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With every year that passes, my decorative and culinary standards slip further, while, paradoxically, I become more obsessed with the former billionaire, felon, fancy fowl enthusiast and Snoop Dogg best buddy Martha Stewart. Stewart is, of course, the original domestic goddess, but also, she’s now claiming, the template tradwife. “I really was that woman. I was the original fucking tradwife,” she told the Lipstick on the Rim podcast, embellishing later, in an interview for the New York Times (marking the reissue of her 1982 cookbook, Entertaining): “And I was just as pretty as those girls, and more organised.”
I suppose she’s not wrong – she was already combining the homemaking, empire-building and self-promotional elements that characterise tradwifery 40 years ago – but it’s not the most tactful or self-effacing way to put it, which is very on-brand.
A lot of lip service gets paid to this notion that as women age, they stop caring, but no one embodies whole-hearted DGAF energy quite like Stewart. She does care enormously about some things, actually – the correct colour of hydrangea for a brunch tablescape, the welfare of her rare geese, teaching the world the “practical and everyday” task of preparing pomegranate seeds (she won’t rest until we are all capable of being a sous-chef at Ottolenghi) – but not about offending people, or appearing humble, relatable and likable. From her partnership with a marijuana producer to her thirst trap Instagram pics in her pool, to the menu suggestions in Entertaining (“omelette supper for thirty”, anyone? I suppose she does have lots of eggs), she is entirely and unapologetically her hard-nosed, opinionated, exacting self. You wouldn’t catch Stewart submitting to her husband, tradwife style (she’s single anyway, and, she explained, once dumped Anthony Hopkins because Hannibal Lecter freaked her out).
I’m lost in admiration for this. I wouldn’t want to be her – she gets up “around 4-4.30am” and reads the whole New York Times, for God’s sake. And she once told the Washington Post when she gets a new cat or dog the first thing she does is bite it “hard”, so it knows she’s in charge. But forget about her cookbooks and CBD gummies – if she could bottle up a touch of that WWMD (what would Martha do) audacity, I’d buy it.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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