Let's just give Martha Stewart a break

By Emily Liebert

I don't know about you, but I was just thinking that with all my free time these days, I might begin a collection of homemade trinkets or maybe work on perfecting the light, golden flakiness of my pie crust. Or maybe it's high time I created an efficient method of organization for my broom closet. These are just a few of the many projects I considered undertaking as I flipped casually through my November issue of Martha Stewart Living.

In an age of mostly dual-income households, long commutes, and take-out, who sits down to make napkin rings out of dried anise seed? Who is willing to devote a precious Saturday morning to scooping out a gourd, filling it with wax, and making a set of Thanksgiving candles?

The most ironic part of the whole Martha Stewart situation is that it is precisely the preposterously time-consuming excess of her ideas that makes her so successful.

Whether we are suburban housewives, urban CEOs, or college students, we have one thing in common: none of us has any spare time. Martha allows us to live vicariously. She gives us the opportunity to forget our harried lives and imagine that we live in as leisurely a manner as she and her homemaker models seem to. We look at glossy photographs of happy mothers and daughters sewing cozy polar fleece mittens by the fire and fantasize about doing this ourselves. We plan to begin those gloves before the first snowfall, but before we know it, it's February, and we're jamming our hands in our coat pockets.

We see jolly grandmothers stirring big pots of hot, mulled cider and decide we'll do the same for our loved ones on Thanksgiving Day. But when Thanksgiving rolls around, we're popping mugs of Shaw's cider in the microwave.

Even if the reality of such ideas end when we close the magazine or click off of Martha's website, the fantasies remain. Martha's projects sneak into our thoughts, and by planning to carry them out in the (distant) future (if at all), we imagine that we actually do have the time to live as Martha suggests we must.

But wait a minute. Since most of Martha's fans are women, do these fantasies suggest that women want to live confined to the home and be excluded from the workplace? Does Martha, with her domestic persona, challenge feminist ideas of autonomy and equality? Not at all. Domesticity does not inherently undermine feminism. The dictionary definition of domestic is "home-loving." The dictionary definition of feminism is "advocacy of equal rights for women." The two should not be mutually exclusive. A woman can take pleasure in home and family activities without necessarily giving up her career.

In the demanding lives most of us lead, crucial times such as family meals and quiet moments to ourselves are increasingly trivialized. It seems that any business, product, or public personality that reminds us of the importance of such domestic joys is a positive force regardless of whether or not we consider ourselves to be feminists. We should thank Martha for advocating the pleasures of domesticity.

Besides, if Martha hadn't created the booming business she did, how would we see the potential in old sweaters to become new pillows? Where would we have learned to cut a mango so that its strings don't get caught in our teeth? Who but the illustrious Martha can transform banal butter pats into lovely butterflies?

When taken with a sense of humor, Martha's ideas instill positive domestic tendencies and allow us a temporary escape from our ever-hectic lives.

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