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By Joshua Tyler
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Modern retellings of American culture would have you believe that in 1975, women were in the midst of a feminism-driven identity crisis. The claim from some is that the sexual revolution had cracked open the 1950s ideal of the suburban homemaker, and second-wave feminism, led by voices like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, was pushing women out of the kitchen and into the workforce.
That’s not really true. The hippy feminist movement was never a big part of most people’s lives and wasn’t embraced by most of the country in the early seventies.
The reality is that in 1972, Richard Nixon won re-election by one of the biggest landslides in American politics, promising conservative, traditional values. Before Watergate, he was the most popular president of the past 100 years, popular among men, women, and people of all ages.
Culturally, most popular television shows of the time were equally traditional. They still featured dedicated TV housewives and stay-at-home moms like Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch.
By the numbers, in 1975, 70% of married women with children were still stay-at-home Moms whose primary focus was on raising their children and running. No one thought this was weird; in fact, polling suggests that nearly everyone thought that this was a good thing.
By 1980, those numbers were inverting. The percentage of women working full time, which had been growing only very slowly since the hippy movements of the sixties, suddenly saw a skyrocket increase of 13%. That number kept accelerating in the decades that followed.
In between the election of Richard Nixon and the massive increase in women abandoning their lives as housewives was a failed science fiction movie. A science fiction movie that did what all the bra-burning flower power of the 1960s could not.
This is the true story of how The Stepford Wives screenwashed women into leaving their homes and joining the workforce.
screenwashed (adjective) — When something seen on a screen completely changes how someone thinks or feels, as if their old beliefs were erased and replaced by what they just saw.
Structuring Stepford Wives To Screenwash Minds
The Stepford Wives was adapted from a book written by Ira Levin. By 1972, Levin had already terrified readers with a film adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby, a story about a woman manipulated by those she trusts most.
Before Stepford, the image of the housewife was still aspirational. Homemaking wasn’t just accepted; it was respected. It symbolized success: a husband who could provide, a wife who could nurture, a family living the American dream.
But in 1975, The Stepford Wives twisted that dream into horror when Columbia Pictures turned Levin’s book into a movie. The Bryan Forbes-directed film took the visual language of suburbia, the spotless homes, polite neighbors, and perfect lawns, and treated it as a nightmare. William Goldman’s script did that not by arguing for a different point of view, but rather by simply saying rational and logical things with a sneer or a look of terror.
The Story Of Stepford
The movie’s heroine is Joanna, played by Katherine Ross. She’s recently moved to the suburbs in Stepford from New York and hates everything about it. She says “the noise” when asked what she misses most about New York. The only time she smiles is when she hears a police siren.
Joanna befriends a woman who recently moved to the area. The pair bond over their slovenly and lazy approach to housekeeping, as well as their mutual loathing of their hardworking husbands.
The two women are immediately suspicious of the other ladies in Stepford. These women keep their homes squeaky clean, and their children seem happy and well-adjusted. Joanna and her friend express disgust that these industrious women’s husbands haven’t hired housekeepers to do their housework for them.
Joanna’s suspicions mount when she catches a Stepford couple showing each other affection in a private moment. At first, she’s confused, having recently rebuffed the affections of her lawyer husband, to see another wife accepting physical touch from her spouse. Later, she uses it as proof that something is deeply wrong with her neighbors.
When the other women are asked why they spend so much time working to take care of their family, they respond with reasonable and logical arguments such as, “My husband works very hard, and I want to be a good partner so I work hard too.” Or, “it benefits my children for me to take care of them.”
These logical and reasonable arguments are said with a subtly creepy, robotic cadence that makes them feel disturbing and insane. To ensure that the point is hammered home, Joanna is always there to look flabbergasted and shocked as the wives of Stepford talk about how much they love their families.
Eventually, while mocking women for wearing bras and pumping up women for dumping all the kids on their husbands, it turns out that all the hardworking women of Stepford are robot replacements. That’s poorly handled in the movie, because the movie’s goal isn’t so much to tell a story as to shame women into abandoning their families by labeling housewives and mindless robots.
For anyone who saw the movie, to be a contented and dedicated housewife suddenly looked sinister, sick, and shameful.
The Stepford Wives Fails As A Movie, Succeeds As An Early Viral Sensation
The Stepford Wives’ heavy-handed message is delivered in such a hamfisted, overtly propagandistic way that the movie should have been a forgotten footnote. It might have been if people had actually seen it, but almost no one did.
The Stepford Wives was not a hit when it debuted in 1975. Despite a modest $2 million budget from Columbia Pictures, the film only earned around $4–5 million at the U.S. box office, barely breaking even after marketing and distribution.
It opened quietly, drew lukewarm reviews, and vanished within weeks as audiences gravitated toward flashier hits like Jaws and The Towering Inferno. Studio executives expected a provocative feminist thriller; instead, the film confused critics and alienated viewers who weren’t sure if it was satire or horror.
Yet while it failed as a commercial product, the idea behind it, the fear of women being turned into obedient, smiling machines, took on a life of its own. Its metaphor was viral before “viral” existed. The image of the smiling, empty, robotic homemaker was so potent it entered public consciousness through repetition, articles, jokes, parodies, and arguments, not ticket sales.
Its timing couldn’t have been more potent.
Newspapers, magazines, and talk shows picked up “Stepford Wife” almost immediately, using it as a headline metaphor. It was instant cultural shorthand: pithy, visual, and also a little cruel. By late 1975, Newsweek and The New York Times used it without explaining the film. People knew what it meant, and it was meant as an attack on women who prioritized family above personal goals.
The Stepford Wives Becomes The Ultimate Hypno-Weapon
For years, Magazines like Ms. had unsuccessfully tried to rewrite womanhood around autonomy and career ambition. In that moment, The Stepford Wives finally gave them the weapon they’d needed to make progress in their agenda, and that weapon was shame.
The movie’s title became a ready-made slur to lob at anyone who dissented from the anti-housewife view. Even those who’d never seen the movie knew what being called a Stepford Wife meant, and the term was used liberally to shame any woman who put effort into being a mother or wife.
The “Stepford Wife” became shorthand for everything feminism opposed: obedience, beauty without thought, servitude disguised as love. It allowed proponents to skip the step of convincing people their ideas were good and jump to the part where, if you disagree, you’re an evil, mindless robot.
In my younger days, I trained as a hypnotist. One of the earliest lessons our instructors taught revolved around thinking past the sale. Thinking past the sale means getting someone to skip past the decision-making process to focus on the result you want.
thinking past the sale — phrase — a persuasive tactic in which someone assumes agreement or success before it’s secured, framing discussion as if the decision has already been made, to bypass resistance and lead the target toward compliance or purchase.
For example, car salesmen often ask potential buyers to picture the car they’re considering in their driveway, rather than debating the merits of the purchase. Once you can see that result in your mind, it causes your brain to jump past deciding whether to buy something and move your thoughts into a realm where you’ve already bought it.
The Stepford Wives allowed feminists to get women to think past the question of whether or not being a housewife was a good idea, and skip to the result they wanted. That result was viewing traditional female roles as evil.
How Culture Changed To Avoid Being Called Names
Pop culture followed suit to avoid having the Stepford slur lobbed at it. The warm, nurturing mothers of early TV gave way to cynical parodies like Married… with Children’s Peg Bundy and the bored suburbanites of Desperate Housewives.
What had once been considered noble work became a cultural joke. The idea of staying home to raise kids was no longer admirable; it was regressive.
The Stepford Wives didn’t invent that shift, but it crystallized it. It offered a psychological justification for looking down on domesticity: if you wanted to be a housewife, maybe you were already a little bit brainwashed.
Stepford’s Legacy Of Shame
Fifty years later, culture remains firmly locked into the pattern The Stepford Wives helped create. The use of the term was so pervasive it still holds power today. Call any woman Stepford Wife and you’ll get an immediate reaction, whether or not she even knows the film exists.
In the wake of the Stepford phenomenon, the workforce was flooded with millions of new workers escaping the “horrors” of home life, and those workers are still there. With the supply of labor increased, wages decreased, and now even women who wanted to stay home could no longer afford to. Two-income families moved from the realm of choice into the realm of necessity.
The film’s attack on family life was a complete and total victory. Generation after generation of children are now raised by daycare centers, and latchkey kids have become so normal that no one even uses the term anymore. The weird ones are the kids who have moms waiting at home with fresh pizza bread after school, and they’re looked at with suspicion by their friends who spend their time after class in empty homes surfing the worst of the internet on unrestricted wifi systems.
Most view these downsides as a worthwhile price to pay to rescue women from the robotic life of a housewife. But do we think that because we’ve considered the costs, or because we were screenwashed by The Stepford Wives?
