Remaking The Stepford Wives, Remodeling Feminism

Abstract

In 2008, a former acquaintance of Tom Cruise publicly made the scandalous claim that the actor, prior to marrying Katie Holmes, had sought to audition several Hollywood starlets for the “role” of his perfect wife. For the tabloid press, the report was simply confirmation of the label they had branded Holmes with long before: “Stepford wife.” In fact, the phrase began to appear almost immediately following the couple’s 2006 wedding, in big, bold type in outraged headlines, though rarely with any explanation of its meaning or origin: it seems the yellow press felt safe assuming that the expression’s meaning is well understood by its readers. Most people have neither read the original book by Ira Levin, published in 1972, nor seen the first film adaptation, released in 1975, and yet the term has become cemented in popular culture as a way to signify a compliant, passive woman, almost robotic in her subservience to her husband. Indeed, the original book and film touched a nerve in the popular imagination of the 1970s, in part due to the way they addressed the contemporary (and contentious) issue of the women’s liberation movement.