The Stepford Wives

When Joanna Eberhart makes the decision to try to escape Stepford, she returns home to discover that her children are missing. Wrongly believing that they are at her friend Bobby’s house, she makes her way over and resolves to test once and for all whether Bobby is human or, as she suspects, has been transformed into a subservient android. Picking up a knife, she plunges it into Bobby’s abdomen—and is horrified to discover that her worst fears are confirmed when she sees that Bobby does not bleed.

This scene, as gruesome as it sounds, stands as an ideal entry point into the film for several reasons. First, it is important that Joanna stabs Bobby where her womb would be, directly linking Joanna’s attack to the Stepford women’s lack of control over their own reproduction—a key concern of second-wave feminism and one that was pertinent to the American consciousness at that time. Oral contraception had only just become available to all women, regardless of marital status, in 1972, one year before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision had enshrined the legal right to abortion.

The diligence with which the film connects Joanna’s own creativity with her role as a mother suggests that this attack on Bobby is also indicative of its underlying argument about the stultifying effects of suburban life on creativity. By becoming a Stepford android, Bobby has lost her ability to create—both artistically and as a mother—which ultimately is what Joanna is most afraid of.

Discussion of the scene was also an important aspect of the film’s production. The archival documents I discuss in the book reveal that this moment, which was not in the original novel, was nonetheless influenced by a letter from the author, Ira Levin, to the director, Bryan Forbes, after Levin had read Forbes’s screenplay. In the script, Bobby does in fact bleed from her wound, but Levin argued that it was important that she did not because "Joanna’s our heroine and she’s right. (Also, because a knife coming out clean is a real shocker, and Hitchcock has the patent on blood-down-the-drain)." This insight helped Forbes to refine the film’s message, also leading to the refilming of another scene in which one of the Stepford wives is injured in a car accident and, in the version as originally filmed, also bled.

But perhaps its main importance to the film is also one of the many ironies of its production—that this scene represents yet another hidden replacement of a woman. A Styrofoam body covering had been made for Bobby to wear, into which Joanna was supposed to plunge the kitchen knife—but the actress, Katharine Ross, found the notion too disturbing: "It was very hard for me to stab, even something that wasn’t real!" The scene is extremely brief, but what we actually see on screen is not Katharine Ross, but the arm of the film’s director. Forbes says that he "put her jacket on, shaved the back of my hand and did it!" The gusto with which he delivers the blow suggests that he was fully aware of the metaphor of the creative artist striking against the dulling conformity of suburbia—but perhaps not of the irony of his actions in replacing the film’s lead actress in this moment.

In many ways, this scene sums up the debates about Stepford which have occurred since its release in 1975. Does it represent a progressive message about female empowerment, or is this an example of a male attack on the 1970s women’s movement? By bursting some of the myths about the production and highlighting the unknown work of the many women involved in making it, I hope that my book contributes to this discussion in a meaningful way and enables people to view the film again in a new light.