Stepford Wife

Stepford Wife
1.) Used to describe a servile, compliant, submissive, spineless wife who happily does her husband's bidding and serves his every whim dutifully.

2.) Can also be used to describe a wife who is cookie-cutter & bland in appearance and behavior. Subscribes to a popular look and dares not deviate from that look.

This term is borrowed from the fictional suburb of Stepford , Connecticut in Ira Levin's 1972 novel, The Stepford Wives, later made into movies (in 1975 and 2004). In the story, men of this seemingly ideal town have replaced their wives with attractive robotic dolls devoid of emotion or thought.
1.) She's such a stepford wife , I've seen her greet her husband at the door after work with a beer and a kiss 4 days in a row!

2.) I just got back from the pta meeting , I've never seen so many stepford wives.

2b.) The SNL skit "Mom Jeans" features women dressed to earn the SW distinction.
The only kind of wife to have. Obays any and every command with a smile . Never opens her mouth unless its to eat a dick .
My ho is a stepford wife bitch. compare your life to mine and then kill yourself .
Doing a girl who has OCD from behind and positioning her in front of something disorganized , i.e. unfolded laundry, unwashed dishes, unfiled taxes. May take a while...but she just can't stop herself. A real win-win for a single guy.
"So, she just started organizing your closet while you were inside her?"
" Yep , she's a real Stepford Wife."
woman who lives to serve husband does washing , ironing , cleaning, etc. with great joy. also has huge orgasms every time during sex and has sex every time her husband commands.
joe : man i wish i had a stepford wife
An obedient unquestioning individual of either gender, usually in a high-ranking position at a multinational office (e.g. politics). Based on the 1972 novel of the identical title, this use of the term moves beyond the "cult of domesticity " and expands as far as the public / political arena.
In this government, a strong independent representative is very much frowned upon , but a Stepford wife lasts for the entire term.
by ReverseHaloEffect November 5, 2020

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Author Ira Levin was originally going to write this as a stage play, until he realized there were too many characters and opted to turn it into a novel instead, which the film was based on.
When Joanna takes Fred out for a walk, Walter calls the members of the men's association to check out the layout of the master bedroom. Among those who come to the house are Ed Wimpiris and the Reverend. We cut to Joanna on her walk outside the men's association building where a local police officer warns her about walking around at night, and Joanna heads home. Moments after she departs the frame, a car pulls out of the driveway driven by Ed Wimpiris with the Reverend as a passenger. Ed is shown to be a stunned, sweaty mess and the Reverend suggests letting him drive the car instead as Ed is "In no fit shape", the implication being Ed had taken his wife Charmaine to be "changed" that evening. Unless Ed and the Reverend had Stepford doubles of their own running around or Joanna was in the habit of walking Fred for hours on end, this would indicate they were in two places at once that evening.
This movie holds up surprisingly well, nearly twenty five years after its first release. The premise could still intrigue today - there are still men who would like nothing better than to have the women in their lives be less human. I guess now women want the same things and this is known as progress. Anywho, the movie is great and if it were up to me, Katherine Ross' birthday would be a national holiday. She is terrific and beautiful and is matched by best buddy Paula Prentiss. Tina Louise and Nanette ("I'll die if I don't get this recipe") Newman are also memorable. The final shots of Ross are chilling, and top off a memorable movie.
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What is the French language plot outline for The Stepford Wives (1975)?
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Joanna Eberhart has come to the quaint little town of Stepford, Connecticut with her family, but soon discovers there lies a sinister truth in the all too perfect behavior of the female resi... Read all Joanna Eberhart has come to the quaint little town of Stepford, Connecticut with her family, but soon discovers there lies a sinister truth in the all too perfect behavior of the female residents. Joanna Eberhart has come to the quaint little town of Stepford, Connecticut with her family, but soon discovers there lies a sinister truth in the all too perfect behavior of the female residents.
Carol Van Sant : I'll just die if I don't get this recipe. I'll just die if I don't get this recipe. I'll just die if I don't get this recipe.

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Katharine Ross as depicted on the poster for 'The Stepford Wives.' Source: impawards.com
Even if you've never seen The Stepford Wives , the dark 1975 film sci-fi/horror film where wealthy suburban men turn their partners into subservient robots, you know what a "Stepford Wife" is. A Stepford Wife isn't just perfect, she's too perfect. There's an eerie, robotic quality to the way that she goes about her day and dotes on her husband. Subservient and docile, the Stepford Wife is a thing that should not be.
The Stepford Wives get their name from Stepford, Connecticut, the fictional town (based on Wilton) in which the eerie and attractive wives live. These characters were played by actresses known for their model-caliber beauty, including Katharine Ross , Paula Prentiss , Nannette Newman and Tina Louise .
There are at least three iterations of The Stepford Wives and multiple, lesser, spin-offs, and while each version of the story packs its own specific punch it's the phrase that seems to stick with the population, not the story, not the harrowing images on the big screen. Decades after the film's initial release and slow journey to cult status, the term "Stepford Wife" has nestled into the vernacular at large to describe anything that's too perfect, or too good to be true.
To put it simply, a Stepford Wife is a submissive woman who puts her husband's wants and needs ahead of hers while maintaining an immaculate personal appearance. Eternally youthful and docile, the term is full of venom. No one should be excited that they're fulfilling the Stepford ideal of perfection and servitude unless it's something to which all parties have consented.
In Ira Levin's 1972 novel and Bryan Forbes' 1975 film, Stepford Wives were robotic versions of a woman, refitted to be a better version of someone's partner. Their bodies are sculpted and their minds are molded to be exactly what their husbands want. The Stepford Wife doesn't want anything more than to serve because that's how she's programmed. Nanette Newman, who starred as Carol Van Sant in the 1975 adaptation described the robotic women to Entertainment Weekly in 2017:
The 1972 novel and 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives lay out all we need to know about these nefarious automatons who've invaded normal life. Author Ira Levin is no stranger to the horrors of suburban, middle class life. The Stepford Wives , like his 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby , warns of the menace hiding behind the fake smiles and well constructed architecture of the good life.
For Levin , the promise of the perfect home, the perfect family, the perfect wife is a trap. Perfect doesn't exist without strings attached. In Rosemary's Baby those strings are an eternity of servitude to Satan. In The Stepford Wives it's killing your wife and replacing her with a robot. Levin's work in these two novels explores the depths that one will go for personal comfort, for perfection.
Both works bind the reader's hands and force them to watch as unique, self assured women are undermined by their partners and crushed beneath the dreary weight of simple desires. But it's The Stepford Wives that proves to be darker and prescient. There is no demon from the beyond controlling the machinations of the men of Stepford. Every sin committed against the women in this story is committed by a human hand.
There's a look to the Stepford Wife that was dreamed up in the '70s but survives in its own way today. Forbes' 1975 adaptation created the style of Stepford: perfectly coiffured hair and form fitting, outfits that are somehow sexy and conservative. Frills, white gloves, and big hats. Their makeup is shellacked and not one eyelash is out of place. In the '70s the Stepford Wives wore pastels, skirts, and ruffles, but there's a version of that you can still find today.
In a 2015 blog entry on the seemingly defunct website Stepford University , the anonymous author writes that modern Stepford women should be "swans." The author says that these big, beautiful birds are everything that a would-be Stepford wife should be, graceful and tranquil. As a counterpoint here's a video of a swan trying to attack someone in their car.
Seeing the Stepford terminology so far removed from its source material is jarring, but not surprising. The women in the film are gorgeous even if they've been turned into literal automatons. Who wouldn't give up their personal freedom, private thoughts, and any semblance of humanity to live a perfectly wholesome life?
There's a famous quote about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (reportedly taken from a 1982 Frank And Ernest cartoon) about how society perceives the accomplishments of men and women: "Sure, [Astaire] was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, ...backwards and in high heels." Feminism challenged the the traditional view of gender roles -- that men were the smart ones, the ones who belonged in charge, doing things of great consequence, and women were subservient by nature, fit to do easy and less consequential tasks that were denigrated as "women's work." Furthermore, a higher emphasis was placed on women's appearance; they were expected to look put together at all times, and to "keep" their figure -- important to "keeping" a man.
There was the condescending idea that women should aspire to "have it all" -- a perfect home, perfect kids, perfect marriage and perfect appearance -- and that this would bring satisfaction. But having it all sounds a lot like doing it all, doesn't it? Keeping everyone else happy and everything tidy requires a near abdication of self.
The sinister husbands in the film don't really want wives -- they want unquestioning multi-taskers who look and behave perfectly and appear to be happy about it.
They want robots, so they make robots.
The fact is, managing a household is complex, potentially soul-draining, and may have required more skill than the jobs the bread-winning men were doing. Striving for the Barbie-doll ideal, forever dieting while their beer-swilling husbands packed on the pounds and lost their hair, required a discipline those husbands couldn't (or chose not to) understand.
Another way of viewing the Stepford Wife is as a critique of the unfairness of traditional gender expectations. In order to be the perfect wife, you'd almost have to be a robot. And those seemingly perfect wives we all meet from time to time? Maybe they really are robots.
The Stepford Wives was neither a critical or commercial success. Earning only $4 million at the box office in 1975, the film was derided by genre film averse critics and second wave feminists who felt that the film was attempting to co-opt their movement with a shiny, beautiful facade. What people missed at the time is that the film is a warning. The bad guys win. Katherine Ross is choked to death with a pair of nylons by her robotic doppelgänger. It's every bit as harrowing as the final moments of Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers .
In the years following the film's release it became a cult classic along the lines of Beyond The Valley of the Dolls and The Phantom of the Paradise . Each film offers its own perverse pleasures at a price.
How did the title of a critical and commercial failure become the de facto term used to described docile, unthinking housewives? Viewers may not have sat through a two hour movie, but the imagery on the film's poster - Katharine Ross' head smashed like a porcelain doll accomplishes the same goal as the film but it does it in an instant.
Writing for Film Comment , Alissa Quart notes that many of the phrases we use to describe a group of people or a major event can be traced back to the social horror films of the '60s and '70s. Think Soylent Green , and The Manchurian Candidate , aren't we still calling people zombies thanks to George Romero ?
Audiences may not have watched The Stepford Wives or Invasion of the Body Snatchers but those titles are the perfect shorthand for someone who's abandoned every shred of individuality for what they perceive to be a better life, even if that normalcy becomes a nightmare. Perhaps the spread of the phrase is best explained by Mary Stuart Masterson, who plays the young Kim in the 1975 film:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Katharine Ross as Joanna Eberhart
Paula Prentiss as Bobby Markowe
Peter Masterson as Walter Eberhart
Nanette Newman as Carol van Sant
Tina Louise as Charmaine Wimperis
Carol Rossen as Dr. Fancher
William Prince as Ike Mazzard
Carole Mallory as Kit Sundersen
Toni Reid as Marie Axhelm
Judith Baldwin as Patricia Cornell
Barbara Rucker as Mary Ann Stavros
George Coe as Claude Axhelm
Franklin Cover as Ed Wimperis
Robert Fields as Raymond Chandler
Michael Higgins as Frank Cornell
Josef Sommer as Ted van Sant
Remak Ramsay as Mr. Atkinson
Mary Stuart Masterson as Kim Eberhart
Ronny Sullivan as Amy Eberhart
Patrick O'Neal as Dale "Diz" Coba
Tom Spratley as Charlie the Doorman

^ " The Stepford Wives (AA)" . British Board of Film Classification . March 9, 1976. Archived from the original on July 4, 2015 . Retrieved July 3, 2015 .

^ Jump up to: a b "All-time Film Rental Champs". Variety . January 7, 1976. p. 50.

^ Jump up to: a b "The Stepford Wives" . The Numbers . Archived from the original on January 2, 2020.

^ Muir 2012 , p. 373.

^ Jump up to: a b c d e Coggan, Devan (October 23, 2017). "The Stepford Wives: Inside the making of the 1975 feminist horror classic" . Entertainment Weekly . Archived from the original on December 25, 2017.

^ Carlson, Sean (July 24, 2001). "Stepford Wives, The" . IGN . Retrieved June 14, 2022 .

^ Gonzalez, Ed (June 10, 2004). "VIDEODVD Review: Bryan Forbes's The Stepford Wives on Paramount Home Video" . Slant Magazine . Retrieved June 14, 2022 .

^ Forbes 1993 , p. 27.

^ Wolf, William (August 11, 1974). "Creating Horror in Connecticut Sunlight". Los Angeles Times . Los Angeles, California. p. Q30.

^ Jump up to: a b c "The Stepford Wives" . AFI Catalog of Feature Films . Los Angeles, California: American Film Institute . Archived from the original on January 2, 2020.

^ " "The Stepford Life" mini-documentary on 1975 "Stepford Wives" film" . YouTube . Archived from the original on January 31, 2021 . Retrieved January 24, 2021 .

^ "The Stepford Wives (1975)" . American Film Institute . Archived from the original on January 2, 2020 . Retrieved April 5, 2020 .

^ Digrazia, Christina (September 28, 2003). "At a Mansion, Lights, Cameras And, Well, Clonings" . The New York Times . New York City, New York. Archived from the original on December 26, 2017.

^ The Stepford Wives: Behind the Scenes documentary

^ Jump up to: a b Coggan, Devan (October 23, 2017). "The Stepford Wives: Inside the making of the 1975 feminist horror classic" . Entertainment Weekly . Archived from the original on August 28, 2019 . Retrieved April 5, 2020 .

^ Brown 1992 , p. 70.

^ "The Stepford Wives" . Rotten Tomatoes . Flixster . Archived from the original on August 10, 2015 . Retrieved September 22, 2021 .

^ "BBC - Films - review - The Stepford Wives DVD" . bbc.co.uk . Archived from the original on September 25, 2015 . Retrieved February 27, 2015 .

^ Ebert, Roger (January 1, 1975). "The Stepford Wives" . Chicago Sun-Times . Archived from the original on October 3, 2012 . Retrieved February 27, 2015 .

^ Oster, Jerry (February 13, 1975). " 'Stepford Wives' a Tedious Experience" . New York Daily News . New York City, New York. p. 64. Archived from the original on January 2, 2020 . Retrieved January 2, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.

^ Variety Staff (December 31, 1974). "The Stepford Wives" . Variety . Archived from the original on November 23, 2014.

^ Seymour, John (June 21, 1975). " 'Stepford': epic nightmare" . Santa Maria Times . Santa Maria, California. p. 11. Archived from the original on January 3, 2020 . Retrieved January 2, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.

^ Silver, Anna Krugovoy (2002). "The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism". Women's Studies Quarterly . 30 : 60.

^ Jump up to: a b c Klemesrud, Judy (February 28, 1975). "A controversial film" . The Press Democrat . Santa Rosa, California. p. 18. Archived from the original on January 3, 2020 . Retrieved January 2, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.

^ "AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills Nominees" (PDF) . Los Angeles, California: American Film Institute . June 12, 2001. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 20, 2015.

^ "10 Top Ten Film Genres" . The Film Site . AMC. Archived from the original on October 8, 2018.

^ The Stepford Wives [VHS] . ASIN 6304437617 .

^ The Stepford Wives DVD . ASIN 6304697988 .

^ Jump up to: a b Galbraith, Stuart (June 15, 2004). "The Stepford Wives (Silver Anniversary Edition)" . DVD Talk . Archived from the original on December 7, 2011.

^ Muir 2012 , p. 375.

^ "How 'The Stepford Wives' And 'Rosemary's Baby' Influenced The Films Of Jordan Peele" . Slashfilm .

^ "S'Express's 'Hey Music Lover' - Discover the Sample Source" . WhoSampled .

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Stepford Wives (1975 film) .
Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Stepford Wives (1975 film) .
The Stepford Wives is a 1975 American satirical psychological horror film directed by Bryan Forbes . It was written by William Goldman , who based his screenplay on Ira Levin 's 1972 novel of the same name . The film stars Katharine Ross as a woman who relocates with her husband ( Peter Masterson ) and children from New York City to the Connecticut community of Stepford, where she comes to find the women live unwaveringly subservient lives to their husbands.

Filmed in Connecticut in 1974, The Stepford Wives premiered theatrically in February 1975. It grossed $4 million at the U.S. box office, though it received mixed reviews from critics. Reaction from feminist activists was also divided at the time of its release; Betty Friedan dismissed it as a "rip-off of the women's movement" and discouraged women from seeing it, though others such as Gael Greene and Eleanor Perry defended the film. The Stepford Wives
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