The Stepford Wives, Feminism, and the Pygmalion Myth

Introduction

In 1960, the world of women — especially American women — was limited in a great many respects, from the workplace to family life. American women who were employed in 1960 were largely restricted to jobs such as nursing, teaching, or secretarial work. Women were, in general, not welcome in professional fields. Betty Friedan's landmark work, The Feminine Mystique, captured and detailed the lives of a considerable number of housewives from across the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s who felt trapped in their marriages (The Feminine Mystique, 1963: I).

Friedan's work had such a profound impact that it re-ignited the American feminist movement. Ira Levin's novella The Stepford Wives is essentially a social satire — slightly horrifying, slightly unsettling — written and published during the "second wave" of feminism in the United States (Wulandari). The novel takes the reader through the life of Joanna, a white, upper-middle-class New York City housewife and liberated young woman. She reluctantly moves with her lawyer husband and their two daughters to the affluent suburb of Stepford. While there, she wrestles with conflicts over her roles as a mother, wife, and freelance photographer. Joanna grows increasingly wary and alarmed by the fanaticism of the majority of the Stepford wives, who attend to every household chore and yield to their husbands' every whim and demand. Through The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin offers a vivid picture of what women truly needed during the second wave of feminism. In the novel, the Stepford husbands neither grant nor permit their wives' liberation and empowerment. Men ridicule women who try to liberate themselves and break free from the constraints of patriarchal power (Wulandari).

Literature Review: The Stepford Wives Plot and Context

The Stepford Wives is a novella that describes the effects and conditions of the second wave of the American feminist movement during the 1960s through the 1970s. The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira Levin takes the reader through the life of a young, upper-middle-class woman named Joanna Eberhart, who moves together with her young family to Stepford, Connecticut. Even though Joanna is a housewife, she enjoys freelance photography as a passion and hobby, and seeks to turn it into a paying career. When she arrives in the new neighborhood, she meets and converses with a representative from the Welcome Wagon, specifically hoping the woman will help her draft an article for the local paper and organize a meeting with other open-minded, liberated women (Wulandari).

While in Stepford, Joanna's husband — a lawyer named Walter — joins the local Men's Association. Joanna manages to address the association when Walter hosts its committee at their home. She conveys her idea of organizing Parent and Teacher forums at a local school auditorium to the association's president, Dale "Diz" Coba, and other influential members such as Frank Roddenberry, Herb Sundersen, and Claude Anselm. She explains how such forums would help the Stepford community discuss issues affecting their welfare. Unfortunately, when the forums take place, they are attended by very few people — about a dozen men and nine women. Joanna then enlists two of her closest friends, Charmaine Wimperis and Bobbie Markowe, in her idea to start a local Women's Association. The association's aim is to discuss women's roles and responsibilities within the household and the desire of local women to define their own paths in life, particularly career-wise. The group is nearly a complete failure. Matters worsen further when Charmaine and Bobbie return from holiday trips with their husbands having been transformed into perfectly submissive wives.

Joanna then perceives a pattern: things in Stepford began to change shortly after Betty Friedan came to speak with the local Women's Club about six years earlier, following the publication of The Feminine Mystique (Levin, 1972: 39). After a short while, she learns the full truth when she seeks counsel from a former boyfriend who is a chemist. She eventually discovers that the local Men's Association is behind the plot to change the women. The men, aided by the association's chairman — a bachelor named Dale "Diz" Coba, who formerly worked at Disneyland as a figurine creator — are killing their wives and replacing them with nearly indistinguishable robots (Wulandari).

The marriage between Joanna and Walter deteriorates when they argue about their two missing daughters. Seeking her daughters, Joanna considers that her friend Bobbie might be caring for the children. Acting on instinct, Joanna stabs Bobbie with a knife to prove she is human; she grows even more alarmed when Bobbie neither bleeds nor writhes in pain. Instead, Bobbie begins an odd mechanical routine, leading Joanna to conclude that she has also been turned into a robot. Joanna assumes she will be the next victim. Nevertheless, she casts aside her fear and sneaks into the Men's Association mansion to find her children. Inside, she encounters Dale "Diz" Coba, the mastermind of the entire operation. The final chapter narrates Joanna's desperate attempt to rescue her children and escape. She fails, is captured, killed, and replaced by a robot — like all the other women before her. The novel ends with a conversation between Ruthanne and Joanna at the supermarket, in which Joanna is depicted as looking immaculate and behaving perfectly (Wulandari).

Best Wives Are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s

In The Stepford Wives (USA, 1975) film, based on Ira Levin's 1972 novel, cyborg and android themes intersect with feminist ideas on gender, power, and technology. The main protagonist, Joanna Eberhart, played by Katharine Ross, moves from Manhattan, New York, to Stepford, Connecticut, with her husband Walter (a lawyer), played by Peter Masterson, their two daughters, and a family dog. There is something deeply wrong in Stepford, and Joanna senses it immediately: all the women seem like perfect feminine homemakers while their husbands and the other men gather every night at the local Men's Association — when not at work at the town's biotech and computer corporations. Walter remarks that all the important people in Stepford are members of the association, including the police and fire chiefs, the television executives, the psychologists, the head of the hospital, and the head of the telephone company. The Men's Association is headed by a president named Dale Coba, played in the film by Patrick O'Neal, nicknamed "Diz" — a reference to Disney, his former employer (Paasonen).

In the film adaptation, the robot wives are portrayed in Victorian-era dress and hairstyles, complete with vacant gestures, realistic appearances, and submissive displays of conventional femininity, along with an unusual obsession with appearances and cleaning. These women, though picture-perfect, are consumerist and emotionally void. The thriller element of the film rests on the fact that the wives look entirely realistic and human yet are not. Their husbands have murdered them and replaced them with robots that are more "convenient." The robot wives are monstrosities — unnatural constructions striving to emulate human beings — yet their husbands are equally boundary figures who are emotionally void and therefore "not quite human," given that emotions, interiority, and empathy are conventionally considered the markers of one's humanity, in contrast to machines that lack them (Turkle; Williams).

The image of "wife-as-robot-servant" in this film closely parallels the concerns raised by Betty Friedan in her influential 1963 work, The Feminine Mystique, in which she investigates the frustrations of middle-class American homemakers ("the problem that has no name"). According to Friedan, in the period after the Second World War, the "feminine mystique" — a set of beliefs holding that true feminine fulfillment was to be found only in motherhood, domestic chores, and above all marriage — was perpetuated by popular psychology, media (particularly women's magazines), educational systems, and expert literature (Paasonen). Friedan's observations are vividly illustrated by a 1960 Ladies' Home Journal article, which describes a woman sitting on a pale aqua sofa, gazing out at the street. Despite it being very early in the morning, she is wearing powder, lipstick, and rouge, and proudly announces that by 8:30 a.m., when her youngest child has left for school, her entire house will already be neat and clean and she will be dressed for the day (Friedan, p. 63).

This depiction is almost identical to Ira Levin's portrayal of "the new Bobbie." In the novel, Bobbie is found in an immaculate living room: the cushions are fluffed, the woodwork gleams, and the magazines are fanned out on the polished table behind the sofa. Joanna notices the way Bobbie looks — beautiful, face made up, hair done (Levin, p. 129).

This image of smiling, empty passivity (Friedan, 1983, p. 64) is of a woman who dedicates her life entirely to her husband, home, and children, and is consumed by her feminine appearance. She is the ideal subject of women's magazines that define women through their exclusively domestic interests: romance, clothes, home furnishing, and early and lasting marriage. Domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning became not merely the occupation of a housewife but also a kind of religion, perceived as the fulfillment of women's inner drives and natural roles, as defined by their biological capacity for reproduction, Friedan noted. Another crucial element of the feminine mystique is consumerism: the perfect housewife is a passionate consumer who endlessly purchases household goods and derives satisfaction from doing so (Friedan, pp. 206–208; Bowlby, pp. 199–200).

In The Stepford Wives, women shop neatly and systematically, discussing and consuming goods with great enthusiasm and satisfaction. Mary Anne Doane, in her article on representations of the feminine and technology, argues that The Stepford Wives suggests feminism is relevant only within a science-fiction nightmare in which husbands kill and transform their wives into robots, and she regards its portrayal of the machine-woman as banal. For Doane, films that truly transcend the ordinary and treat the machine-woman theme in unique and interesting ways are those that concentrate on technology and the maternal. However, Doane's reading is not entirely convincing, since the depictions of the maternal in The Stepford Wives can also be read as cynical, evasive, or both: the majority of women turned into robots are mothers, yet the reactions of their children to these transformations are treated as a non-issue. The implication is that the mother is essentially fundamental to both her children's and her husband's existence — an idea that echoes remarks made by one of Friedan's interviewees (p. 74), whose mother had no family role except cleaning the house. Moreover, children in the film are not portrayed as agents of any kind; they are merely shown riding the school bus, running on the lawn, or being groomed by their mothers. Children are afforded no more humanity than the women in the film. Ira Levin's work suggests that children actually appreciate their mothers' transformed domestic-robot versions: Bobbie's son Jonny tells Joanna with satisfaction that his mother no longer shouts, that she prepares hot breakfasts, and that he hopes it will last (Levin, pp. 141–142).

The film can be understood as a portrayal of an experimental upper-middle-class community where both the "feminine mystique" and feminist understandings of gendered power and labor relations coexist within the family. The "feminine mystique" as applied by the Men's Association casts women as passive, obedient servants whose love for homemaking defines their existence. Because the wives are unwilling to comply with these ideals, the association resolves to solve the problem through high technology. The Stepford Wives presents men as the decision-makers and the (robot) wives as existing simply to comply. As Friedan's study shows, the kitchen is the core of these women's lives; they do not leave their homes except for duties such as shopping, chauffeuring their children, or attending social engagements with their husbands (Friedan, p. 17). The machine-wives can readily be seen as embodiments of Friedan's feminine mystique, because as machines they do not experience the boredom, emptiness, or lack of challenge in their lives; they do not complain of lacking personality, of not feeling alive, or of feeling incomplete; they do not compensate through sleeping pills, tranquilizers, overeating, or excessive drinking; nor do they develop psychotic conditions, unlike the real housewives interviewed by Friedan (pp. 20–22, 234–235, 251–252; also discussed in Bowlby, 2000, pp. 200–202). When the president of the Men's Association remarks to Joanna that the solution they found is simply perfect, this may be interpreted not merely as a science-fiction nightmare but also as an ironic cinematic resolution to "the problem that has no name" (Paasonen).

The novel and film are both somewhat superficial in the ways they address the gender question. Despite everything it proposes, as Rachel Bowlby (2000, p. 201) notes, The Stepford Wives offers very little motivation for the male desire to kill and transform their wives, inferring that men are naturally misogynist and anti-feminist. In The Stepford Wives, the women who conform to the feminine stereotype are man-made; however, the men who act out of equivalent male stereotypes are real. Nevertheless, unlike Doane, the present analysis is not prepared to categorize this work as banal. Portraying ideal housewives as non-human and the portraying their patronizing husbands as monstrous in their lack of affect and their readiness to turn their wives into servant-robots carries real satirical force. The Stepford Wives takes the gendered division of labor to extremes and produces an alienating effect. In both the novel and the film, Joanna is the protagonist and the story is narrated from her point of view; it is her reactions that viewers and readers witness. The inner life or motivations of her husband are never revealed, and therefore he remains a dangerous alien to her, denying their nuclear family any sense of normalcy and transforming it into a site of labor, abuse, and compulsive repetition.

In contrast to the film, Levin's novel uses The Feminine Mystique as a direct intertext: both Joanna and Bobbie are members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), an organization in which Friedan served as a long-time president. According to a local newspaper article referenced in the novel, at least fifty women applauded Mrs. Friedan as she discussed the frustrations and inequities facing the contemporary housewife (Levin, pp. 37, 62–63, 90). Beyond references to Friedan, the novel is, as Rachel Bowlby (2000, p. 199) observes, filled with references to other prominent feminists such as Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gloria Steinem. However, it is Friedan's model of feminism that the novel most directly supports, portraying the main protagonists as combining creative careers with motherhood and being "naturally feminist" until they are replaced by machines that embody the feminine mystique. Moreover, as Bowlby notes, many of Friedan's themes — such as the critique of psychoanalysis, the women's movement, and the mutation of sex into a perverted "pseudo-sex" depicted in the novel through rubber fetishes and masturbation — reappear repeatedly in the novel, most often in hyperbolic form (Bowlby, pp. 199–200).

The Stepford wives function as both household machines and domestic servants. The term "robot" is used as a generic representative of the service class, deriving from a Slavic word ("rabotnik") meaning worker or forced laborer (Halberstam, p. 468). As Alexandra Chasin (1995) observed, the classed, raced, and gendered category of servants occupies the boundary between humans and objects, between "us" and "them." The instrumental social position of servants, like the undervalued domain of domestic work itself, has historically generated comparisons between slaves, servants, robots, and non-humans. Chasin (pp. 81–83) correlates this crossing and redrawing of boundaries with a broader cultural tendency to portray technology as anthropomorphic, while human labor is increasingly defined in mechanical terms — despite the fact that in both cases the relevant human categories are clearly gendered and classed. As Chasin further notes, the central issue is not the difference between humans and non-humans, given that women's inclusion in the former category has never been guaranteed, but rather the way in which social life's dependence on a service being goes unquestioned (Chasin, pp. 84–85).

When addressing the feminine housewife mystique, Friedan repeatedly crossed the blurred boundary between women and objects. She compared nineteenth-century perceptions of women as animal-like and irrational to 1950s housewife literature, and refuted them, arguing instead that women are human beings and not animals or stuffed dolls (Friedan, p. 67). Friedan's core argument for gender equality was grounded in women's humanity; and yet women have become the human sex most frequently excluded from that category, or accused of not being fully human — of being more akin to the material world of possessions, objects, and nature (Butler, pp. 81–82). However, Friedan's case for recognizing women's humanity does not account for the workings of class, sexuality, or race, leaving the category of "women" to represent only white, heterosexual, middle-class women. Rachel Bowlby (p. 202) similarly argues that in The Stepford Wives, only middle-class housewives are turned into robot-servants — implying that working women and domestic servants face no such risk — while simultaneously drawing attention to Ruth, an African American woman who faces a fate identical to that of Bobbie and Joanna (Paasonen).

Beyond functioning as perfect domestic workers, the machine-wives — like the ideal wives in Friedan's work — are also ever-ready and willing sexual slaves to their "masters." The portrayal of machine-wives as perfect love dolls is a recurring theme in literary and cinematic fiction, suggesting both the desirability of man-made technological objects and the mechanistic nature of desirable sexual acts and femininity. In The Stepford Wives, the body of the machine-wife is effectively the property of the husband, modeled to satisfy and please him in a manner similar to the futuristic sex-model robots in Futureworld (1976) and Westworld (1973) — films featuring theme parks where sex with female and male robots is a principal attraction. As one visitor to these parks puts it in Futureworld: once one gets a robot woman, one will not want anything else. Similar to Hadaly, the perfect mechanical female in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1880 novel, these robot wives are defined as superior to the originals — the perfect heterosexual love object, the embodiment of La Femme. In such fictions, desirable femininity is conceived as a computer-programmable set of gestures, responses, and sounds produced for male pleasure, implying that the ultimately satisfying woman is a robot love-object and that ideal wives can be engineered (Paasonen).

As Anna Krugovoy Silver and Elyce Rae Helford have shown, the original versions of The Stepford Wives were shaped by ideas arising from the second wave of feminism. In the same way that Levin's narrative employs feminist arguments about the domination of women in modern American patriarchy, it also satirizes the resulting male backlash against feminism — displaying masculine nostalgia for an era in which men were men and women became what men decreed them to be (Williams). Interestingly, the film drew hostility from two prominent viewers who might have been expected to be more sympathetic: film critic Pauline Kael and Betty Friedan herself. Friedan's 1963 book had attempted to illuminate the suffering of middle-class women living almost entirely within the domestic sphere, yet she walked out of a screening organized by a group of feminist writers. She was quoted as saying that she thought everyone should leave the screening and that they should not help publicize the film, calling it a rip-off of the women's feminist movement (Silver, p. 111).

The "living robots" of the original Stepford Wives were therefore products of their time, their gothic narrative rooted in long-standing assumptions about female inferiority and difference. Between 1975 and 2004, however, the liberal feminism proposed by Friedan had been challenged by many for failing to acknowledge that the subjection of women was typically a white, middle-class experience (Williams). By the 1990s, the term "post-feminism" had begun to appear in print. In the mainstream media, it was often used as a shorthand dismissal — implying that society had moved beyond feminism either because all its objectives had been achieved and it was no longer necessary, or because women had come to realize that the feminist promise of "having it all" was a delusion that left many of its true believers miserable. Feminist scholars, however, use the term "post-feminism" differently — to indicate that feminist analysis had moved beyond binary structures such as female/male or whore/virgin, the binary options in which liberal feminism, like the Gothic tradition, is rooted (Williams).

Frank Oz's 2004 film version of The Stepford Wives moves toward an understanding informed by thirty years of feminist development: that women have been culturally programmed into passive domestic roles, and that the female/male binary simultaneously programs men to perform the opposite role. The Stepford husbands have been culturally conditioned to expect certain behaviors from their wives and to wield cultural power to enforce those expectations. Walter's refusal to participate in Joanna's second transformation is, however, intended to suggest that both genders may ultimately escape the confinements of gender altogether (Williams).