We're all a little Martha

On the enduring female perfectionism of Martha Stewart.

I don’t really cook and, though I love getting my favorite people in a room, hosting elaborate parties where I’m responsible for the food and decor has never been my thing. But watching Martha, the new Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix, I understood the appeal. Beyond a simple appreciation for beauty and nice things, being the perfect host is a means of control over oneself and one’s image—a desire most women have tasted at least briefly.

Stewart’s home-making pursuits were a drive for perfection, as countless friends and family recall in the film. She had a compulsion to make everything around her beautiful, delicious, and better than anything anyone had ever seen before, and she succeeded in a way that made it all look easy. But it becomes clear over the documentary’s two hours that to achieve that success she lived under a self-enforced level of pressure that most therapists would describe, at the very least, as unhealthy. She was putting on a show, constantly in creative motion to avoid feelings she claims bluntly to have no interest in. 

But when the facade cracks—as it does when her husband leaves her after they both have multiple affairs—letters she wrote to him at the time show raw emotion beneath the expertly coiffed hair, as she rails at him and begs him to come back. The tone is full of desperation and despair and it’s hard to sync with the reserved and at-times chilly Martha being interviewed on screen. But friends and family members note that, beyond heartbreak, she was very worried about the impact this divorce would have on her brand.

*

I knew someone years ago whose main concern in getting married was that her photos look Vogue-worthy. No matter that she tried to call off her engagement multiple times and complained often about her partner. When she got engaged, her first impulse was to gripe about the engagement ring and the proposal, not to celebrate the moment or their love. 

But it wasn’t the clear void in their relationship that she was upset with, not on the surface at least. It was simply how their relationship might appear to others, an attitude founded on the illusion that everyone had the same superficial expectations for conveying love. Love, as this person had come to understand it, was a vessel for impressing others rather than something meant to nourish you far beyond Instagram. 

There are shades of Martha in this story—a woman who cared about real love, I’m sure, but cared more about seeming in love in a very particular way. The painful irony, as Martha comes to learn as she sets off to promote her new wedding-themed book fresh off a divorce, is that none of her fans cared about this imperfect development. If anything, it made her more human.

*

We live in a culture now filled with so many Marthas, who spend their days curating the perfect life on Instagram and TikTok. It’s not just paid influencers but the people you grew up with, your college friends, your colleagues—all angling to prove something to someone about how good their lives are now. To convey a life that looks perfect is still one of the central goals of womanhood after all these years, even if the mediums are different.

Some people certainly pursue this to a higher degree than others, but to deny falling prey to it at all, at least on some scale, is to lie. I don’t know a single woman who’s not somewhat sucked into this fascination with image, with making our lives look just right. What that looks like may come in different shades than it did in the ‘90s but the core goal—controlling how others see us—remains painfully the same.

*

I’ve never cared about having a Vogue-worthy wedding or curating a sumptuous charcuterie plate, but I strove for perfection for a decade in other ways and learned a lot about that prison. When I see that impulse in so many women now, I think about what it is they’re running from. Because to spend so much energy making some aspect of your life look just right is to reveal that you’re afraid of something, something truer and more real. Usually, the thing we’re running from—or, rather, suffocating with a perfectionistic impulse—is simply ourselves.