On Martha

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What I didn’t know about Martha Stewart could fill a Netflix documentary, so it’s a good thing they made Martha. She grew up Catholic, not well off, in the New Jersey suburbs, and is one of six children. The reason she’s a great gardener was that her cruel, bigoted father taught his children to do so to make up the difference in sustenance he couldn’t afford. She could cook because she watched her mother, a teacher, prepare meals for her big family. I understand why this wasn’t part of the Connecticut myth-making as I experienced it in my youth.

What I did know about Martha Stewart was what she wanted us to know: she could pipe a stunning wedding cake with Julia Child; her houses were gorgeous; her Entertaining is a classic of the domestic arts genre; and every recipe that went through the test kitchens of her media company was one I trust to work. She also wanted us to know that she didn’t think “good things” were only for wealthy people, and though the media mocked her line at Kmart, she claimed to have created it in order to make nicer housewares accessible (and, of course, earn millions). While all that Waspy perfectionism—not necessarily an act but a carefully constructed public persona—was bound to piss people off, in the end, the joke was on them.

There’s a narrative in the U.S. that most Americans don’t want nice things, don’t have time for nice things, or equate “nice things” with ease and convenience, not care and skill. Land of the fast, home of the cheap. Is this a Puritan thing—an embarrassment about real effort in pursuit of beauty and pleasure? Is this why it shouldn’t have surprised me that Martha is Catholic, that Ina is Jewish, that Julia went to France to find her pleasures? 

All of their successes prove the narrative wrong, and yet it persists. Regular women don’t have time! She’s making them feel like a failure, was said on Oprah about Stewart at her peak. To whom were they talking? Not the millions of people who were buying her books and magazines, or watching her on TV. Not the people who have caused Entertaining to be such a collector’s item that first editions are going for hundreds on eBay. (Mine is signed, but because I caught it before this wave of popularity, was maybe $5.)

What it sounds like to me is the protection of a neoliberal status quo that takes a paternalistic perspective on how working people should spend their time and money: It’s dangerous for regular people to imagine it possible that the bread could be freshly baked, the fragrant roses just cut. Stewart made her billions, funnily enough, on getting people to desire just that.

Watching the Martha documentary this week reminded me that domesticity is a powerful thing, living and lifestyle are powerful things, and they can be wielded for the right reasons: not in service to making billions of dollars, or the individual nuclear family, or a fundamentalist tradwife homesteading fantasy, but to a more convivial way of living. “Living is limitless,” she says of her brand. She wanted the diner waitress and the woman with a mansion in Greenwich to be able to make a stunning table; I hope to see them side by side, aprons coated in flour, in the community bakery.

I’m far less interested in whether Stewart herself is a good person and more compelled by the narrative around a woman making a business built upon domesticity while not being sunny, nice, inviting. The lesson that domesticity itself is something that can be be harnessed for purposes beyond the family home, beyond care and service—we know this, and we know that it’s politically significant, but because of the conditions in which most housework is done, it requires constant repeating. I didn’t expect to be reminded of it while watching Martha—I just wanted to zone out for a bit—but I do wonder if the contrast of “ruthless bitch who’s really good at making scones” will drive the point home to people who need to hear it: These skills aren’t and cannot be synonymous with motherly care or wifely duty.

My second viewing notes.

The same commentators who kept expressing incredulity and mockery at the notion of a woman making her name as a businesswoman on domesticity imagined that Stewart could never recover from a brief jail sentence. In the early ’00s, she was found guilty of lying about what wasn’t insider trading by then–U.S. Attorney James Comey, who (the documentary suggests, and it rings true) wanted to make a name for himself off the case. Indeed, the press reveled in her conviction and she was cut off by rich friends—perhaps Ina herself—dumped by a boyfriend of 15 years, and lost her company.

And yet upon her release, the public didn’t care, just as no one cared when she got divorced: She built a new audience, let loose on TV with Snoop Dogg and on social media, and retains authority in her domain. The documentary gives her space to humanize her fellow inmates, and briefly admonish the inhuman conditions they were and are forced to endure. While she’s by no means perfect—and the documentary amply demonstrates that—she has worked her ass off, took her punches well, and is funny even when she’s arrogant. These are traits people generally respect (especially in men). Stewart can’t really be mocked in quite the same way today because she’s got a clearer sense of humor about herself, but it’s also because she doesn’t occupy such a central cultural role anymore.

In the current fragmented media landscape, there’s no one doyenne of domesticity who reigns. Everyone chooses their own favorites in the parasocial olympics, and so to understand the kitchen in the U.S., we keep looking back. Maybe we need to look at each other, talk to each other, cook with each other—look sideways, not up. How can we harness the power of domesticity for a better future? This is the question that I need to keep top of mind right now. Martha reminded me.