One thing you know right from the start of the movie The Stepford Wives is how much Joanna Eberhart values her rights. She considers herself one of the liberated women from the 70’s, and her husband seems to accept that, until they leave the city at least. For the first part of the movie, Joanna seems to be the perfect mix of independent woman and doting wife, her being a photographer and stay at home mom to her children. Joanna is immediately unsettled by the other women who live in Stepford. These women are made by the men, and are almost perfect portrayals of the perfect “American Housewife” as described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. They cook, clean, look after their children, and pleasure their husbands, and never talk about anything dealing with their feelings. The robot-women are submissive, and have a “dumbed down” vocabulary, as demonstrated by the Bobbie-Robot not knowing what the word archaic means, when she did before she was replaced.

    There are also several instances of men having a large amount of control over Joanna and the other women of Stepford. One example of this is the man at the gallery, who decides essentially whether Joanna’s photography career takes off, and whether her pieces can be displayed in the gallery. The first time she asks if he’ll display her work, he tells her no and she’s devastated, almost giving up because the man said no. Joanna’s husband wants to leave the city, and even though she doesn’t, she goes along with it without complaining because that’s what her husband wanted. She let the men’s club have a meeting at her house, and said the list of words she was asked to say. 

    When Joanna is making her last ditch attempt to escape the town, she runs to find her children in the men’s club building. Here, she enters what essentially equates to the lion’s den, the physical representation of the men’s power over her and the town. The building is intimidating, and Joanna faces it alone, as the last woman who hasn’t conformed to the men’s ideals. She becomes trapped in an exact copy of her Stepford bedroom, where the robot version of her is. The Joanna-Robot is everything her husband wants, and everything Joanna doesn’t want to see herself become. The robot version of Joanna kills the real Joanna, symbolizing how the men or patriarchy in the town have succeeded in making her a dependent, quiet, demure woman like the rest of the town and turning her into the perfect “American Housewife”.

The point where Joanna gets murdered falls in line with the ideas from the “The Horror Film as a Social Allegory” by Christopher Sharrett. In his text, he talks about there never really being an option to escape, and the women always lose when trying to fight the monster, or, the patriarchy.