Screenwashed: How A 70s Sci-Fi Disaster Shamed American Women Into Joining The Workforce

Written by Joshua Tyler | Updated 1 hour ago

The modern narrative of American culture would have you believe that in 1975, women were in the midst of a feminist-driven identity crisis. Some claim that the sexual revolution had broken the 1950s model of the suburban housewife, and that second-wave feminism, led by voices like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, was pushing women out of the kitchen and into the workforce.

This is not really true. Hippie feminism was never a big part of most people’s lives and most of the country did not embrace it in the early 1970s.

The fact is that in 1972, Richard Nixon won re-election with one of the biggest landslides in American politics, promising traditional conservative values. Before the Watergate scandal, he was the most popular president of the past 100 years, popular among men, women, and people of all ages.

Culturally, the most popular television shows of the time were equally traditional. They still feature TV housewives and stay-at-home moms like Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch.

By the numbers, in 1975, 70% of married women with children were still stay-at-home mothers whose primary focus was raising their children and running. No one thought this was strange. In fact, polls show that almost everyone thought this was a good thing.

By 1980, these numbers were upside down. The proportion of women working full-time, which had been growing very slowly since the hippie movements of the 1960s, suddenly saw a massive increase of 13%. This number continued to accelerate in the following decades.

Between the election of Richard Nixon and the huge increase in women giving up their lives as housewives, it was a sci-fi flop. A sci-fi film that did what all the bra-burning flower power of the 1960s couldn’t.

This is the true story of how it happened Stepford Wives Women were pressured to leave their homes and join the workforce.

Screen washed (characteristic) – When something on screen completely changes the way someone thinks or feels, as if their old beliefs have been erased and replaced by what they just saw.

Structuring the Stepford Wives for brainwashing

Stepford Wives Adapted from the book written by Ira Levin. By 1972, Levin had already terrified readers with a film adaptation of the novel Rosemary’s babyThe story of a woman who is manipulated by those she trusts most.

before StepfordThe image of a housewife was still aspirational. Housekeeping was not only acceptable; He was respected. He symbolized success: a husband who could provide, a wife who could care, and a family who lived the American dream.

But in 1975, Stepford Wives She turned that dream into horror when Columbia Pictures turned Levine’s book into a movie. Directed by Brian Forbes, the film takes on the visual language of suburbia – clean houses, courteous neighbors and idyllic lawns – And I treated it like a nightmare. William Goldman’s script does this not by advocating a different point of view, but simply by saying rational, logical things with a hint of sarcasm or a look of horror.

Stepford story

The film’s heroine is Joanna, played by Katherine Ross. She recently moved to the Stepford suburbs from New York and hates everything about it. “The noise,” she says when asked what she misses most about New York. The only time she smiles is when she hears the police siren.

Joanna befriends a woman who has recently moved to the area. The pair bond over their sloppy, lazy ways of housekeeping, as well as their mutual dislike of their hard-working husbands.

The two women are immediately suspicious of the other Stepford ladies. These women keep their homes squeaky clean, and their children seem happy and well-adjusted. Joanna and her friend express disgust that the husbands of these hardworking women did not hire housekeepers to do their chores for them.

Joanna’s suspicions grow when she discovers a Stepford couple showing affection for each other in a private moment. At first, she was confused, having recently rejected the affections of her lawyer husband, to see another wife accepting physical touch from her husband. Later, she used it as evidence that something was very wrong with her neighbors.

When other women are asked why they spend so much time at work taking care of their families, they answer with reasonable and logical arguments such as: “My husband works hard, and I want to be a good partner, so I work hard, too.” Or “It benefits me to take care of my children.”

These logical, reasonable arguments are said in a creepy, robotic cadence that makes them feel uncomfortable and mad. To make sure this point is driven home, Joanna is always there to look surprised and shocked as the Stepford Wives talk about how much they love their families.

In the end, while women are mocked for wearing bras and goaded for leaving all the children on their husbands, it turns out that all the hardworking Stepford women are robot surrogates. This is handled poorly in the film, because the film’s goal is not so much to tell a story as it is to shame women into abandoning their families by labeling housewives and mindless robots.

To anyone who saw the movie, being a content, dedicated housewife suddenly seemed evil, sick, and shameful.

The Stepford Wives failed as a film, and succeeded as an early viral sensation

Stepford Wives The harsh message is delivered in such an overtly propagandistic manner that the film should have been a forgotten footnote. It might have been so if people had actually seen it, but almost no one did.

Stepford Wives The film was not a huge success when it debuted in 1975. Despite a modest $2 million budget from Columbia Pictures, the film only grossed about $4–5 million at the US box office, barely breaking even after marketing and distribution.

It opened quietly, to lukewarm reviews, then disappeared within weeks as audiences gravitated toward flashier songs like Jaws and Towering hell. Studio executives expected a feminist thriller. Instead, the film confused critics and alienated viewers who were unsure whether it was a satire or a horror film.

However, despite its failure as a commercial product, the idea behind it, the fear of women being transformed into obedient, smiling machines, took on a life of its own. Her metaphor was popular before there was a word “viral.” The image of the smiling, blank-faced robotic housewife was so powerful that it entered the public consciousness through repetition, articles, jokes, parodies, and arguments, not through ticket sales.

Her timing couldn’t be more effective.

Newspapers, magazines, and talk shows picked up the phrase “Stepford Wife” almost immediately, using it as a metaphor in headlines. It was instant cultural shorthand: pithy, visual, and a bit harsh, too. By late 1975, Newsweek and the New York Times were using it without explaining the film. People knew what that meant, and it was meant as an attack on women who prioritized family above personal goals.

The Stepford Wives become the ultimate hypnosis weapon

For many years, magazines like Magazine have tried unsuccessfully to rewrite femininity around independence and career ambition. At that moment, Stepford Wives Finally he gave them the weapon they needed to advance their agenda, and that weapon was shame.

The film’s title became a slur ready to be attacked against anyone who opposed the anti-homemaker viewpoint. Even those who have never seen the movie know what it means to be called a Stepford Wife, and this term has been used freely to shame any woman who makes an effort to become a mother or wife.

“The Stepford Wife” became shorthand for everything the feminist movement opposed: obedience, beauty without thought, and slavery disguised as love. It allowed proponents to skip the step of convincing people their ideas were good and skip to the part where, if you don’t agree, you’re a mindless evil robot.

In my younger days, I trained in hypnosis. One of the first lessons our teachers taught was about thinking beyond the sales. Thinking beyond the sale means getting someone to skip the decision-making process to focus on the outcome you want.

Think after the sale — phrase – A persuasive tactic in which someone assumes agreement or success before securing it, framing the discussion as if the decision has already been made, to bypass resistance and lead the target toward compliance or purchase.

For example, car sellers often ask potential buyers to photograph the car they are considering driving, rather than discussing the merits of the purchase. Once you can see this outcome in your mind, it makes your mind go beyond deciding to buy something and move your thoughts into a world where you actually bought it.

Stepford Wives It allowed feminists to make women think beyond the question of whether being a housewife was a good idea or not, and move on to the outcome they wanted. The result was that traditional female roles were viewed as evil.

How the culture has changed to avoid name calling

Pop culture followed suit to avoid hurling Stepford slurs at her. The warm, nursing mothers of early television gave way to parodies such as Married…with children Big Bundy and the bored suburbanites Desperate Housewives.

What was once considered a noble act has become a cultural joke. The idea of ​​staying home to raise children is no longer appealing; It was reactionary.

Stepford Wives He did not invent this transformation, but he crystallized it. She provided a psychological justification for skipping home life: If you wanted to be a housewife, you might already be a little brainwashed.

Stepford’s legacy of shame

Fifty years later, the culture is still firmly locked into this pattern Stepford Wives Help create. The use of this term was so widespread that it still holds authority today. Call any woman Stepford Wife and she’ll get an immediate reaction, whether she knows the movie exists or not.

In the wake of the Stepford phenomenon, the workforce was flooded with millions of new workers escaping the “horrors” of domestic life, and those workers are still there. As the supply of labor increased, wages fell, and now even women who wanted to stay at home could no longer afford to do so. Two-income families have moved from the world of choice to the world of necessity.

The film’s attack on family life was a complete and complete triumph. Generation after generation of children are now being raised in day care centers, and key children have become so normalized that no one uses the term anymore. What’s strange are the kids whose mothers wait at home with fresh pizza bread after school, and are looked at suspiciously by their friends who spend their time after class in empty houses browsing the worst of the internet on unrestricted Wi-Fi systems.

Most of them see these negative aspects as a worthwhile price to pay to save women from the mechanized life of a housewife. But do we think so because we have taken into account the costs, or because our screen has been washed before Stepford Wives?