Martha’s moment

Martha Stewart is an icon, and she’s having a moment with multiple documentaries about her life on streaming. A few months ago, it was The Many Lives of Martha Stewart on Max, and now it’s RJ Cutler’s documentary, Martha, coming to Netflix on October 30. The trailer for Martha dropped yesterday, and it’s interesting to compare the points of similarity between the two docs—Martha as the “original influencer”, her insider trading scandal and incarceration, her post-carceral reinvention—but in the Martha trailer, I am specifically drawn to two moments.

The first is when Stewart says to get out of a marriage if your spouse is cheating, and you can hear RJ Cutler offscreen ask, “Didn’t you have an affair early on?” and Stewart’s reply is just, “Yeah but I don’t think [my husband] ever knew about that.” I MEAN. Talk about boss bitch moves. It’s very “rules for thee, none for me”, which is often a mindset used against women in domestic situations. 

The other interesting point is that Stewart, who is now 83, has maintained her cultural relevance as an older woman, something that is difficult to do in our youth-obsessed culture. Arguably, she’s MORE relevant now than she was at the height of her “domestic goddess” era, thanks in no small part to her friendship with Snoop Dogg, and her less than perfect image since her conviction and incarceration in the ImClone insider trading case (Stewart maintains her innocence).  

It's also interesting seeing this trailer and hearing Stewart lay into the prosecutors like she does after watching Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice in which Roy Cohn and Donald Trump are constantly lambasting the government, particularly the judicial branch, for targeting and persecuting them. I’m not saying Stewart is anything like them, but…in that instance, she doesn’t not sound like them. The other side of that coin, though, is that you can easily place Stewart into the category of women “not aspiring to be humble”, as Kamala Harris recently put it. 

And that’s the real appeal of Martha Stewart. She’s a self-made mogul who did it by turning homemaking and the domestic arts into a billion-dollar business. I don’t think there’s a “you can have it all” message here, but I do think Stewart is an example of having both a high-powered career and interest in pretty things and domesticity. Those do not have to be mutually exclusive, even though we’re often sold the message that they are diametrically opposed. A lot of domestic influencing right now is centered on the “tradwife” narrative, but while Stewart has always sold a version of idealized domestic life, she’s not advocating that specific lifestyle.

I wonder if her popularity will increase in response to tradwives, as a counterpoint that you can be a career woman and still care about homemaking. Or maybe we’re all just waiting for the next round in the ongoing Martha Stewart vs Ina Garten gossip battle.