A gendered walking tour of post-war suburbia

This walking tour explores post-war American suburbia as a gendered stage through John Cheever’s The Swimmer (Cheever, 1964) and Bryan Forbes’s film adaption of the novel The Stepford Wives (Forbes, 1975) by Ira Levin.  Suburban space is treated as something that symbolises and shapes the characters. Reading the spaces through a gendered lens reveals how masculine autonomy is sustained through illusion while women’s independence is constrained.