With the renewed interest in Martha Stewart after the release of R.J. Cutler’s aptly titled Martha, there is likely to be some equally renewed interest in an article that Joan Didion wrote about the one-woman brand in question for The New Yorker back in 2000, selections of which are interwoven throughout the documentary via voiceover. Reprinted in 2021’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean as “Everywoman.com,” the essay exhibits something rather rare coming from Didion: an impassioned defense. Oh sure, Didion had written defenses before (e.g., “Sentimental Journeys”), but most of them were markedly dispassionate. Her whole “shtick” being to exude total coldness and impenetrability. Sort of like, well, Martha herself.

In both women’s cases, it was a constant source of criticism to be so “steely.” Particularly as both of them worked in fields where one is expected to be “open” and “approachable.” Homemakers being people who create a sense of warmth and quite literally open their homes to others and writers being people who are supposed to mine their personal lives with the type of unabashed candor that makes them seem like they might be, you know, accessible. Didion, of course, was the exact opposite of that. Which is perhaps, in part, why she often liked to focus her lens on “the culture,” rather than herself. And no one was a more indelible part of the culture in the last decade of the twentieth century than Martha Stewart.

While some might find it ironic that Stewart would become a resonant fixture at a time when women were theoretically trying to run away from the homemaking stereotypes automatically associated with their gender, it was just the opposite. As the Martha documentary points out with a voiceover from Isolde Motley, the editor of Martha Stewart Living, “We had a whole generation of young women whose mothers had worked, so they didn’t know how to do things. And she felt we needed a way to show people exactly how to do it, step by step.” Gael Towey, the art director for MSL adds, “What we now call DIY, that was a revolution for America.” Particularly for American women who, for a couple of decades there, were given the impression that they ought to shy away entirely from notions of “home and hearth” to focus solely on their careers, not aware that it was possible to have both, with a little tutelage from Martha. Because, as she says during a 1995 Charlie Rose interview, “Everyday living. It has always been for me a very serious subject.” Even though it is written off as “frivolous” or perhaps a “rich person’s pursuit.”

But the thing that Didion reminds people of throughout the essay is that Stewart’s intent has always been in the doing and sharing of her skills with, that’s right, the everywoman. Because that’s what Stewart herself started out as. This being why her “capitalist pig” aura is belied by a certain “we all deserve to live well” irony. As Didion phrases it, “What she offers, and what more strictly professional shelter and food magazines and shows do not, is the promise of transferred manna, transferred luck.” You, too, can make your house (or ramshackle), your life beautiful. Stewart herself came from humble beginnings before she started to hobnob with the upper crust of the East Coast thanks to her marriage to “that kind of man.” Again, this, too, bears a kind of similarity to Didion’s backstory (complete with John Gregory Dunne being her access point to an “East Coast pedigree”)—even if her beginnings weren’t as “humble” as she might have played them up to be. Still, this was a woman from ultra-unglamorous Sacramento. A place where existence was rooted in agricultural stoicism—something that Didion tried perhaps too hard to convey in her first novel, Run River. Granted, that didn’t mean Didion’s particular Sacramento lifestyle wasn’t, let’s say, more well-to-do.

Indeed, it was often a source of pride for Didion to allude to being a “fifth-generation Californian” (one supposes that was the equivalent of being a fifteenth-generation New Yorker). Descended from what one historian in The Last Love Song calls “Sacramento’s landed gentry.” Not exactly tantamount to being an Astor or anything, but still, Didion was not without her pedigree. Not quite as “salt of the earth” as she might have made herself out to be with her constant reference to pioneer history and “grit of the West” je ne sais quoi.

Stewart, in contrast, came from a large Catholic family of six children, her parents often struggling to feed so many mouths (as Martha also covers at the beginning). Both her mother and father were teachers, which is likely where Stewart gleaned her own knack for giving instruction (though her gift for gardening was strictly from her father). Later, her father would work as a salesman of pharmaceuticals (perhaps before Arthur Miller released Death of a Salesman). To make extra money to support her family, Stewart would babysit before then moving on to modeling at a rate of fifteen dollars an hour. She continued to do so while attending college at Barnard. Thus, this so-called obsession with “perfection” that Stewart has often been accused of having stems from a common mindset among those who grew up without “a lot.” The fear that they will lose the things they’ve worked so hard to get, to achieve.

In another portion of “Everywoman.com,” Didion quotes the creator of “My Martha Stewart Page” as saying, “She seems perfect, but she’s not. She’s obsessed. She’s frantic. She’s a control freak beyond my wildest dreams. And that shows me two things: A) no one is perfect and B) there’s a price for everything.” Here, too, Didion appears to be facing her own mirror image, for she could also be described in a similar manner when it came to her fastidiousness. That is, with words—their arrangement, their sparseness…blatantly being modeled after Hemingway’s style.

In an interview she gave for Sacramento news station KCRA in 1971 (albeit from the comfort of her Los Angeles abode), Didion said, “I’m very excited by making, by seeing what can be done with words.” She then refers to her perfectionism and meticulousness about what can be done with words in mentioning Play It As It Lays, explaining, “My last book was an absolutely very short book…it was, every word, I worked on it for five years, but when I finished it I thought every word was exactly right. And now I can’t even read it because words pop out at me, and sentences that I think ought to be different or ought to be changed and I become very nervous and so…almost sick if something goes wrong. I mean if I can’t get it right or if it’s a piece in a magazine and they leave out a comma or something. I mean it’s a form of perfectionism that some women—I mean if I did it around the house, which I certainly don’t as you can see, I would be a normal, neurotic perfectionist housewife…”

It’s quite apropos that Didion should bring up the then still accepted and expected role of housewife as a pinnacle of perfectionism in women. And yes, before Martha Stewart came along and became an example of actually enjoying “housework,” doing it for oneself, there was a male expectation that those in a homemaker role ought to make everything in the home “perfect.” Just for the male benefit, obviously. But when Stewart started doing these things not because any man had put pressure on her to do them—rather, simply because she genuinely enjoyed making her surroundings beautiful—that was when homemaking was suddenly a “threat” in a way it never had been before. Even if one might expect the patriarchy to embrace the Stewart School of Homemaking.

Of the frequent ridicule Stewart endured throughout the nineties, Didion wrote, “…but there remains, both in the bond she makes and in the outrage she provokes, something unaddressed, something pitched, like a dog whistle, too high for traditional textual analysis. The outrage, which reaches sometimes startling levels, centers on the misconception that she has somehow tricked her admirers into not noticing the ambition that brought her to their attention. To her critics, she seems to represent a fraud to be exposed, a wrong to be righted. ‘She’s a shark,’ one declares in Salon. ‘However much she’s got, Martha wants more. And she wants it her way and in her world, not in the balls-out boys’ club realms of real estate or technology, but in the delicate land of doily hearts and wedding cakes.’” And that, right there, was the biggest affront of all to the patriarchy. That a woman should “dare” to financially profit from things in the domestic sphere that were formerly (and tacitly) deemed “free labor.”

This being an additional reason for Didion to call out another “contributor” to the (unofficial) Martha Stewart website. A contributor who assessed that Stewart is “a good role model in many ways… she’s a strong woman who’s in charge, and she has indeed changed the way our country, if not the world, views what used to be called ‘women’s work.’” Which, to reiterate, has frequently been branded as unworthy of payment. Or, if it is, that payment is often far too low (e.g., such fields as cleaning services, babysitting and elder care). This phenomenon has been dubbed “the feminization of labor,” a term that highlights “forced flexibility, low pay and precariousness, all of which have historically been associated with women’s work.”

Thus, Stewart’s “against all odds” ability to transform her “Hestia gambit” into a billion-dollar empire was enough to make plenty of men red-faced. And even women who were vexed by what they saw as Stewart’s “Little Miss Perfect” “act,” missing the point that Didion brings up in remarking, “The ‘cultural meaning’ of Martha Stewart’s success…lies deep in the success itself, which is why even her troubles and strivings are part of the message, not detrimental but integral to the brand. She has branded herself not as Superwoman but as Everywoman, a distinction that seems to remain unclear to her critics.” (This excerpt from the essay, by the way, is wielded to help close out Cutler’s documentary.)

And because Didion can rarely get through an essay without making mention of the “Western frontier” legend in some way or another, she is certain to conclude her take on Martha with, “This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills. This is a story about a woman who did her own I.P.O. This is the ‘woman’s pluck’ story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men. The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Here, as well, Didion could just as easily be alluding to herself. For she managed to become one of the most revered and accepted-in-the-Establishment writers of the late twentieth century. All because she played the “man’s game” while cleverly beating them at it. In fact, Didion was so used to playing their game that she typically exuded more misogynistic qualities than feministic ones, even going so far as to publicly decry/scathingly belittle the feminist movement in a 1972 essay for The New York Times called “The Women’s Movement.”

In it, Didion wrote, “To read even desultorily in this [women’s movement] literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman [that word again] with whom the authors seemed to identify all too entirely. This ubiquitous construct was everyone’s victim but her own. She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist’s table.” Didion’s summation of how the women’s movement was being used, in her estimation, as carte blanche to “play victim” by certain “enterprising females” (what some would flatly brand as “manipulative bitches”) is in keeping with her cynical views of movements in general. Ultimately wary that they all turn out to be cults (and, often, yes, that’s true).

Stewart, technically, did have her own cult at the apex of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, with Didion also bringing attention to how one unauthorized biographer of Stewart’s, Jerry Oppenheimer (the biography he wrote was called, what else, Just Desserts), presents a “corporate manifesto” in the book as “evidence” of Stewart’s cult leader-like status. One excerpt meant to prove as much was: “‘Martha’s Way’ can be obtained because she puts us in direct touch with everything we need to know, and tells/shows us exactly what we have to do… MSL enterprises are founded on the proposition that Martha herself is both leader and teacher… While the ranks of ‘teaching disciples’ within MSL may grow and extend, their authority rests upon their direct association with Martha; their work emanates from her approach and philosophies; and their techniques, and products and results meet her test…”

Didion finds Oppenheimer’s attempt to bill this memo as somehow “sinister” proof of Stewart running some sort of “gentrified Jonestown” utterly laughable. Yet another means to try discrediting a successful woman. And for Didion to actually speak out about the intense vitriol Stewart kept getting really said something about how much it bothered her. But, again, that could have well been in large part due to seeing herself in Martha. Literally. For Didion and Stewart even share a similar smug expression in certain photos. Well, smug to some. But merely “distant” and “pensive” to others. Plotting their next bid for perfectionism. A singular trait that both women shared. However, what made Didion more adept at sidestepping patriarchal venom was, antithetically enough, working in a “man’s profession” (just like Martha somehow being less threatening as a stockbroker than a monetized homemaker).

And, as Eve Babitz would tell you, Didion played their rules so well that she was able to learn a few loopholes about the game, too. One of which is: always appear to be an unoffending wisp. Stewart, alas, couldn’t maintain her “wispiness” and “icy” demeanor as perennially as Didion. What’s more, she revealed how much she still “overly” cared about things by continuing her career well into her eighties (currently, eighty-three).

Didion, on the other hand, might have stopped writing altogether (in book form, anyway), were it not for the deaths of her husband and daughter in the span of less than two years. These losses prompting her to write the memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, respectively. But it was the last book that Didion struggled with especially, fretting over not just its subject matter, Quintana Roo (and largely tiptoeing around how her alcoholism contributed to her early demise), but the arrangement of words she admitted to obsessing over in the abovementioned TV segment. Worrying over whether her mind was no longer sharp enough to “get it right.”

In this regard, Stewart might actually be less of a perfectionist than Didion was, with the former telling Cutler at the end of Martha, “I’ve learned as one gets older, imperfections are a little bit more…okay than they were when I was a little younger. I think imperfection is something that you can deal with.” Unless, of course, you were Didion, who ceased releasing new work after 2011 precisely because she didn’t seem to think she could “do it well”—make it perfect—anymore (appropriately, her literary mentor, Hemingway, ended up killing himself when he started to feel this way about his own writing). But at least she was able to do so in her uncharacteristically feminist defense of Stewart in 2000, just before Stewart’s major fall from grace: being accused of insider trading. The first domino that would topple all of Stewart’s previous clinging to “being perfect.”