The Stepford Wives

The Stepford Wives is a 1972 satirical novel by Ira Levin, often described as feminist horror. It concerns Joanna Eberhart, a photographer, wife and young mother who suspects that something in the town of Stepford is turning intelligent women into compliant wives, and it is written as a domestic story that becomes something else.

Joanna and her family move from New York, and she joins a small group of women who have arrived recently. The wives who have lived in Stepford longer are perfect at housekeeping and uninterested in anything else, and the novel follows Joanna's attempts to interest her friends in what she has noticed, while the men of the town meet regularly at an association whose purpose is never stated.

Levin writes a short, controlled horror story whose satire is aimed at the expectations placed on women in the period, and the title entered the language as a shorthand for the same idea. It remains one of the most quoted satires of American suburbia, and its shortness is part of why it has lasted.