When somebody wants to insult a certain type of complicit passiveness, they can casually call the person in question a “Stepford Wife.” And anyone who makes this assertion about a person who seems like a social zombie can do so without any fear of being misunderstood. For the past 50 years, a “Stepford Wife” came to mean a brainwashed, vacant person, who is being controlled by someone else, usually a man.
But the funny thing is, this phrase has had an impact on the lexicon, and on culture at large even if people wielding the phrase have never seen the movie from which it came. Just like “jumping the shark” derives from an episode of Happy Days that most people probably have never even glimpsed, the social crime of being a Stepford Wife comes from the 1975 film The Stepford Wives, a somewhat underrated movie that managed to change both the horror and science fiction genres simultaneously. Fifty years later, it's still a great, haunting movie, full of deft tricks that genre film and TV have been trying to replicate for years.
