S
Sophia
Guest
STEPFORD WIFE: YOU'VE COME THE WRONG WAY, BABY
Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/18980/
EXCERPT:
Claire, once an over
achieving geneticist,
yearns for the halcyon days when a woman was not required
to choose her own identity
nor negotiate the consequences of her choices.
Her descent into pathology is sp
arked by what she sees
as the one such consequence of her professional success --
catching Mike and her research assistant in flagrante,
so to speak.
As she surveys the shambles of her life
(and the body of her dead husband across the breakfast table),
Claire has a veritable epiphany.
She reconstructs Mike not as a devoted, f
aithful husband but a smooth, manipulative alpha robot.
Oozing old-fashioned machismo,
he is just the right candidate to persuade other men
of the wisdom of reclaiming their position as head of the household.
The Stepford Way is not about oppressing women, Claire assures us, but recognizing our "true happiness."
It helps us find our way back to an Eden,
where both men and women know their place
and are content to r
emain within it.
Step one is, of course, getting those uppity wives back into the kitchen
where they belong.
Once the women start baking cookies and serving up sex on demand,
it is o
nly a matter of time before men step into their assigned role
of provider and protector.
Much as we may want to pretend otherwise,
this vision of old-fashioned domestic bliss
is not just a male-constructed fantasy.
In her conviction that the road to fulfillment lies in reclaiming
our much-maligned feminine mystique,
Claire is no different than Dr. Laura
or the advocates
of the "surrendered wife."
Nor are these ideas the preserve of low-brow talk show hosts
and self-help gurus catering to Middle America.
Caitlin Flanagan, the newly appointed staff writer at the New Yorker
and one of the most visible and erudite commentators
on all things female,
waxes just as rhapsodic about the lost domestic virtues
of the "traditional mar
riage."
As the resident book critic at The Atlantic Monthly in 2003,
Flanagan wrote approvingly of the '50s housewife who
"understood that in addition to ironing her hus
band's shirts
and cooking the Sunday roast,
she was -- with some regularity --
going to have relations with the man of the house."
For Flanagan, the Wife, in the most old-fashioned sense of the word,
represents all that is good and worthy about femininity.
This icon of feminine virtue is not to be confused with "high-achieving women" who "are going to get exactly what they want, and damn the expense or the human toll."
Whatever the probl
em at hand -- sexless marriages or exploited nannies -- Flanagan can be relied on to trace the source of the malaise back to feminism.
And it is the sign of our times that while feminism is virtually unmentionable in Hollywood, it can be repeatedly invoked and demonized in some of our most influential magazi
nes.
The working women in Flanagan's writings sound a lot like the
"castrating Manhattan career b*tches"
that the Stepford men are eager to replace.
More to
the point, her version of the '50s woman
is just as mechanical and self-constructed as Claire's robots.
This is the "rare woman -- the good wife, and the happy one -- ...
who maintains her husband's sexual interest
and who returns it in full measure,"
mostly by virtue of "orderly and successful housekeeping."
It's perhaps why Flanagan inevitably relies on how-to
(please your husband, save your marriage, etc.)
manuals to make her arguments than real women themselves.
But to attack Flanagan and her ilk as
misogynists is to miss the point --
and reinforce her recent claim that feminists
"are very much like adolescents, they get hysterical so often."
Better to understand her as someone much like Claire,
who repr
esents the part of us that wants to throw in the towel,
to give up the good fight in the hope that surrender will bring a better,
more perfect happiness than the contradictions a
nd confusion of a partly-liberated life.
Thanks to the women's movement,
we have more freedom to choose,
but these choices remain difficult
as we negotiate the arduous business of both wanting and doing it all,
be it motherhood, career, love, or pleasure.
What's more, we've exchanged a rigid yet uncomplicated definition
of the good life for the pervasive anxiety about doing the "right" thing.
So no wonder some of us want to turn back the clock.
We want to believe, like Claire or a newly surrendered wife,
that fulfillment is just a batch of cookies away.
Even Nicol
e Kidman, one of the most powerful women in Hollywood,
hopes, as she put it to Red magazine,
"someone will come along and sweep me off my feet.
Then I would stop doing the career thing as much."
Not surprisingly, she doesn't want a man who will do the dishes but
"who would step in front of someone and
take a bullet."
It isn't then far-fetched to imagine that the Stepford wives are indeed an expression of a woman's desire.
The truth, sad or otherwise,
is that the Stepford Way is just another kind of snake oil.
The good news is that at least some of us now get to choose to stay at home
or go to work,
play the traditional wife or the liberated kind.
Whatever we do, however, there is no guarantee of happiness,
there never was --
how much ever the hardy band of anti-feminists may insist to the contrary.
The Stepford paradise is not just irretrievably lost,
it does not exist --
except perhaps in the next issue of the New Yorker,
courtesy of Caitlin Flanag
an.
Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of Alternet.