Martha Stewart’s Empire Monetized More Than Just Domesticity
By Amanda Mull
November 14, 2024
After watching Martha, the new Netflix documentary charting the rise, fall and eventual redemption of Martha Stewart, it’s difficult not to walk away with the vague urge to do something—throw a party, bake a pie, arrange some flowers, check in on your enemies. That’s not the point of the film, which was released at the end of October, but Martha just has that effect on people.
Stewart’s appeal as a titan of DIY homemaking and lifestyle media has long been described as aspirational, an unsurprising assessment given that the world she’s spent decades building for her audience is one occupied by the moneyed elite. Stewart wasn’t born rich—as she tells it in Martha, she and her siblings learned to garden at their home in Nutley, New Jersey, because they needed more food than her parents could afford, and she became a teen model, because the money was better than what she could earn for the family by babysitting.
Once she moved to Manhattan in 1960 to attend Barnard College, wealth followed in pretty short order: She was introduced to an affluent classmate’s brother, married him and, after a stint as a Wall Street stockbroker, eventually decamped to Connecticut with her husband and baby daughter. (She was, of course, a great broker. “Martha was really better than everyone at everything,” Andy Monness, the man who hired her, says in one of the film’s voiceovers.)
If that description of Stewart’s initial ascent sounds glib, that’s not the intention. Stewart, for all the accusations over the years that she’s sold women a bill of goods about the ease of cultivating domestic bliss, doesn’t really project ease. What she radiates, both in the documentary and in her own enormous body of work, is proficiency. And it’s the enduring appeal of proficiency that’s made Stewart a singular figure in American domestic life.
One thing Martha makes clear is that Stewart believes in the pleasure and value of doing: in picking up skills, in perfecting old ones, in making an alternate Thanksgiving turkey wrapped whole in puff pastry just because no one can stop you. This is a woman who, at 19 years old, went to Europe on her honeymoon and didn’t just luxuriate in eating the continent’s finest foods and visiting its grandest gardens, but also took copious notes for when it was time to build her own life back home. It’s no coincidence that years later the elaborate centerpieces she constructed for her American fans resembled something painted by the Dutch old masters.
There are two ways to have faith in your own good taste: You can assume that it marks you as special and separates you from others, or you can regard it as an opportunity to share. Stewart is resolutely in the latter camp, and her belief that other people would enjoy doing the same things she did would turn out to be the defining insight of her bountiful career. As the food writer Alicia Kennedy wrote recently in her own reaction to the documentary, “there’s a narrative in the US 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.” The idea that working people don’t have any use for craft or beauty remains, though Stewart long ago proved it a fallacy. There is no class character inherent to the appreciation of a buttery pie crust or a freshly made bed topped with sumptuous linens.
Instead, Stewart built an empire on the idea that the only thing that could really stop anyone from appreciating those things was lack of knowledge, and knowledge was something that she could acquire and distribute. She never pretended to be anything other than the rich Connecticut homemaker she became, but she trusted the women who watched her shows and read her books to understand how to adapt her ideas and instruction to their own circumstances. Her faith in those women was well-placed, and they made her a billionaire not because she was a paragon of the traditional femininity to which they aspired—she was not, as evidenced by her own discomfort with emotions and her uneasy fit in the roles of wife and mother—but because her recipes and craft projects were instructionally sound, even if you didn’t have the skill to pull them off on the first try. (You should keep trying, of course. Martha would.)
Most lifestyle doyennes are pleasure merchants of one type or another—the internet’s nascent cohort of tradwife influencers, for example, are selling the pleasure of submission. What Stewart was selling was the pleasure of mastery, which she very obviously had achieved. She was, in the modern language of influencer marketing, authentic.
But mastery is not a happy ending in and of itself. Martha makes that much clear, and anyone who’s read a biography of a legendary athlete or artist knows that when combined, incredible ability and a tireless dedication to craft do not generally lead to satisfaction in a job well done. Perfectionism haunts the documentary and seems to haunt Stewart herself. It’s a trait she first attributes to her father, whom she clearly loved even though she also described him as both mean and a bigot. Former employees confirm Stewart’s reputation as an imperious boss, and the film itself shows old clips of her sniping at a kitchen assistant for using the wrong knife to slice an orange and being unable to stop herself from calling another past employee an idiot, even though she clearly knows that she shouldn’t finish the thought on camera. (She bails out of “idiot” halfway and goes with “nitwit.”)
This is the downside to building a business based on the idea that everyone could be just like you if they really tried. To be successful, you probably do have to be exceptional, which means that, fairly or not, you’re going to spend a lot of time disappointed in the perceived failures of those around you. (Naturally, Stewart hated Martha and voiced her criticisms to a New York Times journalist in detail. Among them: not enough hip-hop on the soundtrack.)
There is, of course, also a decent bit of hubris involved in becoming Martha Stewart, which fueled waves of backlash that have now mostly died down as she’s aged into the public-facing role of America’s glamorous great-aunt. It’s that hubris that lands you in federal prison for lying to the FBI or prompts you to tell a documentary filmmaker that your husband’s affair was unforgivable while dismissing your own, which you appear to have sort of forgotten about, as a silly little flight of fancy. But Martha doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to decide whether or not its subject is good or bad, likable or cold. Stewart has always been exactly what she promised her audience she would be, which is why we’re still talking about her.
