The Stepford Wives

According to bell hooks, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and oppression.  The movie, The Stepford Wives, presents to us a life of sexism, sexual exploitation and oppression of women via an exaggerated portrayal of a 1975 patriarchal fantasy. 

Through the characters of Joanna and Bobbi we see realistic second wave feminists who make an attempt to use their educations, talents, and even their ‘maiden’ names to express themselves as individuals before they were turned into robots like the other Stepford Wives.  Although hooks says she likes her definition of feminism because it doesn’t imply men are the enemy, the men in The Stepford Wives are the enemy.  They represent patriarchy, the Dominant Culture, that by which men have the control and the power; and who, because they can, appropriate their command to the fullest by making their wives into their polite, domestic, sexual robots, keeping them as subservient as possible in every aspect of their existence.

When Joanna expresses her unhappiness with life in Stepford, Walter urges her to see a psychiatrist, a typical male response to female melancholy and despair.   Essentialism and the male/female binary system play into the notion that if a woman is not happy, she has innate psychological issues for which she needs treatment.  This is her biology; she is weak, emotional, and irrational, among other unfavorable ‘less than’ traits.

One important scene in the movie is where Joanna is objectified by ‘the gaze’, where the camera holds your eye and gives power to the viewer.  The gaze is an incredibly strong satiric image of a suburban housewife, and that which satisfies patriarchal desire.  Joanna is refracted three times in the shot, encompassing three versions in competing roles.  We see two portraits, one, who she is momentarily and the other, who she will become when robotized.

I know that feminists did not receive this move warmly, and at first, I didn’t understand why, since the movie portrays men at their most insidious, taking the notion of white privilege and male privilege to the extreme, thereby demonstrating the challenges women need to overcome.  However, after giving this some further thought, I realized that, if somehow Joanna had been able  to escape her oppressive situation  to claim her own life as a photographer or whatever she chose to do, it would have been considered a feminist success.  She wasn’t able to save herself or her children, thus the men won.  The ideas sound simple but they are grossly complex.