The Many Contradictions of Martha Stewart
7 min read
By the time Martha Stewart rose to fame, family life in the United States looked very different than it had during her childhood. American mothers had entered the workforce en masse, and when Stewart’s first book was published, in 1982, many women were no longer instructing their daughters on the finer points of homemaking fundamentals like cooking meals from scratch or hosting holiday gatherings. Stewart’s meticulous guides to domestic life ended up filling a maternal vacuum for many of her fans, and she inspired both devotion and envy. Oprah Winfrey, no stranger to hard work herself, once summed up the ire that many people felt about Stewart: “Who has the time for all of this? For every woman who makes a complicated gingerbread house, a million don’t even have the time to bake a cookie.”
At a moment when American women were already feeling the exhaustion of the second shift, Stewart seemed to suggest that they toil overtime to beautify their second work environment too. But despite being most famous as a homemaker, an occupation usually associated with mothers, Stewart would later appear ambivalent about motherhood itself. Before her daughter was born, when Stewart was 24, “I thought it was a natural thing,” she says in Martha, a new Netflix documentary about her life and career. “It turns out it’s not at all natural to be a mother.”
Early in the documentary, an off-camera speaker—Stewart is the only on-camera interviewee—refers to her as “the original influencer.” The label emphasizes how she shaped domestic life and purchasing trends decades before the advent of Instagram or TikTok; as one friend says, Stewart “was the first woman that saw the marketability of her personal life.” Archival images of a young Stewart exude the charming, homespun domesticity that many social-media creators now emulate. We see Stewart stooped low in her gardens, then feeding chickens in her “palais du poulet”—the French name she gave her coop (“palace of the chicken”). That visual would be right at home on the vision boards of modern influencers who broadcast their nostalgic visions of Americana to millions of followers.
But Stewart’s words, whether spoken directly to the camera or read from private letters, tell a story that diverges from tidy fantasies. Part of why Martha raises such interesting questions about motherhood, family life, and domestic labor is Stewart’s apparent doubts about the value of all three. Throughout the documentary, she seems to be confronting her own conflicting beliefs, but clearly, business—not the art of homemaking—has been the essential pursuit of Stewart’s life. And her single-minded focus on expanding her empire is what ultimately attracted the most criticism as she transformed into a gargantuan brand.
In 1987, the same year that Stewart published Weddings, a glossy guide about how to host the perfect matrimonial celebration, she and her husband separated after he had an affair with a younger woman. While Stewart promoted a book about celebrating love, she wrestled with her family’s private dysfunction—and when rumors of the affair became public, Stewart worried about the professional implications of her husband appearing absent from her carefully curated life. At one point in the film, Stewart advises young wives on how to react to their husband’s philandering: “Look at him, [say] ‘He’s a piece of shit,’ and get out of it. Get out of that marriage,” she says defiantly, cautioning today’s women not to stay, like she did, and try to work things out. (The two divorced a few years later, in 1990.)
Only when the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, asks about an affair that she had earlier in the marriage does Stewart concede her own actions. “It was just nothing,” she says, before decrying the messiness of divorce. “I would never have broken up a marriage for it.” It’s one thing to cheat in private, in other words, but she frowns at the public spectacle of dissolving a family unit. The moment draws attention to how tightly Stewart has attempted to control her image—and underscores how much she appears to resent the ways her accomplishments (and her misdeeds) have been judged in relation to her gender. In 1999, Stewart, then the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. The following year, Joan Didion wrote in a New Yorker essay that the “dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”
Nearly 25 years later, Martha makes the case that Stewart was subject to different rules than her male counterparts because she disturbed conventional views of women in the corporate world. “She was ruthless,” one commentator says. “In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But, you know, for a woman—you know, she was a bitch.” That may be an interesting place to begin a look back at a controversial mogul, but the documentary is light on specifics about Stewart’s perceived professional shortcomings, which have included criticism that she underpaid her staff while earning millions, berated them, and sold their work as her own. Instead, we get the vague sense that some people thought she was harsh and that others found her to be an exacting perfectionist. But unlike an earlier CNN docuseries on Stewart, Martha shies away from interrogating the details of such workplace accusations in favor of rehashing how multiple powerful men underestimated or outright disliked her.
The back half of the film brings the same gender-based analysis to Stewart’s infamous 2004 trial, which began with the FBI—led by a young, ambitious James Comey—implicating Stewart in a larger insider-trading scandal. When the agency failed to indict Stewart for illegal trading, it pursued a case against her for lying to the authorities during the investigation. In the end, Stewart served five months in prison after being found guilty of charges including obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Martha presents the case as one more example of the vitriol that Stewart had long endured. To her critics, Stewart’s case punctured the veneer of her propriety; even though her prison sentence had nothing to do with her corporation, it suggested an untoward explanation for her lifestyle company’s success, one that made Stewart’s relentless drive even more unpalatable. “I’m strict and I’m demanding and I’m all those good things that make a successful person,” Stewart says in an archival clip from around the time she was sentenced.
A more nuanced view does emerge in the documentary, which later addresses how Stewart changed while serving her sentence. Her time in a West Virginia prison prompted a serious reconsideration of her enterprise—and what kinds of homes it reflected. Stewart encountered incarcerated women who’d faced much harsher realities but also wanted to turn their varied talents into viable business ventures. Hearing the other women’s stories and looking over their business plans when they sought her advice made the experience bearable for Stewart—and partially recalibrated her approach to her own work. The homecoming speech she delivered to her staff shortly after being released focused heavily on shifting the why of their work. “I sense in the American public there is a growing need to preserve human connections,” Stewart said then, adding that she had come to understand “the need to honor many, many kinds of families.”
Nearly a decade after Stewart left prison wearing a poncho crocheted by a fellow inmate, the rise of girlboss feminism popularized a style of brash, demanding leadership that Stewart embodied before her conviction. Girlboss feminism has since fallen out of favor in the corporate world, but today’s lifestyle influencers, even those who espouse traditional values, are more emboldened to openly discuss the profit-making motive of their work—especially if they look the part of the doting maternal figure. Where Stewart often succeeded in branding herself as a businesswoman before a mother, many of the most popular homemaking-content creators seem to grasp that their children are the most important emblems of the hyper-feminine fantasy they’re putting on display. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert recently wrote in an essay about a new Hulu reality series following TikTok-famous Mormon women, “the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority.”
These women’s popularity—and, in some cases, their families’ economic viability—is inextricably tied to how they perform sacrificial motherhood, a role that Stewart never appeared interested in. But even though the business of domesticity has shifted in the years since Stewart’s IPO, her earlier successes unquestionably primed audiences for the advent of homemaking influencers whose approach to their public image differs radically from her own. Stewart laid a foundation for an entire genre of creators who generate income by giving followers a glimpse into their kitchen—not just with her recipes but with her sheer dedication to building a brand and her unwillingness to render her labor invisible. For all the controversies Stewart has weathered, she’s always seemed to project authority because she knows what she’s doing—and she’s always behaved as though everyone would be better off heeding the boss’s advice.
