The Stepford Wives

Plot

The premise involves the married men of the fictional town of Stepford, Connecticut and their fawning, submissive, impossibly beautiful wives. The protagonist is Joanna Eberhart, a talented photographer newly arrived from New York City with her husband and children, eager to start a new life. As time goes on, she becomes increasingly disturbed by the zombie-like, submissive wives of Stepford, especially when she sees her once independent-minded friends, fellow new arrivals to Stepford, turn into mindless, docile housewives overnight. Her husband, who seems to be spending more and more time at meetings of the local men's association, mocks her fears.

As the story progresses, Joanna becomes convinced that the wives of Stepford are being poisoned or brainwashed into submission by the men's club. She visits the library and researches the pasts of Stepford's wives, discovering that some of the women were once feminist activists and very successful professionals and that the leader of the men's club is a former Disney engineer and others are artists and scientists, capable of creating lifelike robots. Her friend Bobbie helps her investigate, going so far as to write to the EPA to inquire about possible environmental toxins in Stepford. However, eventually, Bobbie is also transformed into a docile housewife and has no interest in her previous activities.

At the end of the novel, Joanna decides to flee Stepford but when she gets home she finds that her children have been taken. She asks her husband to let her leave but he takes her car keys. She manages to escape from the house on foot and several of the men's club members track her down. They corner her in the woods, and she accuses them of creating robots out of the town's women. The men deny the accusation and ask Joanna if she would believe them if she saw one of the other women bleed. Joanna agrees to this, and they take her to Bobbie's house. Bobbie's husband and son are upstairs, with loud rock music playing as if to cover screams. The scene ends as Bobbie brandishes a knife at her former friend.

In the story's epilogue, Joanna has become another Stepford wife gliding through the local supermarket, having given up her career as a photographer, while Ruthanne (a new resident in Stepford) appears poised to become the conspiracy's next victim.

Adaptations

In 1975, the book was adapted into a science fiction thriller directed by Bryan Forbes with a screenplay by William Goldman and starring Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson and Tina Louise. While the script emphasis is on gender conflict and the sterility of suburban living, and thus the science fiction elements are only lightly explored, the movie still makes it much clearer than the book that the women are being replaced by some form of robot. Goldman's treatment of the book differed from that of Forbes, with the robots closer to an idealized Playboy Bunny; it has been claimed that the look was scrapped when Forbes' actress wife Nanette Newman was cast as one of the town residents.

A 1980 made-for-television sequel was titled Revenge of the Stepford Wives. In this film, instead of being androids, the wives underwent a brainwashing procedure and then took pills that keep them hypnotized. In the end the wives broke free of their conditioning and a mob of them killed the mastermind behind the conspiracy.

In a 1987 made-for-television sequel/remake called The Stepford Children, both the wives and the children of the male residents were replaced by drones. It ended with the members of the conspiracy being killed.

A 1996 version called The Stepford Husbands was made as a third television movie with the gender roles reversed and the men in the town being brainwashed by a female clinic director into being perfect husbands.

A largely panned remake of the original The Stepford Wives was released in 2004. It was directed by Frank Oz and featured Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken, Roger Bart, Faith Hill, Glenn Close and Jon Lovitz. It was intended to be more comedic than previous versions. The new script by screenwriter Paul Rudnick featured several other changes, most importantly the almost complete erasure of the powerful feminist message of the original film, culminating in a role reversal in which it is the powerful woman (played by Glenn Close) who is the evil mastermind of the injustice perpetrated on other women and featuring a Stepford-drone replacement for the male partner of a gay town resident.

Both versions were filmed in various towns in Fairfield County, Connecticut, including Redding, Westport, Darien, New Canaan, Wilton and Norwalk. The 1975 version had several locations in the Greenfield Hill section of Fairfield, including the Eberharts' house and the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church. Additional scenes from the 2004 movie were filmed in Bedminster, New Jersey, with extras from surrounding communities.

"Stepford wife"

The term "Stepford wife" entered common use in the English language after the publication of Levin's book and it is generally used as a term of satire which refers to a submissive and docile wife who seems to conform blindly to an old-fashioned subservient role in relationship to her husband, compared to other, presumably more independent women. It is sometimes used in reference to any woman, even an accomplished professional woman, who had subordinated her life and/or career to her husband's interests and who affected submission and devotion to him even in the face of the husband's public problems and disgrace.

It can also be used to criticise any person, male or female, who submits meekly to authority and/or abuse; or even to describe someone who lives in a robotic, conformist manner without giving offense to anyone.

It has been used by critics to describe Katie Holmes after her marriage to Tom Cruise.