When Floral Prints Attack

~ Laura

I finally got around to watching The Stepford Wives this weekend. Nice work by Nicole Kidman. It’s always good to see Jon Lovitz working. The movie is a bit of a mess, as the critics have pointed out, but what bothered me most was its elitism.

Joanna Eberhardt, the Nicole Kidman character, is a big TV executive in the city making a ton of money and wearing chic black outfits. After she’s fired when one of her reality show characters goes bizerk, she and her family moves to Stepford, CT. Joanna meets the women of this town who dress in floral, pouffy dresses topped with Barbie hair. She’s horrified.

Not only do the Stepford wives dress badly, but they do THEIR OWN GROCERY SHOPPING. Horrors! With frozen smiles, they wheel their carts through the aisles (still without children) and buy eggs.

In the Ira Levin book, the pre-robotic women cleaned their homes and raised their children, they just did it badly. In this movie remake, the pre-robotic women had high powered careers and farmed out their duties to maids and nannies.

Is this the new ideal? A life without domestic responsibilities. Where the boring tasks of sale shopping and cleaning the microwave are passed onto others. A lifestyle that few can afford.

Russell Arben Foxwrote last week about his brother in law and his family who take great pride in the simple life. They take on jobs that most of us have delegated to others such as growing fruits and vegetables and knitting. As much as I find all that fascinating, learning to weave my own yarn doesn’t sound all that simple. I would rather use my time doing more noble pursuits — blogging and drinking — and delegate the scarf making to the little elves at Target.

I guess what we delegate and what we do is kind of arbitrary. But this movie suggests that the movement to delegate is growing.

In the movie, the men force their wives to assume the job of nanny and maid for unspecified reasons. Behind the scenes and covered by two way mirrors, I wonder if the servants were really the ones pushing the buttons and laughing as their employers do the work for a change.

Published by Laura

5 thoughts on “When Floral Prints Attack”

  2. The ‘little elves at Target’ are in fact young Chinese women working twelve hour days for under a dollar an hour. At some point, our wages won’t be very different from those of Chinese workers – we’d best hope that it’s at least mostly because their wages go up.

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  3. I remember reading an article a few years ago about a Nike factory in Vietnam employing 12 year olds for under a dollar an hour. Do you know what those 12 year olds would be doing otherwise? Not everyone gets to go to school so they would probably be working in the fields for 12 hours a day for about a dollar A DAY. Cost of living makes a huge difference. There was also a similar story on NPR about kids in South America working in factories in hazardous conditions. Turns out that when the labor laws were changed to prevent the kids from being exploited, they had to turn to working on banana farms in far more dangerous conditions for far less money.

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  4. You know, working for wages outside the home is not an ‘elite’ thing to do. Rich women do it, poor women do it, and poor women have less choice about it than rich. Once you have both parents working fulltime outside the home, then they will delegate childcare somehow — easily for the well off, doing whatever they can manage for the poor — so delegating childcare is not ‘elitist’ or a class marker, it just means that both parents work.
    I haven’t seen the new movie, but the old movie showed a very wealthy, upper middle class millieu, with provate tennis courts, etc. I can’t imagine why showing working women looks more elitist to you.

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