In The Stepford Wives (1975), Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) and her family move from bustling New York to the sleepy Stepford Village in Connecticut. Joanna misses the hubbub of the city and wants to explore her interest in photography more fully. She finds that Stepford is a strange place, however. Specifically, all the women there are interested only in serving and obeying their husbands and keeping immaculate homes.
Joanna tries to set up a women’s lib group in town with her new friend, Bobby (Prentiss), but they find that there is no interest and no support. Meanwhile, Joanna’s husband, Walter (Masterson) has joined the town’s secretive Men’s Association, and the organization takes an unusual interest in her. Soon, Bobby mysteriously begins to act like all the other “Stepford wives,” and Joanna comes to realize that her turn is fast approaching.
She sneaks into the Men’s Association to learn the town secret, and makes a terrifying discovery…
Husbands would rather be married to fuckable, compliant robot maids than real flesh-and-bod, independent-mind women.That’s the inescapable conclusion in The Stepford Wives, the fifty-year-old sci-fi/horror/comedy film based on the novel by Ira Levin of the same name. The movie is a scalding indictment of (some) men, and one that notes their inadequacies as fathers, husbands, and lovers at the same time it acknowledges that, in American society, they nonetheless possess all the levers of power. One can rage against them, but in the end, the Men’s Association -- a loosely renamed Boys Club -- always wins.
The description above may make The Stepford Wives sound shrill and serious, but the movie’s genius is that it is anything but shrill, and there are many funny moments. In fact, The Stepford Wives goes out of its way to establish how reasonable Joanna is, and how the things she wishes for herself are the very things that every man also wishes for himself: a chance to pursue happiness. The film uses humor to makes men look small and moronic for denying others the very things that they enjoy for themselves.
In Joanna’s case, she is fascinated by photography. That’s the thing that she feels make her a special and distinct individual. She wants to be remembered as an artist. But her husband Walter doesn’t want Joanna to pursue photography, preferring a clean house to a spouse who brings something intellectual or artistic to the table. “When are things going to sparkle around here?” he asks her pointedly, referring to the perfect, clean houses of Stepford. He’s quite clear in this. Her value as a wife is in keeping his home spotless.
The funny thing about this is that Walter has no apparent desire to see Joanna get paid for her toils at home, and this element of the debate about sex roles was actually a crucial issue of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when married women had precious little financial independence. They had to be married for twenty years, for example, to receive their husband’s Social Security benefits upon his death. And, since they worked entirely at home, they had no such benefits in their own name. Representative Bella Abzug fought this battle vociferously, and in 1974 delivered a speech about the fact that married women were working approximately 99 hours a week, but not being paid a red cent, and not receiving anything in terms of retirement security. In the famous delivery, she declared:
“If America’s housewives ever placed an embargo on dispensing their free labor, the pilot lights on gas ranges would go out all over the land, the washing machines and vacuum cleaners would fall silent, husbands would not be driven to suburban trains, children would not be fetched…and the nation would discover a whole new definition of crisis.” (Congressional Record: 120 Cong. Rec., 1759-61).
Once more, the point here concerns the levers of power, and the fact that men hold all the power in this society. There’s a beautiful speech by Joanna in The Stepford Wives that perfectly explains what she has to lose if replaced by a machine, a more perfect doppelgänger.
She imagines her counterpart and states. “She’ll cook and clean, but she won’t take pictures, and she won’t be me. She’ll be like one of those robots in Disneyland.”
There’s the crux of it: the replacement Joanna will love to serve (and possess larger breasts too…) but the spark of life, of individuality would be missing. What does it say about the men of Stepford that they prefer mindless, perpetual service to the spark of life? To the companionship of real women?
One funny aspect of The Stepford Wives is the high level of denial the movie exposes on the part of the Stepford men. They program their wives to mindlessly and relentlessly appreciate their lovemaking, and the audience hears one wife moaning during sexual intercourse that “nobody ever touched me the way you touch me. You’re the best. You’re the champion. You’re the master.” The man on the receiving end of that excessive compliment would have to know, of course, that his machine-wife was programmed to express that level of satisfaction and enthusiasm, and therefore that the sentiment was not genuine or authentic, let alone earned. And yet he still wants to hear it, and he still wants to believe it.
If you think about that kind of self-deluded behavior and couple it with the selfishness the film exposes in the Men's Association, including the guy who paves over his wife’s tennis court, it’s not a pretty picture.
The satire and social commentary here really works because it makes another trenchant point too. The problem with men reaches beyond the borders of Stepford. The town doesn’t contain it. Accordingly, one of the most fascinating scenes in The Stepford Wives sees Joanna reconnecting with the man she almost married, humorously named Raymond Chandler, as if to put a fine point on her “romantic” vision of a man not her husband. But very soon, Joanna realizes that Raymond is just a bad a choice for her as Walter is and that he would have been no more appreciative or responsive a mate.
This scene is also illustrative for another reason. Joanna confesses that she married Walter because, she dreamed, he was going to “become Perry Mason.” She married him because she believed she could mold him into a vision or male fantasy that she personally found appealing. And of course, that’s what Walter is literally doing with her in Stepford, crafting a replacement that is more his dream Joanna than the real one is.
Male or female, the desire for a “perfect” mate is shared, apparently. However, fifty years on, it’s clear that The Stepford Wives understood just how monstrous the Boy’s Club could be, and would be, if granted power. Half-a-century after the film's release there are so many people, still in power, who believe a woman's only place is at home, serving her spouse.
It's a bit depressing that this well-made film, this social critique, remains so relevant in 2025.
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