Pre-programmed, mindless, automatons incapable of feeling or expressing any authentic emotions are running amok in Stepford…and they’re turning their wives into robots. The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin’s 1972 satire on fear of feminism in the suburbs, is technically a story about husbands in a cloistered upper middle community who have taken the same expertise which led to the animatronic Chief Executives on display at Disney World’s Hall of President and perfected it to create utterly realistic high-tech robots that are the dream of every man who ever fantasized about a gorgeous subservient wife who is always ready for sex whenever they are not cleaning the house.
A much more appropriate title would have been The Stepford Men since what Levin’s story is really about is the very fact that these men don’t really want wives. Wives implies humanity and humanity implies respect and emotional connection that men like those in Stepford not only are incapable of satisfying, but don’t want in the first place. As for titling it The Stepford Husbands…well, that’s just silly. The men of Stepford are not defined by the fact of their marriage...like wives.
The satire at work here is an allegorical one that is deeply rooted in the countercultural revolution linking the 1950’s to the 1970’s. “Women’s Lib” came of age in the 1960’s and really took firm hold in the years in which Levin was constructing his novel. Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, was one of the bibles of the feminist movement and she plays a major role in the events which take place before the arrival into Stepford of the story’s protagonist Joanna Eberhart. Her speech on feminism at the Stepford Women’s Club initiates the demise of the particular social organization and the beginning of the Stepford Man’s Association. The movement to take that Disney World animatronic technology which just so happens to have a connection to the men of Stepford and exploit it for the purpose of subjugating their wives into totally compliant sexbots with a fetish for housecleaning directly stems from a fear of losing hold on the patriarchal grip of control over the womenfolk.
The underlying irony of Levin’s story, of course, is that the only emotion that the Stepford men seem capable of feeling right down to their very bones is fear. They express no desire, willingness or capacity to feel any other emotion and it is the fact that this state as human beings is only replicated by their wives once they have undergone the process of being transformed into the robots that is the real message here. The secret process of turning the women of Stepford into unthinking, unfeeling mindless automatons takes four months. No such timeline is presented for how long it took to do the same thing to the men of Stepford.
