Martha Stewart: Domesticity and Dollars
Image courtesy of Nathan Congleton / TODAY.
From properly folding a fitted sheet and making perfect fried chicken (with the help of Snoop Dog) to posing for Instagram “thirst traps” at 81 years old, Martha Stewart can do it all. With her television show, blog, Instagram, magazine, TikTok, Pinterest, healthcare centers, YouTube channel, Facebook, new podcast, limited edition Triscuit flavor, weekly column, radio show, Food Network show, catalog operation, clothing and lifestyle lines, restaurant, and 50+ books, Stewart has earned a reputation as the “Hillary of homemaking, the Madonna of domesticity” — and has enormously profited. Her current net worth exceeds $400 million and, in 2001, was nearly a billion. Stewart’s two public images created by herself and the media — a curated glossy magazine domestic goddess and a divorced celebrity “bad girl of housekeeping” (Fraiman) — fit her into a much larger history of celebrity domesticity and media.
By developing a public persona separate from the magazine photoshoot and integrating it into her brand, Stewart has created new possible influences and values of domestic and lifestyle content. Using her expected societal position and behavior as a woman to profit and gain power, her image continues to endure and stay relevant thanks to a larger history of, and interest in, domestic platforms.
Stewart’s work is historically rooted in 19th-century domestic handbooks. Domestic authors and activists, such as Lydia Child (1802–1880) and Catharine Beecher (1800–1878), placed religion and politics in conversation alongside home advice, creating a community for middle-class women. Child, like Stewart, proudly and humbly self-identified as working with her hands while also rising to the upper, gentile class because of her career. She later sacrificed her position as the “national authority on homemaking” for her activism and abolitionist work. Child also stressed economizing in her books, creating a new market niche of domestic middle-class women, as domestic handbooks at the time were for women with servants and money.
Stewart’s steady rise mimics the humble beginnings of these women. Growing up in a Polish immigrant, working-class family, she made her start as a model. She then went on to graduate from Barnard, marry, work on Wall Street, start a catering business, and acquire fame before returning to Wall Street with the IPO of her company. Her biggest controversy — an insider trading scandal that resulted in a five-month prison sentence — is another important part of her rise, especially considering her fans' ambivalence towards it. Fans often claim that Stewart was held to a different standard because of her gender and was portrayed as cold or self-righteous — her personality and likeability playing a bigger role in her sentencing than they would for a man. After prison, Stewart appeared to make a full branding recovery, joking about the prison time and using it as a way to shift her image to appeal to new audiences, such as through her marketing campaigns and ties with rapper Snoop Dog. Prison has shown how Stewart can continue to be a “bad girl of Good Housekeeping,” keeping a career and audience.
The Martha Stewart Living show (1993–2004) and The Martha Stewart Show (2005–2012) were first produced in syndication and later picked up by the Hallmark Channel in 2010. Each episode of the latter of the two shows was segmented into sections typically focusing on cooking, gardening, decorating, crafts, or celebrity guests including Fran Drescher, Joan Rivers, Maya Angelou, and Lindsey Lohan. The Martha Stewart Living magazine, which ended print production in May 2022, was published by Dotdash Meredith. In 2022, nine out of the ten top editors were female.
Martha Stewart’s 2021 magazine readership of 6,400,000 — whose demographics parallel those of her past television audience — is 89% female and 71% home-owners. The median household income of readers is $77,754 and the median age is 56 years old. According to the 2022 media kit, the Martha Stewart brand “celebrates living” and attempts to “inspire and equip people to design the life they want.” Readers also serve as essential ad-targets, as 80% are their household’s principal shoppers and are “10% more likely than [the] U.S. average to influence others' purchase decisions.” This impressionable audience makes the idealized home and the for-sale objects that can potentially create it an especially important and lucrative business. As Stewart said in a Bloomberg interview about building a brand, “media leads and merchandise follows.” By cultivating an audience following and gaining their trust to make larger moves for profit, Stewart has been able to become more than just a business: she’s a brand.
The 90th episode of season two of The Martha Stewart Show features singer and diva-of-a-different-kind Diana Ross learning how to make Valentine’s Day paper crafts, taught, of course, by Martha Stewart. Throughout the episode, both Stewart and Ross continuously state that they are having “girl talk” and sharing secrets. This, combined with the overwhelmingly female audience and a short personal recap of Stewart’s weekend, creates a secluded, female-dominated atmosphere. The audience asks Stewart questions about her dating life — which she jokingly brushes off by saying she’ll be spending the holiday with her dogs. Continuing on, Stewart goess off on occasional tangents, including one about a drink she invented that involves a kiss.
But despite the warm atmosphere, Stewart’s godliness is unabashed. She speaks about her busy weekend of keynote speeches and a recent flight to Venice for a private Ross concert. Her privilege is not hidden, nor is her enjoyment of her life. But, to the audience, she is inspirational rather than braggy. A recent Instagram post prompted followers to comment on what Stewart had taught them. Almost all of the submissions were variations of “take pride in home keeping” and “see homemaking as an art, not a chore.” The comments on her TikTok page are filled with nothing but praise: “She is so iconic,” “I am proud to admit that I’m obsessed with Martha Stewart,” and “you’re such a baddie.” Stewart’s audience’s reception to her success shows how she has added value to female domestic success. To her audience, her busy schedule and constant new ventures are not a cash-grab, but important and valid work.
Stewart’s brand has been expanding to social media as of late. Her Instagram has 3.9 million followers and she posts multiple times a day. Her TikTok — created in April 2020, seemingly for a BIC lighter marketing campaign with Snoop Dog — has 1.5 million followers and 8.6 million likes. Recent videos include Stewart sharing corn recipes while a trending TikTok song about the vegetable plays, her “teenage dirtbag” pictures (another trend), and a story about how a nativity set (reproductions available on the Martha Stewart website for $200) was originally made in prison.
What complicates The Martha Stewart Show, setting it apart from its domestic predecessors and creating a new type of media in the genre, is the inclusion of Stewart’s off-camera life and the embrace of her wrong-doings. Stewart’s status as a profit-turned divorcee who has spent time in jail surprisingly strengthens her audience base, generating awe and admiration. As Professor Fraimain claims, Stewart’s “badness” lies in the pursuit of her own happiness over that of others and the aforementioned blatant enjoyment of her life. For a female audience — one that is potentially used to sacrificing happiness or hiding ambitions for others — seeing Stewart’s perseverance and continuation throughout crime, divorce, and criticism serves as wish fulfillment and empowerment.
Stewart also rejects the male gaze. As one male critic said in an online message board, she is “so frigid looking that my television actually gets cold when she’s on.” Stewart is unwilling and does not see the need to make a male audience comfortable. On her show, dating and romance are treated as peripheral to the domestic world and craft projects. After a commercial break on the Ross episode, it is teased that the women were talking about dating in their 60s. Still, they immediately resume their project, suggesting the lack of importance of the conversation. Stewart has created a women-centered space for her audience where men do not serve as important products or markets.
Joan Didion strongly defended Stewart in a 2000 New Yorker essay titled “The Promises Martha Stewart Made—and Why We Wanted to Believe Them,” saying it is a misconception that Stewart has tricked her audience into not seeing her profit ambition and that her work creates unrealistic expectations for women. Instead, Didion argues that Stewart’s audience sees her as a “comforting and obscurely inspirational experience.” Didion turns the criticism around, arguing Stewart’s opponents are “a little too intent on marginalizing a rather considerable number of women by making light of their situations and their aspirations.” Their hatred lies more with the makeup of the audience and their collective power than Stewart herself.
In her essay, Didion shows Stewart’s audience’s fanatic, occasionally parasocial relationship with her. They feel a part of Martha Stewart’s living through her on-stage presence and daily social media sharing. Not only are they hyper-loyal to Stewart as a celebrity, but they also have the same relationship with her brand and image. For example, a fan blogger mentioned in Didion’s essay expressed concern for Stewart’s well-being after a segment on her “preoccupation” with the appearance of her liquid-detergent dispensers: “It makes me worry about her…Of course it is just this strangeness that makes me love her. She helps me know I’m OK—everyone’s OK. . . . She seems perfect, but she’s not. She’s obsessed. She’s frantic. She’s a control freak beyond my wildest dreams.”
Stewart’s enthusiastic audience is a showing of her power and gains throughout her career. Not only has she managed to create and profit from a niche market of upper-middle class, domestically-interested women who are eager to buy branded dishes and decor, but she has also built a celebrity following through an embrace of her “frantic” personality and bad-girl-esque actions. By leaning into the previously largely-unexplored domestic market, Stewart has become hugely successful because of, and not despite, her feminine traits — a process which creates a unique feminist identity.
Stewart occupies an overall post-feminist space. In Professor Chris Holmlund’s essay “Postfeminism from A to G,” she defines “chick” postfeminism as a backlash against the desirability of gender equality. This backlash can either be hostile or be presented in a way that takes past advances towards equality for granted. Stewart’s feminist identity seems to fit in most closely with this idea of chick postfeminism. Her show and her views of female-centered spaces do not attempt to make women into men or to incorporate them with men. Instead, she embraces and derives power from gendered communities and social groups.
Stewart does not, nor does she wish to, defend her work as equal to that of a man’s or try to make her show more masculine. Instead, she leans into the concept of women’s work, celebrating her niche and its differences from larger culture and society. By professionalizing domestic work, Stewart does not attempt to enter or equalize herself with the patriarchal economic system, but rather creates her own, thus rendering her a post-feminist. Additionally, Stewart’s show and her image are not political and do not touch on social issues. By assuming progress to have already been made, Stewart does not need her existence and her image to be overtly feminist.
Stewart’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s could also be attributed to the counter-trend to the working girl era. Female participation in the workforce and higher education increased dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s. Stewart participated in this rise, working for years on Wall Street. However, she also led the counter-trend that called for domestic work to continue to be valued in an age of more choices for women. The counter-trend still took cues from the main trend, calling for female empowerment and profit through femininity.
As Elizabeth Nicholas claims in Vanity Fair, Stewart is the original #GirlBoss. The #GirlBoss movement, which was coined in 2014 in a book by Sophia Amoruso, celebrates women who succeed despite the masculine business world in which they “swim upstream.” The term has been criticized for being overly capitalist and reinforcing patriarchal power structures.. Urban Dictionary defines GirlBoss (verb) as “to make something or someone appear as a feminist idol or inspiration for profit, despite the numerous flaws of the person.” Stewart’s profit-chasing, business-minded actions certainly place her in the realm of GirlBoss, and its associated criticisms. In addition, like all GirlBosses, she is accused of being too driven and ambitious, and cold-hearted. More recent GirlBosses, continuing Stewart’s work, include Emma Chamberlain, a social media star who has monetized her content and created a highly profitable coffee company filled with minimalist glass cups and brightly colored matcha powder.
The successors to Stewart can already be seen in TikTok’s “that” girl. Short, minimalist videos of girls cleaning their rooms, making green smoothies, taking showers with lots of products, and completing workouts. This new aestheticizing of everyday domestic tasks reflects a turn in feminist movements to the value of productivity — in work and at home — and a return to post-feminism’s self-care and empowerment narrative. Stewart’s work and art have helped to create this trend and they continue the idealization and beautification of domestic life by bringing 19th century domesticity into 21st century popular culture. Stewart’s continued success with domestic media shows the platform’s interest and audience power, especially for profit and marketing. As Ali Montag claims in her essay on Stewart’s never-ending relevancy, the Martha Stewart of tomorrow could take shape in a trend rather than a single person as the rise of the Internet gives space for more voices.
The use of affiliate links in social media and capitalization on aesthetics by creators such as Chamberlain is a sign of how Stewart’s work of profiting from domestic labor will spread and grow, creating more choices for women. Stewart’s television and magazine work was preceded by domestic handbooks, and will most certainly be succeeded by the Internet and social media. Her work in elevating domesticity is enduring, due to the stable platforms throughout time devoted to the cause, and the captive audience. While Stewart’s position is clearly stable regardless of controversy, it is still undetermined who her successor will be, and what changes they will bring to domestic labor and media.
Citations:
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