The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism

ANNA KRUGOVOY SILVER The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism Ryan forbes's IQ75 suburban Gothic film The Stepford ' Wives has been almost uniformly neglected in film criticism of the last two decades.1 Recent genre studies of horror and science fiction ignore the film, as have collections of feminist film criticism. Although The Stepford Wives is in part a science fiction rewrite of Betty Friedan's pioneering 1963 liberal feminist polemic The Feminine Mystique, Friedan lambasted it as "a rip-off of the women's movement," a surprising indictment considering the film's obvious debt to het work (Klemesrud 28).2 The themes of The Stepford Wives dovetail so closely with those of second wave feminism that the film can be viewed as a popularization of some of the most persistent concerns of the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.3 The film's examination of the plight of the dissatisfied middle-class housewife, its parody of the fetishization of housework, its explicit critique of the nuclear family, and its relentless focus on the constructedness and artificiality offemale beauty are key issues to which second wave feminists—particularly radical feminists —drew public attention. The Stepford Wives, I argue, is a feminist allegory that stems from the ideological and political concerns of feminists as diverse as Friedan, Pat Mainatdi, the Redstockings, and The Feminists. The film's popularity thus attests to the diffusion of feminist theory from smaller, loosely connected consciousness raising and activist groups to mainstream American culture as a whole. By translating essential ideas found in such radical feminist documents as the "Florida Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 1, Spring 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 1 1o Anna Krugovoy Silver Paper" into film, The Stepford Wives indicates that by 1975, these ideas had, through widespread media coverage, become common currency; the film thus suggests not the failure and perversion of feminist rhetoric , as Friedan implies, but its success and popular appeal.4 This essay will briefly examine the film's reception, and then read it as an important cultural document of second wave feminism that addresses three main issues drawn from the women's movement: a woman's domestic labot, a woman's role in the nuclear family, and a woman's control over her body. Critics of The Stepford Wives either derided it, on the one hand, as anti-male or, on the other hand, as a misrepresentation of feminist goals and cultural critiques. Richard Schickel, of Time magazine, chastises the film because it "never shows a single man whose feminine ideal exceeds gatefold dimensions. That too is a form of dehumanization" (4), while P. Zinnerman's Newsweek review calls The Stepford Wives "a shallowly satiric suburban joke that says some ugly and unsupported things about what kind of women men really want" (70). Such critiques are almost identical to the critiques of 1970s feminist consciousness novels and are thus unsurprising.5 Others found the film's feminist message muddled, simplistic, or downright offensive. Paula Kael's angry New Yorker essay concludes that the film's aggressively pro-woman stance places too much blame on men and not enough on women. "If women turn into replicas of the women in commercials, they do it to themselves ," she claims. "Even if the whole pop culture weighs on them— pushing them in that direction—if they go that way, they're the ones letting it happen" (112). Though she clearly simplifies the power of cultural gender norms, ignoring the ways that women internalize gender expectations, Kael does not reject the notion of a feminist film outright ; however, in the tradition of liberal feminism, she believes that The Stepford Wives is too critical of men and presents "educated American women" only as victims rather than as actors (113). Herbert Gans, writing in Social Policy, sets forth a similar liberal feminist critique: "the film sees the movement as setting women against men, thus ignoring the many feminists who have argued that women's liberation cannot be achieved without larger social change that also libetates men" (59-60). Gans, who conflates men's and women's needs for liberation...