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What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?
Joanna, a photographer, moves with her husband and two children to the perfect little suburb of Stepford, where she discovers to her dismay that almost all the married women in town have no interests but housekeeping and pleasing their husbands. When she does find a few women like herself, messy and alive, they start investigating why women arrive in Stepford with careers and interests and personalities and politics, then they lose all that, along with a few pounds that seem to migrate to their breasts, replaced with an extreme fascination with household cleaning products...
A taut, understated, horrifying little horror novel about what too many men really want in a woman. I am impressed that a man wrote this, and in the 70s no less, because it is so dead-on about gaslighting, condescension, men who want women to be nothing but an object of desire and a source of free labor, and the endless household labor that sucks up women's time and attention, preventing them from freeing themselves until it's too late.
I went into this knowing the premise, but it's well worth reading anyway. It's stripped-down, dead-on, and genuinely unsettling; a 1970s period piece that's not as dated as one might expect, and is most unsettling for the many ways in which it isn't dated at all.
The Stepford Wives
Joanna, a photographer, moves with her husband and two children to the perfect little suburb of Stepford, where she discovers to her dismay that almost all the married women in town have no interests but housekeeping and pleasing their husbands. When she does find a few women like herself, messy and alive, they start investigating why women arrive in Stepford with careers and interests and personalities and politics, then they lose all that, along with a few pounds that seem to migrate to their breasts, replaced with an extreme fascination with household cleaning products...
A taut, understated, horrifying little horror novel about what too many men really want in a woman. I am impressed that a man wrote this, and in the 70s no less, because it is so dead-on about gaslighting, condescension, men who want women to be nothing but an object of desire and a source of free labor, and the endless household labor that sucks up women's time and attention, preventing them from freeing themselves until it's too late.
I went into this knowing the premise, but it's well worth reading anyway. It's stripped-down, dead-on, and genuinely unsettling; a 1970s period piece that's not as dated as one might expect, and is most unsettling for the many ways in which it isn't dated at all.
The Stepford Wives
