#11: Stepford, Connecticut — The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
Levin published this in 1972 and set it in a commuter suburb of extraordinary cleanliness and domestic perfection. The women of Stepford are beautiful, compliant, and entirely focused on their husbands’ comfort. New resident Joanna Eberhart notices this and begins investigating, which is precisely the kind of initiative that Stepford cannot accommodate. The horror is not that the replacements are robotic but that several of the husbands appear to find the original women’s interiority and ambition genuinely inconvenient.
