Things are then further worsened when Charmaine and Bobbie get back from their holiday travels with their husbands and turn into submissive wives. Joanna then gets to see the pattern of how things started to change in Stepford immediately after Betty Friedan came to talk with the local Women's club about six years earlier, after the publication of her book 'The Feminine Mystique' (Levin, 1972:39)
The dominance of male gaze is spoken about in cinema. The point stated here is not just the ordinariness of male-dominated advances, but also this is facilitated by putting the male creatures in the viewer and the feminine creatures in the viewed position (Mulvey)
Walter states that all the important people of Stepford are members of the association, including, the police and fire chiefs, the TV executives, the psychologists, the head of the hospital and the head of the telephone company. The Men's Association is headed by a president named Dale Coba (a part acted in the movie by Patrick O'Nal), who is nicknamed "Diz," a nickname based on Disney, where he was formerly employed (Paasonen)
Most of the science fiction movies diffuse the fear of men and women as being similar, and attempt to direct the attention away. This assures the diversity (Penley, pg
The condition of being out of control normally concerns the definition of women in the eye of men. The current movies should actually disclose that when we come up with robots, we make and at times, un-make beginnings of ourselves (Pyle, pg
Marleen Barr has spoken about the manner in which "the female" in patriarchal community is already viewed as alien: in our culture, which stresses that to be human is to be male, women are perceived as alien (OZYOL). Currently, science fiction is viewed as a very strong device in the reflectance of the female outlook (Roberts, pg
Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, had attempted to delineate the suffering that middle class women who were almost completely in domestic existence underwent, however she walked out of a screening that was organized by a number of feminist writers. She is quoted as saying that she thought everyone should leave the screening and that they should not help publicize the movie, terming it (the movie) as a rip-off of the women's feminist movement (Silver p
This is because husbands have murdered their wives and replaced them with robots that are more 'convenient'. The Robot wives are monstrosities as unnatural constructions trying to emulate human beings, however their husbands as similarly boundary figures who are emotionally void, and therefore 'not quite human'-based on the fact that emotions, interiority, and empathy are conventionally thought to be the markers of one's humanity (in comparison to machines which lack them) (Turkle; Williams)
It also implies that the ultimate satisfying woman is indeed a robot love-object and that ideal wives can be built/engineered (Paasonen) As Anna Kugovoy Silver and Elyce Rae Helford have shown, the initial versions of The Stepford Wives were based on ideas that came from the "second wave of feminism." The same way Ira Levin's narrative uses feminist arguments on the domination of women in modern American patriarchy, it also in a way satirizes the resulting male backlash against feminism and feminists, showing masculine nostalgia for 'the old days' where men were men and women became what the men decreed them to be (Williams)
It also implies that the ultimate satisfying woman is indeed a robot love-object and that ideal wives can be built/engineered (Paasonen) As Anna Kugovoy Silver and Elyce Rae Helford have shown, the initial versions of The Stepford Wives were based on ideas that came from the "second wave of feminism." The same way Ira Levin's narrative uses feminist arguments on the domination of women in modern American patriarchy, it also in a way satirizes the resulting male backlash against feminism and feminists, showing masculine nostalgia for 'the old days' where men were men and women became what the men decreed them to be (Williams)
Friedan's work had such a huge impact that it re-ignited the American feminist movement. Ira Levin's novella, The Stepford Wives, is basically a social satire which is a little bit horror, a little bit spooky, was written and published during the "second wave" of feminism in the United States (Wulandari)