So, as part of spooky season reading, I got a copy of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives from the library. I vaguely remember watching bits and pieces of the 70's movie on TV, and I fully remember watching the early '00s Frank Oz version, so I was interested to see what the actual source material was like.
Hoo boy.
Let me start this by saying the copyright is 1972, so there are quite a few references that either left me scratching my head, or worse, having flashbacks. (I'll note these as we go.)
So, we open with Joanna and Walter moving to Stepford, Connecticut, to raise their son and daughter away from Manhattan. Walter, a lawyer, commutes to and from the city by train, suggesting they're in the southwest corner of the state. Joanna is a semi professional photographer who's also active in Women's Liberation and National Organization of Women. She's less than pleased that the men in town all seem to belong to the Men's Club, high on a hill in town. Walter, of course, loves the Men's Club, even if he starts off suggesting making it coed.
Joanna tries to make friends, but the women of Stepford all seem to be obsessed with household chores, except for Bobbie (with a big behind and small mammaries), and Charmaine, a semi professional tennis player who's into astrology. Except Charmaine goes away for a couple's weekend, and returns as a dedicated hausfrau, even tearing up her clay tennis court to give her husband a putting green. This gets Bobbie and Joanna suspicious, to the point they write a letter to the state board of health to see if chemicals from the nearby factories are acting like the lithium in El Paso water to make the women all docile. That gets disproven, and we start getting signs that something is amiss, as men from the club sketch Joanna and have her dictate on cassette words, phrases, and songs. (Cassettes. Happy it wasn't 8 tracks.)
Joanna tries to convince Walter to move, and indeed joins Bobbie in looking for houses outside Stepford. Well, at least until Bobbie and her husband have a staycation and suddenly Bobbie doesn't want to move, is suddenly wearing a girdle and a push up bra, and waxes the kitchen floor daily. Walter tells Joanna they can look at houses after Christmas, and insists she sees a shrink. Shrink thinks Joanna is just overly stressed. Joanna finds a house, calls Walter, since she can't find the bank books (When's the last time anyone used one of those?) to put down a deposit. She ends up in the library basement where she finds out the men in town have work/have worked on animatronics and synthetics, among other things. Which leads her to the logical conclusion the men of Stepford are killing their wives and replacing them with perfected sex doll robots who can wax a floor.
The conclusion is kind of ambiguous as to whether or not Joanna is correct, which is a big point in its favor, although the matron of the one black family (introduced not long after Charmaine becomes a Wife) runs in to Joanna at the store in the epilogue, noticing how Joanna's shopping cart is perfectly organized, and how Joanna has given up photography in favor of keeping Walter happy.
Ok, so, I really enjoyed this quite a bit, even if the overall idea of losing autonomy to please a man makes my soul itch. As Peter Straub points out in his introduction, lots of little things towards the start take on really ugly meaning as the conclusion nears. Although, I will add that while Joanna refers to Disney's Hall of Presidents as evidence robots could pass for human, we really don't have that tech now, 50 years on, so there's a lot of suspension of disbelief here. Really good read, even with some of the outdated references, since there are plenty of folks who'd like to see it happen still.
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