The Stepford Men's Association
The Stepford Men’s Association has a clearly defined purpose in its publicly posted mandate; it is a social club for poker, man-talk and sharing information about hobbies and crafts.” It is that final purpose that is the cause of the trouble, of course. Naturally, as a “men’s association” the number one rule is that no women are allowed. Taken in total, the Stepford Men’s Association is nothing more nor less than a symbol of patriarchal power and control with the intent to dominate women into subjugation and subservience.
Betty Friedan
The Stepford Men’s Association arises in response to meeting at the soon-to-be-defunct Stepford Women’s Club previous to the events described in the novel. Friedan is the author one of the bibles of the Women’s Liberation Movement, The Feminist Mystique, and the impact of her appearance on the wives of Stepford is the stimulation behind the entire scheme to create sexbot replacements. As a result, Friedan is the symbolic incarnation of masculine fear of female empowerment.
The Tennis Court
The destruction of Charmaine’s prized clay tennis court for the purpose of replacing it with a putting green is the central symbol of male domination in Stepford. Even among such affluent suburban settings, a clay tennis was a rare enough sight to signal a special sort of privilege—“It’s a clay court,” Joanna reminds her with a bewildered emphasis. The wholesale destruction of the clay of her court with the grass of the putting green symbolizes the extent to which the wives of Stepford can be dehumanized.
Step'forward
The name Stepford itself can be interpreted as a particularly creative symbol. Some communities get their name as the result of a contraction of a longer name: Kingston might have started out as King’s Town, for instance. Although never directly addressed as though in the novel, the author’s legacy as one who employs a great deal of irony in his books might have come up with the name of his town as a satirical example. Stepford sounds like an “archaic”—a word used notable for effect in the novel—contraction of Step Forward. So, the contracted version of Stepford might be intended as a subtle symbol of the irony of the community which is taking such astonishing steps to obstruct the forward progression of feminism and equal rights taking place in the world beyond its city limits.
Kitchens
The symbolism here is clear: an immaculately clean kitchen is the symbol that a Stepford wife has been replaced by a robot. Any kitchen less than immaculate is a symbol that all is still human in the household. This symbolism is much more significant than it might seem. After all, the selling point of the robot transformation process is apparently the sexbot aspect. Therefore, one might expect the identifying symbolism determining the difference to be associated with sexuality. That it is instead associated with household cleaning--and not just household cleaning, but the cleaning of the central symbolic duties of the properly domesticated wife, the kitchen, says much about what is really going on with the men in Stepford. And that something is not necessarily focused on sexual depravity.
