Junkfood Activism: How Stepford Became Shorthand for a Certain Kind of Woman

Stepford

/ˈstɛpˌfəd/adjective (informal, derogatory)

1

blandly conformist and submissive: aStepford employeenoun

2

Stepford wife, a married woman whosubmits to her husband's will and ispreoccupied by domestic concernsand her own personal appearance.

The year was 1972. Nixon was president; Watergate was scandalizing; the Olympics were held in Sapporo, Japan, and Munich, Germany, where eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed. The Godfather and Clockwork Orange headlined theatre marquees, and the playlist—by then, the cool kids had abandoned 8-tracks for cassette tapes—glittered with ABBA and Ziggy Stardust. That year, The National Book Award skewed grotesque to Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Short Stories with E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel among the finalists. Children's literature welcomed Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator which I wouldn't love until years later.

In October of '72, the "New and Novel" column of The New York Times devoted exactly two paragraphs to American novelist and playwright Ira Levin, best known for jump-starting the horror genre with A Kiss Before Dying and Rosemary's Baby. Adjacent to a glowing ad for the Doctorow book, The Times called The Stepford Wives "a little ambush of Women's Lib, life and the pursuit of happiness," in a catch-all column for books deemed worthy of mention, but not a stand-alone. On other "Best Of" lists, Wives was nowhere to be seen. In the forty years following, however, Stepford entered the English lexicon, and spawned two major motion pictures plus three television sequels including Revenge of the Stepford Wives, The Stepford Children, and The Stepford Husbands.

A short novella by today's standards and a blip on the radar at its release, how did The Stepford Wives become an enduring cultural touchstone? The novel endures in our national consciousness not due to its artistic merit, but because it captures the zeitgeist, providing useful shorthand to a culture as much—some would say, more—in fear of corruption and subjugation today as it was in 1972, functioning exactly as Levin intended.

My tattered first edition copy cost me $2 at a library book sale. The yellowing jacket shows rows of disembodied wife heads, their bouffant hairdos tinged pastel. Protagonist Joanna Eberhart's floating head is smack in the middle, her expression the 1970s version of, wtf? Levin's black-and-white author photo peers menacingly from the back cover, his face half-hidden in shadow. The front flap copy is prescient.

It is one of those rare novels whose very title may well become part of our vocabulary. For, after reading it, you will never forget Stepford and the horror it contains; and there is a certain kind of woman who, from now on, will be known as a Stepford Wife.

The novel is a satirical thriller following photographer and feminist Joanna Eberhart as she moves with husband Walter and their two young children from New York City to idyllic Stepford, Connecticut (based on Wilton, Conn., where Levin lived in the 1960s). Joanna is increasingly disturbed by Stepford's zombie-Barbie-like housewives, as well as the influential Men's Association helmed by ex-Disney animatronics engineer—think: Hall of Presidents—"Diz" Coba. Fearing the women of Stepford are being poisoned or brainwashed, Joanna digs into the library's archives in hopes of solving the mystery. Turns out, the housewives were former professionals and activists leading the now defunct Stepford Women's Club and League of Women Voters. When even her independent friend Bobbie turns robot-June-Cleaver, Joanna has had enough. The quintessential Final Girl of the horror genre, she attempts escape.

The story ends with a butcher knife wielded by Bobbie, and Joanna's implied robo-wife conversion; afterward, she glides through the grocery store—Nicole Kidman is hair-raising in the second film adaptation—"looking terrific in a tightly belted pale blue coat." She insists, "Housework's enough for me. I used to feel I had...