either they will have to change their ways of thinking about men and women, or they will have to resort to other means to preserve the status quo.
The second important thing The Stepford Wives does as a work of horror is it makes an original contribution to the genre, a contribution that continues to be relevant today. While the idea of someone being convincingly replaced by an android is quite farfetched, our culture's emphasis on youth and beauty is turning many women, and lately men, into a type of Stepford Human. Many women, exhausted by having it all, both career and family, where they are too often the main person responsible for housekeeping and childcare, opt to quit their careers (often to their own financial peril) to concentrate on their families. And men as well as women are refusing to go gently into that good night and are resorting to plastic surgery in an attempt to remain youthful for as long as possible.
Perhaps it's an accident of history, but The Stepford Wives manages to bridge the gulf of 30 years for its 21st century readers. Whenever I've shared this novel (or the film) with my students, they are both fascinated by the ancient world (at least to them) of their mothers that Levin represents and intrigued by how the characters are so very similar to some of their contemporaries. Perhaps it is this timelessness that has resulted in Levin's novel having sired two movie versions (a remake is in production as I write), as well as the idea of the "stepford wife" having achieved icongraphic status.