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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Stepford Wives, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Sexism and Power
Equality and Societal Change
Secrecy, Doubt, and Uncertainty
Female Ambition vs. Societal Expectations
Summary
Analysis
Joanna has decided that she’ll only move if she finds a perfect house. Bobbie, on the other hand, is pushing forward with the idea, spending almost every day looking at new houses. Joanna accompanies her and listens to a real estate agent talk about how much more “with-it” the neighboring town of Eastbridge is compared to Stepford—there’s even a National Organization for Women chapter. Around this time, Bobbie and Joanna receive a response from the Department of Health, which assures them that the area is free of any toxic chemicals. Still suspicious, Bobbie continues drinking bottled water.
The uncertainty about what, exactly, is going on in Stepford builds suspense. Bobbie and Joanna have a clear sense that something is amiss, but they can’t actually point to any sort of tangible proof, other than that Charmaine has undergone a sudden transformation—which, of course, could just be a coincidence, since people do sometimes change of their own volition. Without any proof that something sinister is going on, then, Joanna and Bobbie are forced to tensely wait to see what will happen next.
Themes
Shortly before Christmas, Bobbie asks Joanna if she and Walter will watch one of her kids for the weekend. She explains that she and Dave have decided to spend a weekend all by themselves—a sort of second honeymoon. Joanna thinks this sounds nice and agrees to watch Bobbie’s son.
Bobbie’s request seems unremarkable—unless, that is, readers recall that Charmaine’s abrupt transformation into a passive and subservient wife took place right after she spent a weekend alone with her husband. But there’s nothing that directly links her transformation to the weekend she spent with her husband, which is most likely why it doesn’t even occur to Joanna to worry about Bobbie.
Themes
Before the weekend comes, Joanna goes to the library and sits next to a Black woman who has recently moved to the area. She has already heard through the grapevine that a Black family bought a house in Stepford, and she’s eager to make the woman feel welcome, but she’s unsure how to start up a conversation—but then the woman starts talking about how long it’s taking the librarian to appear from behind the desk. She introduces herself as Ruthanne Henry, and Joanna recognizes her as the author of a children’s book she likes to read to Kim. The two women hit it off. Eventually, Ruthanne hints that the other women she has met in Stepford aren’t quite as warm and welcoming. Joanna quickly insists that it’s not because Stepford is racist but because of how strange the women are, going on to explain her and Bobbie’s theories.
Themes
That weekend is complete chaos for Joanna as she tries to get her kids and Bobbie’s son to behave. By the end of the day on Sunday, she’s deeply relieved to see Bobbie and Dave coming up to the front door to pick up their son. They both look very good, prompting Joanna to conclude that they really needed the alone time. At one point, there’s a brief pause in the conversation where Bobbie would usually say something funny, but she doesn’t say anything. Joanna doesn’t think much of this and bids farewell to Bobbie and Dave.
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When Bobbie goes to kiss Walter goodbye on the cheek, Walter hesitates for a moment, as if he doesn’t want to kiss her. After they’re gone, Joanna asks Walter why he hesitated, and he claims it’s because he thinks kisses on the cheek are showy and pointless. Either way, they both agree that Bobbie looks better than they’ve ever seen her. In fact, Joanna is so impressed by how rejuvenated her friend seems that she says perhaps she and Walter should have their own weekend alone. Walter agrees. They plan to do so after the holidays.
Two days pass. Joanna doesn’t hear from Bobbie, which is strange because she usually calls every day. Finally, Joanna calls her and is somewhat put off by the way her friend sounds: sort of “flat” and distracted. She asks if Bobbie went house-hunting, but Bobbie says she went shopping instead, prompting Joanna to wonder why she didn’t invite her. When they hang up, Joanna wonders if Bobbie and Dave smoked pot over the weekend—maybe that’s why Bobbie seems different. She brings it up with Walter, but he says she’s probably just tired from all the house hunting she has been doing. When Joanna suggests that Bobbie seemed strange on Sunday, he says he didn’t notice. “You’re not going to start in with that chemical business, are you?” he says.
The next day, Joanna goes to Bobbie’s. Bobbie apologizes for forgetting that they planned to get together—she has been busy. She invites Joanna inside and offers her a sandwich. Joanna notices that her friend looks as fresh and presentable as she did on Sunday, and that she must be wearing a push-up bra. Bobbie acknowledges that she has changed, saying that she realized she was being “sloppy and self-indulgent.” She adds that there’s no shame in being a “good homemaker,” especially since doing this is like contributing to Dave’s career, too. She has also decided to pay more attention to the way she looks. Joanna tries to shake Bobbie out of her apparent trance by saying that whatever they were afraid of has finally gotten her, but Bobbie disagrees, saying that she was foolish earlier and that Stepford is a very healthy place to live.
Themes
Joanna rushes home and calls Walter at the office. She’s determined to move out of Stepford as soon as possible, but she can’t find their banking information to figure out how much money they have. Walter tells her that he has the banking materials because he has been buying some stocks on Dave’s advice. He’s distressed by Joanna’s urgency and demands that she refrain from doing anything until he gets home—but she hangs up and calls the real estate agent, telling her to find out the lowest possible asking price for a house she recently saw with Bobbie. She also calls her old broker and says that she might want to relist their house.
Themes
Walter is angry when he gets home, thinking that Joanna is blowing things out of proportion. But Joanna insists that whatever happens to women in Stepford clearly takes four months to kick in—that’s what happened to both Charmaine and Bobbie. Joanna moved to Stepford one month after Bobbie, meaning that she only has a month before she’ll lose herself. But Walter says there’s nothing in Stepford that makes women change, arguing that Charmaine and Bobbie changed for other reasons: because they realized they had been lazy. What’s so wrong with Bobbie starting to care about her looks, anyway? Walter thinks it wouldn’t hurt Joanna to do the same.
Joanna is taken aback by Walter’s comment about her looks, and she wonders if he wanted to move to Stepford because somebody told him she would change. Walter denies this accusation and instead says that he’s not moving, though he’s trying to understand things from Joanna’s perspective. Still, he thinks she’s being “irrational” and “a little hysterical,” so he wants her to see a psychiatrist. He’ll consider moving if Joanna visits a therapist to confirm she isn’t having a mental breakdown. Walter proposes a therapist, but Joanna refuses because he’s part of the Men’s Association and his wife is just like all the other women in Stepford.
As she talks to Walter, Joanna realizes that both Charmaine and Bobbie changed after spending a weekend alone with their husbands. She now fears that this is what will happen to her, but Walter reminds her that she was the one to propose that they spend a weekend alone after the holidays. Still, she’s apprehensive. But she eventually agrees to see a psychiatrist of her own choosing.
Themes
Joanna books an appointment with Dr. Margaret Fancher, whose practice is several towns over. She leaves her children at Bobbie’s house when she goes to the appointment, briefly going inside and asking Bobbie what happened to her—but Bobbie says she has just started caring about her appearance a bit more, though it looks like she has lost about ten pounds in the course of a week. She also speaks appreciatively about Dave and a particular cleaning product, encouraging Joanna to hurry out of the house.
Dr. Margaret Fancher is a kind, sympathetic woman who listens patiently to everything Joanna has to say. She doesn’t discount Joanna’s feelings, recognizing how unfulfilling it must feel to live in a town where all of the women are only interested in doing housework and pleasing their husbands. But she isn’t so sure about Joanna’s various theories—she doesn’t think there’s anything strange going on. Rather, she just thinks Joanna is having a difficult time adjusting to a more domestic lifestyle than the one she led in New York City. She suggests that Joanna is torn between “the old conventions on the one hand, and the new conventions of the liberated woman on the other.” Urging her not to move just yet, she prescribes her some tranquilizers.
Joanna goes straight from therapy to the library, where she goes into the basement to look through back issues of the local paper. She spends hours down there, flipping through the “Notes on Newcomers” section of each paper and also looking out for any mention of the Men’s Association or the (now disbanded) Women’s Club in Stepford. As she goes through the papers, she sees just how many of the women she now knows in Stepford were deeply involved in the Women’s Club.
Themes
But the Stepford Women’s Club disbanded around the time Dale Coba and his wife moved to town from California, where—Joanna learns in a “Notes on Newcomers”—he used to work at Disneyland to help make the lifelike presidential robots, which are capable of moving and talking like humans. When she makes this discovery, Joanna starts uncontrollably laughing. She laughs so much that she attracts the librarian’s attention, who tells her the library is closing. Joanna walks out of the building still laughing.
Themes
When Joanna gets home, Walter is angry and worried because she didn’t call to say she was at the library. He thought she had gotten in a crash, but she brushes off his concern. She informs him that she will be taking the kids to the city right away—she won’t spend another minute in Stepford. She’ll call Walter in a couple days, or perhaps she’ll have a lawyer contact him. She then tells him that she knows what he and Dale Coba—and everyone else in the Men’s Association—are up to: they’re turning their wives into robots. Walter denies this, apparently finding the claim absurd. Still, Joanna calls out for the kids so she can take them away, but Walter informs her that he sent them away for the night.
Themes
Joanna feels as if Walter has moved up their weekend alone together. Terrified, she tries to leave the house, but Walter blocks her path, making it impossible for her to go downstairs. She asks him what Dale Coba and the other men do with their real wives once they create the robots—do they burn them or throw them in a pond? Her questions only make Walter all the more determined to get her to lie down, saying he won’t let her out of the house when she’s talking like this. Finally, she agrees and goes into the bedroom, though she locks the door and refuses to let him in, saying that she wants some time to rest on her own. He agrees to leave her be and goes downstairs.
Joanna dresses in the warmest clothes she can find and then opens the window, planning to slip out and make a break for it. But the storm window won’t budge. As she tries to figure out how to leave, she hears Walter dialing the phone downstairs and fears that he’s calling Dale Coba. She creeps to the top of the stairs and hears him say, “…not sure I can handle her myself…” While he’s preoccupied, she dashes down the hall and out the door, sprinting toward the dark woods.
Themes
Joanna’s plan is to make her way to Ruthanne Henry’s house, since she’s the only other woman in Stepford who hasn’t been turned into a robot. But getting there will take a long time on foot, especially in the snow. Plus, she has to hide every time a car goes by, as she suspects that Walter and the other men will be looking for her. Sure enough, when one car goes by, Joanna realizes that somebody is shining a flashlight out of the window. As she makes her way through the neighborhood, she eventually gets cornered by three men with flashlights, who chase her into a dead-end. She has a broken branch in her hand and threatens to hit them if they approach, but they insist—with kind voices—that they’re only there to help her.
Themes
The three men sound very sympathetic. They say that Walter told them what Joanna thinks is going on—they’re there to assure her that nobody’s making robots out of women! They note that Joanna must think they’re all a lot smarter than they are, but she points out that many of them work in advanced technical fields; they’re the people who put a man on the moon, she says. But they just chuckle, asking each other if any of them put a man on the moon. None of them have. Plus, if they knew how to make such realistic robots, they point out, they surely would have found some way to profit from the idea by now. But Joanna thinks that maybe turning their wives into robots is just a test run.
Finally, one of the men asks if it would help Joanna to see one of these supposed “robots” bleed. Would she change her mind if one of the women nicked their finger and blood came out? Joanna thinks for a moment and then admits that this would help dispel her fears. She thus agrees to follow the men at a distance—while shining her flashlight on them so they know she’s still there—until they get to Bobbie’s house. One of the men runs ahead to make sure Bobbie is home and to ask if she’d be willing to lightly cut her finger.
Themes
On the walk to Bobbie’s, Joanna realizes she has been wrong all along. She can just tell that Bobbie will bleed. If the men had wanted to kill her, they already would have. She just feels cold and tired now, and she thinks about how it’s clearly a coincidence that Dale Coba worked on the robots at Disneyland. She feels slightly embarrassed for descending into “madness,” and she plans to follow up with Dr. Margaret Fancher when all of this is over. She feels guilty for distrusting Walter, too.
Joanna and the men reach Bobbie’s house. The men say they’ll wait outside while Joanna goes inside with Bobbie, but Joanna backtracks and says Bobbie doesn’t have to cut herself. Still, the men encourage her to follow through with the plan. They say that it’d be good to completely put her doubts to rest, just to make sure she doesn’t start wondering again later.
Themes
Joanna goes into the kitchen with Bobbie, who is perfectly happy to help put her friend’s mind at ease. As they talk, loud rock music plays from upstairs. When Joanna asks what it is, Bobbie says Dave must be listening to music with the kids. She stands over the sink with a huge knife—so big that Joanna says she’ll accidentally cut her whole hand off, but Bobbie says she’ll be careful. She then tells Joanna to get closer. Again, Joanna says Bobbie doesn’t have to cut herself, adding that she’s going to see a therapist, which will ease her mind more than seeing her friend use the knife. Still, Bobbie urges her to come forward, saying, “The men are waiting.”
Themes
