In Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives, and its many adaptations, Joanna Eberhart, a housewife living in Connecticut discovers a dark secret about the other wives in the neighborhood: the women are being replaced by robots built by their husbands.

The novel has been described as a “feminist horror” exploring themes of submission and dominance, heteronormative gender roles, domesticity, and the male backlash to second-wave feminism.

Here we see a seminal work of feminist science fiction literature that inspired a 1975 film, a television sequel, a television remake, a gender-bent version, and a truly awful 2004 film (with, albeit, a great cast but a terrible interpretation of the original novel). Evidently, the story of women losing their humanity to a combination of misogyny and technological development has captured audiences since the novel’s initial release. And even though the Stepford Wives may not have the cultural interest today that it had between 1975 and 2004, its core idea runs through much of modern sci-fi, the most recent of which being Don’t Worry Darling.

To understand the intersection of women’s liberation and science fiction, we have to look at the roots of the science fiction movement. There’s quite a bit of debate about who actually “invented” science fiction, but this title most often goes to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Shelley was concerned with themes of guilt and loss inspired by her own experiences. Still, most importantly, the novel explores what it means to be human, a question so important that Frankenstein has become one of the most ubiquitous and adapted characters in literary history. But besides being inspired by deeply human questions and themes, Shelley also took inspiration from technological development, and the fear those developments created.

Before writing Frankenstein, Shelley and her husband apparently heard stories of a real alchemist who wanted to figure out how to bring bodies back to life and was rumored to conduct experiments using human and animal body parts. While we can’t be certain whether these stories directly inspired Shelley, there is a clear connection between real scientific progress and the fear of its clash with morality. This connection forms the basis of science fiction, but it also creates a unique opportunity to use fears of scientific development as a means to satirize, comment on, or criticize dehumanizing systems.

This opportunity also lays the foundation for adjacent movements in science fiction, like Afrofuturism, which uses sci-fi and speculative fiction to examine worlds in which technology and fantasy have enabled black liberation. While most often associated with literature (such as the works of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler), visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers have all contributed to this aesthetic and artistic movement, further confirming sci-fi’s unique intersection with liberation and equity movements.

This isn’t to say science fiction, and speculative fiction as a whole, have inherently radical tendencies, as many sci-fi and fantasy stories often feature misogynistic or dehumanizing tropes. But because sci-fi allows for more creative freedom in worldbuilding and the ability to imagine a completely different society, there exists more possibility for rejecting existing hierarchies or examining current inequity.

As a genre, therefore, sci-fi can be one of the best modes of storytelling for imagining future avenues for equality, or showcasing the horrors of oppression. The sub-genre of sci-fi horror, to which The Stepford Wives and Don’t Worry Darling both arguably belong, argues that scientific or technological developments don’t inherently further liberation, but rather create newer, more advanced kinds of inequality.

The fear these films are based in, moreover, is completely reasonable; technological developments throughout history have advertised themselves as a way to make life easier while still upholding existing power structures. The Stepford Wives, for example, has been reevaluated in recent years as a response to the advent of prescription psychiatric medication. In the 1960s and 1970s, women were told that the answer to their discontent (which was based in systemic oppression and lack of autonomy), could be fixed with sedatives, rather than activism or the feminist movement. In this case, as Levin points out in his novel, technological development was weaponized against women in order to keep them subservient (and robotic), thereby resisting the efforts of second-wave feminists.

Before the era of prescription tranquilizers, institutionalization, and later lobotomy, both provided ways to silence women who spoke out, were deemed “too emotional” or assertive, or otherwise defiant of traditional gender roles. These women were treated as problems to be solved, and advancements in medicine and technology offered solutions, although terrible, to these problems.

While lobotomy and institutionalization (or a similar practice known as rest-cures, the treatment given to the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper) have been long regarded as ineffective, inhumane, and unethical, technology being weaponized against women is not over.

Social media, influencers, and the expansion of advertising have arguably contributed to creating an unattainable yet ubiquitous beauty standard for women, creating a Sisyphean task to which women are called to direct their energy, time, and money. While some will argue that it’s a choice (and even a feminist one at that) to direct one’s time towards the neverending task of self-improvement, the fact is that technology has made it easier than ever before to tell women exactly what they should look like and how they should spend their time. Whether it is an active or liberating choice to participate in that system is up for debate.

While Don’t Worry Darling has been a film steeped in controversy since before its release, it’s still worthy of examining as another entry into the Stepford Wives sub-genre. Whether or not it succeeds in its social commentary on feminism, the tradwife trend, and incels (with director Olivia Wilde even confirming that the character Frank is based on right-wing media personality Jordan Peterson) is a separate discussion, but the ideas at the core of the film prove the fears Levin and subsequent authors tried to tackle are still very much alive.

Although Mary Shelley is often considered the “inventor” of science fiction, the first to coin the term was publisher Hugo Gernsback, who considered the perfect sci-fi story to be “75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science.” The fundamental aspect of science fiction is its humanity, the tangible fear, excitement, and emotion that makes any story worth reading. Because of this, the genre offers the perfect springboard for representing the unique oppression made possible by technological development, and remains just as useful today as it did fifty years ago.