Gobsmacked

Savannah Eden Bradley on Martha Stewart’s savvy as a proto-influencer in the age before trad wives. This piece was originally published on MERMAID CAFÉ.; Daisy shares good links.

I am demi-lobotomized when it comes to domestic life. I know this is a very Carrie Bradshawian personality defect. Most of my plants die; I like to bake, but I get frustrated easily and end up taking out my rage on dough; the copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette that I bought several years ago, at full price no less, is currently collecting dust between my music biographies, slated somewhere between Sonic Youth and Patti Smith. I talk to children like mini-adults and have zero clue how I’ll ever raise one. “Savannah, you are not a wife,” a friend told me recently. “You are a husband.”

Maybe that’s why you won’t see me making grilled cheese from scratch for my Utahn toddlers anytime soon. I am also fiercely ambitious, competitive to the grave, and quick to snap if I do not get things 100% right on the first try. Not having a perfect, impregnable politesse was unacceptable to me. What kind of WASP would I be if I didn’t know how to do this? I read Etiquette; studied elocution and table setting; ordered custom letterheads; and got really into the idea of giving everyone I knew an orchid. In college, I was expected to go to faculty brunches and parties with famous writers, and I was so totally internal and uncommunicative — Which fork do I grab? Is my posture slackening? Am I letting the purse serve me? — that I became a porcelain duck. I imagine those writers thought they were having dinner with a finishing school co-ed.

I didn’t care about the big trappings, like the 2.5 children of it all, much less a husband. What I cared about was how to roast a mean duck or how to plant a garden that’d make the ghost of Catherine de' Medici weep — how to construct a beautiful life with bountiful returns, whether that be a devilish cocktail party or a blooming zucchini crop. I felt, and do still feel, that these little ceremonies give life immeasurable texture, and even if they’re stuffy, we would be far more boring if we lost them. This is all to say that I have always been spellbound by people who can do domestic life “right”: the Ina Gartens of the world, and, too, the Martha Stewarts. 

When I watched the eponymous Martha Stewart documentary this past week — from R.J. Cutler, who also directed the infamous Vogue documentary The September Issue — I was, yes, gobsmacked. I suppose I thought it’d be another anodyne celebrity tell-all, designed for People headlines and clipped group chat discussions, poxed with bon mots about the terror of fame. And while Martha is that, to some degree, it is also a blithely fascinating portrait of a woman everyone has been wrong about, including her devotees. 

She has a slow, perfectly-calibrated voice, slightly druggy with age. Her sentences, like most of the Baby Boomers who provided voiceovers for the film, have that very tidy, 1960s syntax, devoid of hedge words. She speaks plainly, without much affect, about every aspect of her life, from her threadbare upbringing to her days as a model and stockbroker to the Mephistophelian nature of her marriage. When asked about her husband’s infidelity, she says to Cutler, without blinking: “I handed over letters that were very personal. So guess what? Take it out of the letters.”

The story of Stewart’s life is also very tidy, cinematic with forward motion — a working-class childhood; a stint as a model; a husband found in college; a honeymoon in Europe; a child she didn’t entirely want; a brief moment on Wall Street; a domestic life in Connecticut; a successful catering business for museums and the nouveau riche; a cookbook, thanks to her publisher husband; another cookbook; and another cookbook; and, then, the inevitable empire. This isn’t even to mention her time in prison and then her genuinely against-the-odds rise back to power. 

Martha Stewart’s savvy as a proto-influencer — her complete ease with writing about her personal life, her fastidious approach to entertaining, and her squeaky-clean image — made her a national punchline until her indictment (and then after, for very different reasons). While her books and branded products sold well, homemaking was not fashionable in the latter half of the ‘80s, then into the ‘90s and ‘00s; the smart, sophisticated woman put her children in daycare and went to the office. No matter if some called themselves feminists or others chafed against the label, both factions bought into a lifestyle undeniably accessed through the advances of second-wave feminism. Stewart embodied an old-world, traditionalist spirit that, while lucrative, was uncool at best and backward at worst.

In the modern tradwife spaces I’ve briefly observed, Stewart, the undeniable queen of homemaking, is not popular (maybe it’s the weed). But some young homemakers do like the “old” Stewart — with scanned images of her 1982 book Entertaining making the Instagram rounds or, too, 40-year-old recipes she designed reformatted for TikTok and Reels. “This is how it should be ✨,” one woman commented on a photo of Stewart, then 41, hunched over an overflowing strawberry basket. The obvious difference, nowadays, is that Stewart’s approach to domestic life is the apotheosis of cool, perfectly calibrated for a generation of wannabe homemakers governed by the language of images. If we were to follow Laver’s Law, we’re somewhere in-between amusing and quaint. 

The reason I was gobsmacked was not because this line from Martha Stewart to modern tradwifery was so clearly delineated, or that the working women from 1980 to now were proven wrong, but because everybody, save for Stewart herself, was wrong. Yes, Martha Stewart was oracular, with a deft hand and an unflinching eye for (late-century) taste. But she was not a perfect, prissy housewife in any sense of the word. And while it may seem obvious — she built a world-shattering personal empire, which denotes a certain ambition, and, too, went to prison — this is also not a woman who has bought, like her descendants, into pastoral, romantic ideas of marriage, family, or womanhood itself. 

The constant words, in-documentary, to describe this woman: chilly. No great joy in her marriage or raising a child. Unemotional. Mean. Difficult. Perfectionist. Sergeant. Great white shark. Ruthless. Abrasive. Ambitious. Bitch. The most emotional Stewart gets in the film is while recounting being on her honeymoon and going alone to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore to pray on the night before Easter. Both a devout Catholic and an architectural history major, Stewart, then 19, stood alone in the crowded Gothic portal, staring past the stained glass windows and fresco ceiling detailing The Last Judgment. In the silence and euphoria, she locked eyes with an older man, and then, as if compelled by God, moved to kiss him. When asked why, Stewart said: “It was just emotional, of the moment. It was a very emotional place [...] I wish we could all experience such an evening. I was nineteen years old and didn’t want to go home.”

As Stewart detailed her travel journals — writings made on the layouts of French gardens; records of every food consumed, from red olives to the recipes in Elizabeth David’s seminal A Book of Mediterranean Food; details of the art and architecture she witnessed — I realized, too, that while she would become synonymous with housewifery, she was also another woman more concerned with what it meant to live and construct a beautiful life than surrender to its gendered expectations. She planted magnificent gardens at her home in Connecticut, Turkey Hill, because she wanted to replicate the Jardin à la française; that overflowing strawberry basket came from her obsession with the Dutch Golden Age masters; she enjoyed cooking and hosting, not only for the sensory experience of food but because her husband would invite over the fascinating writers who published equally-fascinating art books at his imprint. Stewart loved the indulgence of art and tradition, worked at it with the discipline and command of a drill sergeant, refused to explain herself when she made money off of it, and never apologized for anything. Watching her explain this in less literal terms finally elucidated what I’d, too, been searching for.

And while many trad young women are steadfast in their beliefs about motherhood and wifedom, I do think that there are many women out there, enchanted by etiquette and domestic life, who might benefit by seeing what this delineation looks like. At no point did Stewart subjugate her desires or be any less of a bitch, all the while planting apple trees and grabbing eggs from the chicken coop. In fact, it seemed as if homemaking was and is much easier for Stewart because she has impossible standards, and a taste for beauty, and has never acted like a second-class citizen in her own life. 

I am not saying homemaking is a feminist act, insofar as homemaking is, at least nowadays, more of a communal family experience, with kids helping with dinner and husbands with laundry. What I am saying is that there is something quite revelatory in designing a decorative, delicious life with the materials at hand — a pie dough, a rose seed, a candle by the window — solely for your own aesthetic enjoyment, rather than for filling a role you think you must play. Maybe we can do the same with the clothes we wear. 🍳 

QUIET DOMESTICITY

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Logistics, a 37 day-long road movie tracking the global movement of a single product, is now serialized on YouTube

• “This was another joy of DOOM’s music: a luxurious escape plan and the threat of jail worded as if by someone who had read every book ever published but never spoken out loud.” (Pitchfork)

• Pitchfork gives British R&B trio FLO an 8 for their debut album Access All Areas (Pitchfork)

• Oklou - choke enough (YouTube)

• What’s on Laurel Halo’s playlist? (Herb Sundays)

• Daniel Keller says we’re in the early days of the singularity (Doomscroll)

• Max and HBO have extended their deal with The Criterion Collection (Variety)

• Meredith is making at least $16 million from their deal with OpenAI (Adweek)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• The perfect shirt for Brian Eno fans (Night Gallery)

• Wolves are returning to California (SF Chronicle)

• Cat Zhang reviews Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (The Cut)

• Dirt contributor Helen Holmes covers the Hirshhorn Annual New York Gala for ARTnews: “Koons beamed, sharklike, as his expression flickered moment to moment between open warmth and blithe inscrutability.”

• A faithful reproduction of the Bitmap version of the Chicago Typeface created by Susan Kare for Apple Computer in 1984 (chicagokare.xyz)

• Nicole Kidman tells GQ, “I’ll do anything for cinema, so you can meme me as much as you want.” (GQ)

• I love you like dogs love Lamb Chop (The Atlantic)

• “I had many questions. Had a herpetological Johnny Appleseed brought Italian wall lizards to my home town?” (The New Yorker)

• It must feel soo good to be a Bigfoot believer (FT)

• “Autumn in the Pain House raises the question: Is alt-lit really dead…or is it just that everyone would rather tweet than write?” Danielle Chelosky on John Doe (Hobart)