Fear of Feminism
The controlling theme of The Stepford Wives is rooted in the era of its genesis: the late 1960’s/early 1970’s Women Liberation movement. This movement is personified in the figure of Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, an actual writer whose appearance in the novel as a guest speaker at the Stepford Women’s Club becomes the impetus behind the formation of the Stepford Man’s Association and the scheme to replace wives with subservient robots.
Protecting the Power of the Patriarchy
The Stepford Men’s Association is particularly galling to the protagonist, Joanna, because its no-women-allowed policy speaks to an archaic and outdated ideology. Clubs exclusive to men’s only membership calls to mind the hard-edged conservatism and reinforcement of the patriarchy in the 1950’s following the taste of independence women enjoyed during the World War II years when millions of women joined the workforce in the absence forced by mass enlistment to fight the Germans and Japanese. By not allowing women to take part, the Stepford Men’s Association can conduct in secret the seemingly innocuous details of their publicly posted mandate that the clubs exists in part for “pooling of information on crafts and hobbies.” Those “crafts and hobbies” turn out to be, in fact, the sinister plans to maintaining their patriarchal domination of Stepford by creating robotic replacements for their wives.
A Homosexual Utopia?
A subtly implied thematic undercurrent running just beneath the more obvious surface sensibilities of male fear of female empowerment is the idea that a Stepford is a hotbed of repressed homosexual desires. The sexbots that replace the wives are clear enough indications that the idea of the perfect female body has been engineered from external sources: the “new and improved” wives generally sport the perfect hourglass shape which dominated the 1950’s concept of the sex symbol. The point being that there seems to be no allowance made for individualized taste; apparently none of the husbands in Stepford prefer the boyish figure which dominated the 1920’s or any other of the infinite possibilities of arranging female body parts.
More importantly, even after replacing the wives with these sex-on-demand substitutes…the men of Stepford still prefer spending time each at the Men’s Association. Even taking into account the fact that these men would care to spend time with a robot for the purposes of good conversation, they should certainly be spending more time having sex than they seem, but the ultimate victory here is expressed through replacing a tennis court with a putting green! The message that remains unspoken and only addressed indirectly through oblique allusion is that the sexbots exist primarily for the purpose of sublimating the deeper desires that keep bringing them men back to the each other to fulfill every need that the robots cannot. The key fact that should not be overlooked in the novel is that the ultimate goal here is to create a Stepford in which actual living, breathing, human women do not exist. If that doesn't sound like a homosexual utopia, what does it sound like?
