The Feminist V. The Housewife

"The book reveals that feminist scholarship on soap opera was a significant site of which the identity 'feminist intellectual' was produced in dialogue with her imagined other, the soap opera watching housewife."
-description of The Feminist, The Housewife, and the Soap Opera by Charlotte Brunsdon

which makes me think of a favorite film, The Stepford Wives (1975)

The film is a battle between two friends (played by pretty Katharine Ross and the incomparable Paula Prentiss) against the robotic wives of Stepford. Ross and Prentiss wear tight denim overalls and bitch in the kitchen while snacking on whiskey and ring dings. The Stepford Wives, on the other hand, like to make casseroles and scrub floors until their husbands interrupt them for a quick romp in the kitchen.


The film is fascinating because it's most sexist while trying to offer a "feminist" view. The Wives' knowledge of how to please their husbands is represented as a gross joke and a fantasy; it accidentally illustrates a simultaneous male worship, dependence and fear of femininity. While Ross and Prentiss, as their opposites, are shown as whiny dabblers. "Tell me," the Ross character whines to a male gallery dealer about her photographs, "Are they any good?" The free women are allowed no mastery in any sphere, in the professional world nor in their own homes.



Worse, the masculine and feminine sides that exist in any real woman are made into two types of women, and into enemies.

When Prentiss's loud-mouthed tomboy character finally loses her personality and converts into a Perfect Wife Persona, Ross stabs her in the crotch while she's at the stove, just to see if she's real. According to imdb:
"Katharine Ross found the scene where she stabs Paula Prentiss so disturbing that director Bryan Forbes ended up shaving the back of his hand and doing the scene for her instead."

Paula Prentiss was perfect to play this role. She's so feminine and so boyish both, always so yin-yang. No one has been so gorgeous and also joked as wildly about her beauty and its effect on those who--for some reason--fall under under her spell.