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Bryan Forbes's 1975 suburban gothic film The Stepford Wives has been almost uniformly neglected in film criticism in the past two decades.1 Recent genre studies of horror and science fiction ignore the film, as have collections of feminist film criticism. Although The Stepford Wives is in part a science fiction rewrite of Betty Friedan's pioneering 1963 liberal feminist polemic The Feminine Mystique, Friedan lambasted it as "a rip-off of the women's movement," a surprising indictment considering the film's obvious debt to her work (Klemesrud 28). The themes of The Stepford Wives dovetail so closely with those of second wave feminism that the film can be viewed as a popularization of some of the most persistent concerns of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.2 The film's examination of the plight of the dissatisfied middle-class housewife, its parody of the fetishization of housework, its explicit critique of the nuclear family, and its relentless focus on the constructedness and artificiality of female beauty are key issues to which second wave feminists-particularly radical feminists-drew public attention. The Stepford Wives, I argue, is a feminist allegory that stems from the ideological and political concerns of feminists as diverse as Friedan, Pat Mainardi, the Redstockings, and The Feminists. The film's popularity thus attests to the diffusion of feminist theory from smaller, loosely connected consciousness-raising and activist groups to mainstream American culture as a whole. By translating essential ideas found in such radical feminist documents as the "Florida Paper" into film, The Stepford Wives indicates that by 1975, these ideas had, through widespread media coverage, become common currency; the film thus suggests not the failure and perversion of feminist rhetoric, as Friedan implies, but its success and popular appeals In this essay I will briefly examine the film's reception, and then read it as an important cultural document of second wave feminism that addresses three main issues drawn from the women's movement: a woman's domestic labor, a woman's role in the nuclear family, and a woman's control over her body.
First, since the film was unavailable for rental for many years, let me provide a brief plot summary. The Stepford Wives takes place in the mythical middle-class suburb of Stepford, where Walter, Joanna, and their two children have...