breakdown: the stepford wives

ira levin really is the "swiss watchmaker" of the suspense novel

Is Ira Levin a feminist icon? I mean this as a sincere question — I don’t know much about him, beyond having read Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives.

But it’s interesting to me that in the ‘60s and ‘70s his horror focused so much on the gaslighting of women as its foundation. The Stepford Wives is clearly inspired by The Feminine Mystique by Betty F…