The Disturbingly Prophetic Message of ‘The Stepford Wives’

Since The Stepford Wives was first shown on movie screens 50 years ago, its title has become shorthand for women in thrall to a throwback domesticized femininity. The film’s warning about retrograde gender roles, though, is framed in a plot which expresses anxieties about a future of dehumanization and automation. 

The movie continues to resonate because it looks backwards and forwards at once, showing how—for women, especially—the future can spiral in an ever-tightening, ever-worsening circle of oppression. Which is why, in an era of techbro wealth, abortion rights rollback, and AI, The Stepford Wives feels even more prescient than it did when it came out in 1975.

The (Robot) Kitchen Closes In

Directed by Bryan Forbes and based on Ira Levin’s 1972 switchblade puzzle-box of a novel, The Stepford Wives begins as budding photographer Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), her lawyer husband Walter (Peter Masterton), and their kids move out of Manhattan to a sprawling house in the suburbs of Stepford. 

Walter fits in quickly, hanging out at the local men’s club and enjoying the space. Joanna, on the other hand, is put off by the men’s club, and especially by her women neighbors, who all seem obsessed with their husbands, demure sex, and cleaning their homes, not necessarily in that order.

Eventually (no point in spoiler warnings after five decades), Joanna figures out that the men are murdering their wives and replacing them with sexier, docile robots. The final scene of the movie is a quiet sequence in the Stepford grocery store: The camera follows the perfectly coiffed, quietly efficient women from aisle to aisle as they greet each other with bland small talk about kids and home. Finally, we see Joanna herself, pushing her cart just like everyone else, skin smooth, breasts forward, eyes blank. As she predicted in a too late conversation with a sympathetic therapist, “There’ll be somebody with my name, and she’ll cook and clean like crazy. But she won’t take pictures, and she won’t be me!”

Before she is assimilated, Joanna and her ally Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) attempt to organize a (futile) feminist consciousness-raising session for the wives of Stepford. As she grows more frustrated, Joanna fumes that the gender roles in the suburb are “archaic.” Her point is clear enough: The other women have no careers and no apparent interest in careers. They cook, clean and obey in a parody of traditional femininity.

But this traditional femininity also has an oddly futurist cast. When Joanna is trying to explain the vacuous unpersonhood of the women in Stepford, she compares them to the “robots in Disneyland.” Part of the pleasure, and/or horror of the film, especially on the second time through, is the way that Forbes provides half-subliminal clues about the men’s assembly line subjugation/robotification process. Ike (William Prince), a famous illustrator, sketches idealized portraits of each woman to serve as a reference for the artificial replacement. Claude (George Coe), asks the women to help him with a lifelong project studying speech accents; he has them record word lists so they can re-create the women’s speech patterns. The men even steal family dogs to acclimatize them to the “new” wife. It’s all chillingly calculated, chillingly efficient—chillingly modern.  

The man who embodies this modern archaism is wealthy engineer “Diz” (Patrick O’Neal). Diz used to work at Disney World creating animatronics. He’s well-dressed, commanding, and he sports an unpleasant and seemingly permanent leer.  “I like to watch women doing little domestic chores,” he tells Joanna creepily while watching her make something in the kitchen. His technical skill, his fetish for control, and his dream of turning back the clock for women are not in conflict. They complement each other.

Techbros and (Anti-) Progress

For viewers today, it’s hard not to think “Elon Musk” or “Mark Zuckerberg” as soon as Diz shows up on screen. Though Zuckerberg denies it, there’s good reason to believe that he initially created Facebook in part as a way to rank the looks of girls at Harvard. (“I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive,” he wrote in one early blog post.) Musk allegedly exposed himself to and then propositioned a SpaceX flight attendant. He’s been accused of inappropriate relationships with women at his companies as well.

The Stepford Wives does more than just predict the era of a misogynist male-dominated techbro establishment, though. It also shows how technology can be, and often is, used not to create social advancement, but to turn the clock back. New inventions, new ideas, new ideologies, can push you back into the same kitchen—or even into a worse one.

Since the introduction of robots in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., androids have consistently been used as a metaphor for oppressed workers—and as a more or less anxious dream of how technological advances might erode rather than improve the position of labor. In The Stepford Wives, robotics robs women of their agency and interests and of their ability to make money for themselves; they become domestic unpaid cleaning drones and nothing else. Similarly, contemporary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says that the goal of AI development is to “crash” human wages, allowing companies to treat workers essentially as slaves. The future—for Andreessen as for Diz—is one in which the creation of android intelligence leads directly to a utopia for (male) bosses, who can exploit their wives/workers with ever more total, ever more ruthless efficiency.

The Stepford Wives is, then, in large part a parable about how the dreams of the powerful can become a physical and ideological technology for reinforcing or re-inscribing the status quo. It’s not just a story about patriarchy. It’s a story about patriarchal backlash.

The movie makes this point very clear in a scene about Stepford’s past. An older (single) resident of Stepford tells Joanna and Bobbie that Stepford used to be a very liberal suburb. In particular, it used to have a large, active women’s club which brought in feminist speakers. The club’s president was Carol (Nanette Newman)—a woman whose only interest now seems to be making casseroles and discussing cleaning products. 

A Conspiracy of Patriarchy

The backlash in The Stepford Wives isn’t some sort of natural social correction. It’s a plan, formulated by certain people (like Diz) and then picked up by others (like Ike or Claude) who add their skills, their genius, and their enthusiasm to the project of subjugation. 

Joanna’s own husband, Walter, needs to join the plot if Joanna is to be murdered and replaced. There’s a scene in which (we later realize) he’s just had the plot explained to him, and he is shaken and upset. Joanna asks him again and again what’s wrong as he sits drinking before the fire, looking at her with a kind of terror, which is not fear of her, but fear of what he is thinking of doing to her. He is guilty, he is unsure. 

But ultimately, and without much fuss, he decides to exchange the wife he loves for a machine that won’t argue with him and will clean the kitchen more thoroughly. And exchanging the wife he loves in this context means, again, murdering her.

The Stepford Wives is a vivid depiction of gaslighting and women’s subjugation; it’s a vivid depiction of tech dystopia. But it’s perhaps most powerful because it presents gender relationships, tech, and time as interrelated phenomena which are shaped not by the inevitable progress of history, but by specific human choices. We can use new knowledge to provide safe abortion pills—or we can use it to monitor women and prevent them from accessing reproductive services. We can use ever more accessible and prevalent communications systems to share stories of women’s oppression and resistance—or we can use them to blare out tradwife influencer content 24/7.

At the end of the film, as Diz calmly prepares to order her robot double with perky breasts to strangle her, Joanna asks the techbro sadist, “Why?” He replies, “Because we can.” But that’s a lie. There’s no one thing we can do with tech or with human capacity. No one makes Diz kill women; he does it because he wants to, and because he has been able to find a bunch of other men who want to do the same thing. Whatever tools and electronics we have lying around, we can use them to make a future of equality and freedom for everyone, or we can use them to make a future of slavery and death. For better and worse, those choices are the same now as when Joanna first traveled to Stepford. And they’re the same now as when, against her will, she was bloodily removed from it.