Stepford Wives- Not Just a Colloquialism Anymore

 

The Stepford Wives (2004 movie version)

Stepford Wives- Not Just a Colloquialism Anymore

Even though I had heard the term “Stepford Wife” bandied about all my life, I never knew the colloquialism’s origins. The Stepford Wives is a “satirical science-fiction horror novel” written by Ira Levin in 1972 that spawned several movie and television adaptations since its publication. When the book was initially published, “the novel was a commentary on the feminist movement of the 1970s, and explores the idea of gender roles and the societal pressure to conform to traditional gender norms.”

According to Michelle Arrow, PhD, “Levin powerfully dramatised [sic] women’s suburban alienation and men’s resistance to feminist change.”

For the men of suburban Stepford, Connecticut, to achieve the perfect wife, husbands changed their spouses into docile women obsessed with being perfect housewives by killing them and rebuilding them as robots. Remember, the 70s was the time of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In August 1970, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest the fact that women were still performing the majority of the household duties, and they were tired of the role prescribed by the patriarchy. Women were starting to speak up about the inequalities of life and disparate workloads between the genders. Ira Levin’s book was a commentary on the themes surrounding male fears of women’s liberation, the role of women in the home, the ability to control every facet of a woman’s life, and a woman’s ability to consent.  Since its publication fifty years ago, The Stepford Wives has become a piece of classic feminist literature arguing against the proliferation of cookie-cutter wives who pander to their husbands' every whim to become a paragon of wifeliness from an era long past.  

Fifty years post-publication, the moniker of “Stepford Wife” is still a cultural reference that most people understand. According to Mary McMahon, these days, it refers to a “woman who lives a blindly conforming life, remaining subservient to her husband and other authority figures while attempting to offend no one.” According to Urban Dictionary user Rex Cavendish, the colloquial definition is: “(u)sed to describe a servile, compliant, submissive, spineless wife who happily does her husband's bidding and serves his every whim dutifully.” Stepford Wives look beautifully flawless (according to the male gaze), keep a spotless house, always have a meal ready on the table when her husband arrives home from a hard day’s work, and is the primary caregiver to the children.   

 

While most people use the term satirically, there are some women in society who actually want to embody Stepford Wifeliness. There are even websites doling out advice as to How to Become a Stepford Wife in 5 Steps. The major five steps listed include: 

1.) Live in a beautiful home.

2.) Have a passion for cleaning.

3.) Make delicious and beautiful meals.

4.) Have a flair for feminine style.

5.) Be devoted to your husband.

To the chagrin of many husbands, these are things that contemporary women just aren’t willing to do for any man.

The expectation of Stepford Wifeliness was problematic for me when I was married at 19. If you know me personally, you know that I am not Stepford Wife material, and I definitely didn’t espouse any of the tenets listed above. So, how did I become mired in that world with its unrealistic expectations in the late ‘90s to early ‘00s? My marriage didn’t start out that way, but those expectations slowly crept in over time. I had dropped out of college to marry my high school sweetheart at 19. Two days after the wedding, we piled my essential belongings into his ridiculous sports car and drove to Salem, Oregon, where he attended law school. Initially, I tried to create a home for my husband like my mother had for us growing up: I cleaned our one-bedroom apartment and cooked regularly during the first month of our marriage. At the end of that month, my husband said he would take care of the cooking from then on because my cooking didn’t meet his standards. This should have been my first clue that I wasn’t cut out to be the same type of wife that my mother had been.

Our daughter was born a couple of weeks shy of my 26th birthday. By this time, my husband had been a lawyer for four years. What I didn’t know when I entered into a union with a budding lawyer was the culture and expectations that accompany being an “attorney’s wife.” When I complained or fought back against those expectations, my then-husband would tell me that I signed up for this life. At this point, those five Stepford steps listed above were an unspoken expectation for my life now. Once I became a stay-at-home mother, my husband started commenting, “Someday, I want to come home to find you vacuuming while wearing high heels and pearls.” I was expected to act and dress a certain way at the firm functions or to host dinners every weekend; there was an expectation that the house would be spotless when my husband arrived home when he would cook the evening meal, and I was supposed to look and act like a Stepford Wife at all times. I was just not cut out to live a life like that, and it caused innumerable problems in our marriage. By the time my daughter was old enough to understand the role that was expected of me, I could no longer stay in a marriage that modeled to her that her place in the world was to become a subservient housewife.

Although The Stepford Wives was published half a century ago, the pendulum of life for women and wives is swinging back in that direction again. With loud celebrities like Andrew Tate encouraging Incel (Involuntary Celibate) behavior, people in the highest echelons of the government praising those in the Conservative TradWife movement, and the loss of many of our reproductive rights, there is a decided regression in women’s fight for equal rights. According to Don Kaye, “(I)t’s still clear that a significant portion of the male population, even in a supposedly enlightened society like the United States, cannot accept the idea of women as equals and cannot find the maturity, emotional or psychological, to engage with them on anything but a sexual or submissive level.” It’s becoming increasingly apparent that “Stepford Wives” is just a colloquialism that we use mockingly anymore; it’s slowly becoming a reality again in 2025. We’ve been warned.