Stepford Wives Quotes

That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

They never stop, these Stepford wives. They something something all their lives. Work like robots. Yes, that would fit. They work like robots all their lives.

You're not going to get any true confessions out of me," she said. "I'm a Leo, and our thing is changing the subject.

What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?

Sex, yes; sexism, no.

That green stuff outside is grass, and the yellow stuff coming down on it is sunshine.

I want you to know I won't always be here,' Fertility says, 'but I'll always find you.

One great difference between good writing, that readers overlook, and bad writing, that they fail to notice, has to do with the number of rewrites and revisions usually required by the former. It isn’t at all easy to write clear, declarative prose—transparency evolves from ruthless cutting and trimming and is hard work—while lumpy, tangle-footed writing flows from the pen as if inspired by the Muse.

Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of the males creates a new conflict: it is with a bad grace that the man lets her go.

Joanna's period was late but came, thank God and the Pill.

No, thanks, we’re not keen on cat pix.

Women's ideas of themselves had changed, but the world's idea of women, somehow, had not. The cognitive dissonance was palpable at all times.

But her smile is vacant. Placid. A Stepford Wife smile. The tears fall but there is nothing behind them. She’s a mannequin crying on command.

It [puberty] is not that you lose control of your body so much as that you lose control over the way your body is interpreted. Your body becomes an alien body, a question rather than a statement.

What’s wrong with Bill McCormick? Can’t he run a washer? I thought he was one of our aerospace brains.” “He’s taking care of Marge,” Kit said, folding the T-shirt. “These things came out nice and white, didn’t they?” She put the folded T-shirt into the laundry basket, smiling. Like an actress in a commercial. That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

We appeared to be done with the marriage plot. ('What's the alternative to the marriage plot?' She said: ' The alternative is adventure.') My generation (I thought) was the first post-feminist generation. The first to be allowed to see love in terms of adventure and quest, not salvation and redemption.

But alas, I'd have to find a way to be opinionated without being too opinionated, authoritative without being a bitch about it, smart without being elitist, fair without being a pushover. If the boyfriends of my youth found me too authoritative when I should have been cheering on the sidelines as they kicked and tossed and smacked balls toward the vanguard, the male colleagues of my adulthood kept reminding me of my lack of authority as they unconsciously displayed theirs. I was always failing someone's standards of legitimacy, as a girlfriend, as a producer of opinions. It was an eternal no-win. I was always too big or too small, like Alice, and forever being told, in one way or another, 'Eat me.

Charmaine was Miss Vamp, provocative and come-hithery in floor-length white silk cut clear to her navel; Dave and Shep were provoked and went thither.

You can learn a lot about the longings and generalized gender anxieties of an era by the kinds of fake women it dreams up.

And you’ll put a deposit on the house tomorrow?

There's a decadent glamour to falling apart, but not everyone can afford it.

There’s something here, Joanna! I’m not kidding! This is Zombieville! And Charmaine moved in in July, I moved in in August, and you moved in in September!

Walter?” she called, touching her hands to a towel. “Yes?” She went to where she could see him, standing in the hallway. “Thanks,” she said, smiling. “I feel better.

Romantic love is a mirror in which you can see your whole self pleasantly reflected, if you’re lucky. Or it’s a dark mirror into which you can disappear.

...She recalls talking to her 'about how there were no women in The Godfather.' Or rather, that the women only served to reaffirm that it was a man's space, that they were only there to serve drinks and be shut out. In classic Hollywood cinema, a woman walks on-screen; She is there to be looked at. She interrupts the action. Diane Keaton in The Godfather is a foil for Al Pacino: She whines, she interrupts, and at the end, she's put in her place. She makes drinks and gets the door shut in her face.

Friedan demystified the fairy tale and traced it back to its roots. She named the unnamed problem. She told women they weren’t crazy, that the culture was set up to drive them crazy and make them relinquish themselves and step into a mass-produced, ready-made identity, ready to please.

... In her immaculate kitchen she said, 'Yes, I've changed. I realized I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. It's no disgrace to be a good homemaker. I've decided to do my job conscientiously, the way Dave does his, and to be more careful about my appearance. Are you sure you don't want a sandwich?' Joanna shook her head. 'Bobbie,' she said, 'I— Don't you see what's happened? Whatever's around here—it's got you, the way it got Charmaine!' Bobbie smiled at her. 'Nothing's got me,' she said. 'There's nothing around. That was a lot of nonsense. Stepford's a fine healthful place to live.' ...

I'd been so tired of 'strong female characters' for so long by then. I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and 'unnatural' and always lonely and exceptional. I was tired of the grim undertone of tragedy that lurked under its surface. 'Strong female characters' were never funny, and they never had any fun, either. More often than not, they were celibate, friendless, and clinically depressed. Their monomaniacal devotion to crime fighting made them lean, cranky, and impatient. Naturally, they had axes to grind: they were avenging brides, poker-faced assassins, gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. Who were these characters? What were they trying to tell us? Why didn't they ever say goodbye before hanging up the phone? And why were they always being reborn or remade as killing machines after losing everything they held dear? ...I don't want to see another symbolic woman start all over again. I want to see the symbolic world change to acknowledge her existence. I don't want to see a young girl get a makeover or go shopping with her boyfriend's credit card. I want to watch her blow up the Death Star - metaphorically, of course.

Girls in pop culture are also often represented in ways that feel almost, but not quite, human. They are lifelike rather than alive, and more than anything they resemble the 'idea of woman' in late capitalist culture; the twenty-first-century 'true women.' There isn't a girl in the world who has not, at some point, come across an image or portrayal that made her feel a sense of recognition and alienation at the same time, a me/not-me, real/not real, true/not-true feeling that, once experienced, never quite goes away. Sure, these images and portrayals do not share the same qualities as the objects Mori first mapped - they are not, at least to start with, artificial beings. They aren't cyborgs or replicants or reanimated corpses. But we don't recognize them as human, either, at least not like any humans we know. Some ineffable thing is missing.

Though Women's Studies was supposed to give a voice to "silenced" women, all too many women who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors—and students, too. Indeed, while some (generally tenured) older professors like Willingham do dare to challenge Women's Studies dogma, younger initiates, whether students or greenhorn instructors, often act as fierce enforcers of dogma, reiterating it (as did Tholen and Alder at the Beijing +15 session) with all the zeal of fresh converts to a fundamentalist faith and bristling at any violation of Holy Writ. Patai and Koertge quote professors who complain about students being "zombified" by Women's Studies, turned into "ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives" who "utter…stock phrases" and are plainly "terrified of a thought because if they ever had a serious thought, they might start reflecting on this stuff they're taught to repeat.

Alice's predicament in Wonderland is a familiar one to modern women: She's a post-Enlightenment girl in a persistently feudal world. She perceives herself as a subject with inalienable rights, but she's perceived, variously, as an interloper, a servant, a threat, an object, a bother, a girl. Alice believes this can be remedied with information. She believes that if she explains and assets herself, if she reasonably points out the facts, then she will shift the perception. At the very least, she thinks, she can learn the rules and fit in. So, she tries. She takes others' good faith for granted. She makes her case again and again. She tries to learn their rules. But she is eternally frustrated, because Wonderland is governed not by reason or rules but by ideology, faith, superstition, and fear. Something is real if you believe it's real, if you continually affirm its existence. It disappears if you don't, subsumed into a parallel universe.

On the other hand, maybe what attracts us aren't the stories of falling apart so much as the stories of self-creation. The falling apart stuff is just a byproduct, a hazard of the trade. Maybe what I loved about Camille Claudel was what she created out of what she smashed to bits. How did a bourgeois girl become an artist and a woman? What was the female equivalent of the Great Man? If it didn't exist, why not? Who said it didn't? Who said it couldn't? What were the conditions that made it so hard? Rodin was the image Claudel identified with and against which she defined herself. Scott was this image for Zelda. A woman could not be a great artist and have a traditional marriage - not unless her husband was a Leonard Woolf. One boyfriend I had in college used to joke, 'Only one artist in the family,' meaning not me. I didn't get it then, but I get it now. There was always something self-annihilating in the act of loving, for a girl with creative aspirations - always - but far more then than now. The message, invariably, was that youthful passions lead to middle-age breakdowns, so choose your institution wisely. Marriage or the nuthouse. One or the other. It started to dawn on me that it wasn't that I was attracted to stories about girls who went mad, I was attracted to stories about girls with ambitions who wound up institutionalized. Getting locked up was not the result of adventure, it was the price you paid for adventure, it was your punishment. I had mistaken correlation for causation. Rookie mistake.

Supper?' he asked. She nodded. 'Would you take them to the pizza place? Or to McDonald's?' He took his pipe from the table. 'All right,' he said. 'I want to get it done with,' she said. 'Otherwise I won't enjoy next weekend.' He laid the open book down across his lap and took his pipe-cleaning gadget from the table. She turned to go, and looked back at him. 'You sure you don't mind?' she asked. He twisted the gadget back and forth in the pipe bowl. 'Sure,' he said. 'Stay with it.' He looked up at her and smiled. 'I don't mind,' he said.

Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The 'housewives' of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart 'homemakers' of the 1980s, then the 'soccer moms' of the 1990s, then the stay-at-home moms of the 2000s. Next may come the homeschooling homesteaders of the impending post-apocalypse - who knows? What's significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture.

Sylvia called to apologize - she had been passed up for a promotion she damn well knew she deserved - and Charmaine called to say they'd had a great time and to postpone a tentative Tuesday tennis date. "Ed's got a bee in his bonnet," she said. "He's taking a few days off, we're putting Merrill with the DaCostas - you don't know them, lucky you - and he and I are going to 'rediscover each other.' That means he chases me around the bed. And my period's not till next week, God damn it." "Why not let him catch you?" Joanna said. "Oh God," Charmaine said. "Look, I just don't enjoy having a big cock shoved into me, that's all. Never have and never will. And I'm not a lez either, because I tried it and that's no big deal. I'm just not interested in sex. I don't think any woman is, really, not even Pisces women. Are you?" "Well I'm not a nympho," Joanna said, "but I'm interested in it, sure I am." "Really, or do you just feel you're supposed to be?" "Really." "Well, to each his own," Charmaine said.

Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it's still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the 'porn star' aesthetic and young girls' behavior on social media, observing that pornography is not about liberation but about control. The more pornography, the more control. 'Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV,' the director of a youth-counseling service for teens told Sales. 'They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.' The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic, combined with the under-representation of more multidimensional female characters, affects the attitudes, behavior, and ideas about gender roles in both girls and boys, but it's especially insidious for girls' self-concept; as they constantly absorb the message that the choice comes down to either duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts, or abject invisibility.

Sometimes, it seems like popular media exists primarily to set impossible standards and then to shame people who don't try their hardest to meet them.

Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation. Darwin's theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of 'primitivism,' moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, 'going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,' as Jacques Derrida put it, 'the end of history...the end of subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.' A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regarded with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the 'author' - the media outlets that shape the train wreck's life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as “angel in the house,” domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and social partnership—a lifelong collaboration, a project, a constant becoming?

Her remark laid bare not only the reality - not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood - but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: 'All the scripts are for men and you play 'the girl'' suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished 'the girl' to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. 'Borat's Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,' one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women's experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations.

What if, Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was more than just about housewifely ennui but also about the alienation and unending tedium of all modern work - of a moneymaking need that expands to fill the time available? Why else this constant repetition and reinforcement of a fiction that reality keeps refuting but that fiction keeps reimposing: the fiction of progress, the feeling that we are going somewhere, getting somewhere, that our lives have meaning, that we are not caught in a constant recursion, an infinite loop? Is there progress? What is progress? What if author Ira Levin was not ripping off Betty Friedan but was on her side? What if he was calling back to her, saying, 'I feel you, sister! Fuck the patriarchy!' What if, as Elliott suggested, The Stepford Wives was an allegory for the lives not just of suburban housewives but of global corporate capitalism? of working ceaselessly with nothing to show for it at the end? What if it represented anxieties about lives of pointless repetition with no progress, no end result, and no possibility of transformation? If it wasn't just the housewives' problem, or a problem caused by housewives who ceased to perform their housewifely duties, but everyone's problem? What if 'the problem that has no name turns out to be caused by the life that has no more plot?

What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as 'angel in the house,' domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and social partnership - a lifelong collaboration, a project, a constant becoming? Is it what patriarchal society said it is, or what Hollywood pretended it was? What does it mean to be a modern woman? Where does a woman's 'modern-ness' reside? In what she looks like, how she acts, what she does, wears, or says? Or is it somewhere else entirely outside of her, in a larger system that allows her to be a whole, free person? that represents her as such? that allows her to represent herself? that recognizes her individuality and subjectivity? Is it about things like voting and birth control, the issues that Katharine Hepburn's mother devoted her life to fighting for? Is it about wearing pants, not aiming to please, sleeping around, and not getting married, like Katharine Hepburn did? Is it about smoking Virginia Slims? Is it not perhaps all and none of these things but the fact that we keep having to make a case for our personhood? Is it not the story that needs to be reframed? the heroine who needs to be allowed to create herself, from scratch?

The fear of 'unnatural' women was high, as it was in the 1980s, as it is as I write this in 2016. Women's behavior was strictly delimited and policed. To react to the limits in frustration or anger was to get labeled hysterical - female madness comes from the womb. It was believed to be a reproductive ailment.

In his 1899 critique of upper-class values, The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen wrote, 'The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe add the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult.' Women may no longer wear bonnets, and high-heeled shoes may no longer be seen as hindrances to employment, but the fact remains that 'the more elegant styles' are outside the reach of most working women. They require more money, more attention, and more leisure than the average working woman can afford. This is their point.

Across the various iterations, the 'real housewives' flaunted their refusal to conform to the happy modern housewife ideal as though they were breaking the law by spending their days drinking, sparring, and shopping. They proudly showed off their incompetence in the kitchen (as when Adrienne of Beverly Hills washed a chicken with hand soap), or their disinterest in sex (as when Lisa Vanderpump joked about treating sex as a twice-annual gift to her husband), or their limited patience for parenthood (like Camille, who gave birth to her kids via a surrogate and employed one nanny per kid). Some, like Camille, made a point of treating their employees like beloved friends and their beloved friends like employees, whereas others, like Larsa Pippen, bragged to friends about their deep-seated nanny hatred and their compulsive need to fire them. Their lives were constantly being exposed as shams in the tabloids as they continued to deconstruct the feminine mystique on-screen and reconstruct it for the New New Gilded Age (Gilded Age III: More for Me). They hawked their lifestyle brands. When wronged, they became pure vessels for sorrow. They fell apart in public and wasted away in plain sight. They suffered exquisitely.

...Lindsay Lohan is a textbook persecuted gothic heroine. In the space of about two months just after Christmas 2006, Lindsay Lohan entered rehab; Anna Nicole Smith was found dead in her suite at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, surrounded by prescription-pill bottles, nicotine gum, and empty cans of SlimFast; and Britney Spears, trailed by paparazzi, walked into a Sherman Oaks tattoo parlor and shaved her head. Each time women like these made headlines, the headlines shot to the top of the most-read lists. The hunger for Britney's pantyless crotch shots dominated even as troops surges, systematic layoffs, and a rise in global warming and global terrorism took place, and as global credit and asset bubbles headed for a pop. It was as though the tabloids were not just distracting us from the scary stuff but enacting our fears and honing our outrage to bite-size pieces. (What were suspect sites and credit-default swaps, anyway?) More virgins were sacrificed to the god of war. Because that's who got it the worst by far: the former child stars and erstwhile Mouseketeers who had the temerity to grow up.

Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as 'the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,' and literary critics in the late eighteenth century mocked the work of early gothic writers Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by referring to it as 'the terrorist school' of writing. As Fred Botting writes in Gothic, his lucid introduction to the genre, it expresses our unresolved feelings about 'the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality' and yet is extremely concerned with issues of social disintegration and collapse. It's preoccupied with all that is immoral, fantastic, suspenseful, and sensational and yet prone to promoting middle-class values. It's interested in transgression, but it's ultimately more interested in restitution; it alludes to the past yet is carefully attuned to the present; it's designed to evoke excessive emotion, yet it's thoroughly ambivalent; it's the product of revolution and upheaval, yet it endeavors to contain their forces; it's terrifying, but pretty funny. And, importantly, the gothic always reflects the anxieties of its age in an appropriate package, so that by the nineteenth century, familiar tropes representing external threats like crumbling castles, aristocratic villains, and pesky ghosts had been swallowed and interiorized. In the nineteenth century, gothic horrors were more concerned with madness, disease, moral depravity, and decay than with evil aristocrats and depraved monks. Darwin's theories, the changing roles of women in society, and ethical issues raised by advances in science and technology haunted the Victorian gothic, and the repression of these fears returned again and again in the form of guilt, anxiety, and despair. 'Doubles, alter egos, mirrors, and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices,' Botting writes, 'signifying the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he is located.' In the transition from modernity to post-modernity, the very idea of culture as something stable and real is challenged, and so postmodern gothic freaks itself out by dismantling modernist grand narratives and playing games. In the twentieth century, 'Gothic [was] everywhere and nowhere,' and 'narrative forms and devices spill[ed] over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.

Oh God, please don’t! Don’t take away the Stepford Wives and macaroonsssss!” I proclaimed dramatically, drawling out the s. Pointing a sharp finger at the ceiling, I continued, “Take the damn Porsche, the kids, the Hampton Estate—but you leave my fuckin’ macaroons alone! Do you hear me?

It’s a shame to see such fun, independent women reduced to Stepford Wives. I mean, what is this shapeless auntie bubu you’re wearing? You’re taking this whole Nigerwives thing too far.