![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Stepford-Wives.jpg\")
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On August 26 1970, 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in a\u00a0Women\u2019s Strike<\/a>. Organised by feminist activist Betty Friedan, the march highlighted the fact women still performed the vast majority of domestic work.<\/p>\n The Women\u2019s Liberation Movement wanted many things in 1970, but one of the most important was freedom from \u201cunpaid domestic servitude at home<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n Half a century later, most women are still waiting for their freedom. Women still do\u00a0far more<\/a>\u00a0domestic and care labour than men.<\/p>\n Since the 1960s, more and more women have taken up paid employment, but a problem remains: how would their unpaid domestic work be replaced?<\/p>\n Ira Levin\u2019s novel\u00a0The Stepford Wives<\/a>\u00a0offered a bleak answer: women themselves would be replaced. Levin powerfully dramatised women\u2019s suburban alienation and men\u2019s resistance to feminist change.<\/p>\n The Stepford Wives begins with Joanna Eberhart, a wife, mother and photographer, who moves with her family from Manhattan to the suburban town of Stepford. She is interested in tennis, photography and\u00a0women\u2019s liberation<\/a>. Joanna and her husband Walter have a happy, respectful marriage. Yet Walter joins the mysterious Stepford Men\u2019s Association, where the men of the town spend their evenings.<\/p>\n Joanna finds it hard to make friends in their new home: all the women of Stepford are too busy cooking and cleaning. In the 1975 film adaptation (directed by Bryan Forbes, with a screenplay by William Goldman), Joanna and her only friend, fellow newcomer Bobbie, begin a consciousness-raising group \u2013 designed to raise women\u2019s feminist awareness \u2013 which is derailed by an intense discussion of the merits of\u00a0Easy-On Spray Starch<\/a>.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/wifesstrike.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDramatising women\u2019s suburban alienation<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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