“whiteness moved again, leaving one pane and filling the next; the window was being washed. Joanna smile, in case Donna Claybrook was looking at her. The whiteness moved to a lower pane, and then to the pane beside it.”
In the opening scene of the novel, new Stepford resident Joanna is being visited by the Welcome Wagon lady. In seeing her to the door, Joanna looks across the way to see that her neighbor, Mrs. Claybrook is just a white shape moving from window to window as she cleans each pane. This is the first subtle indication that all is not right with the wives of this suburban paradise.
“You could have woke me. I wouldn’t have minded. Gee whiz, you didn’t have to do that.”
Early in the novel, not long after Walter has gone to the Men’s Association to become a member, Joanna goes to bed before he arrives him and is awoken by the sound the bed shaking and its springs squeaking. Later on, the reader will be able to intimate that Walter has gotten turned on by the stories he’s been told about the sexbots that replace the wives of Stepford because what is causing the noise that awakens Joanna is her husband lying in bed next to her masturbating. The scene is short, but powerfully significant: Joanna is already a satisfyingly compliant sex partner for Walter, so it is clearly is not just about sex that makes him want to replace her with a non-human substitute.
“He’s a wonderful guy and I’m a lucky woman who ought to be grateful to him.”
The secret to the significance of this seemingly innocuous little quote is that its pours forth out of the mouth with seemingly the same unaffected sincerity of a woman who not much earlier had described this “wonderful guy” as “sex fiend and a real weirdo.” The scene also takes place during one of the novel’s most important events: when Charmaine is destroying her beloved clay tennis court in order to put in a putting green because her husband doesn’t play tennis, he plays golf.
“Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, addressed members of the Stepford Women’s Club Tuesday evening in the Fairview Lane home of Mrs. Herbert Sundersen, the Club’s President.”
Raging with suspicion of the strange behavior of the women in Stepford—especially those who seem to have transformed overnight—Joanna tracks down what the appears to be the singular defining event that forever changed the way things are in the suburb. The Feminine Mystique is an actual book and Friedan the actual author, but to many men in the 1960’s and 1970’s she was nothing more nor less than the enemy; a “women’s libber” whose rabble rousing was turning perfectly normal and happy housewives into militant feminists threatening to tear down the patriarchal system which, to their minds, had been operating perfectly fine for several millennia.
