“This volume will inspire a new generation of hosts.” This is how Martha Stewart announced on her website, just a few days ago, that her first book, Funit had been reprinted for the first time since 1982, when it was originally released. “Finally!”, many will have exclaimed, judging by the spectacular success that the book, out of print since 2021, has found recently on eBay and other platforms dedicated to second-hand books, where copies worth more than a thousand dollars can be found. The entrepreneur, who has amassed a fortune by teaching millions of women to be ideal housewives, could not miss the opportunity to profit commercially from what was her first great success in bookshops, a sort of bible for receiving guests, taking care of every single detail.
Fun It is reprinted as is, with the same content as the original, and also maintains Martha’s dedication to her ex-husband, Andrew Stewart. The term fun The book’s title refers to the practice of inviting people into your home and offering them food and drink, but the concept itself implies something much bigger than simply preparing recipes. For Martha Stewart, hosting people at home is a serious matter that requires work and planning, and the presentation of the table and the dishes is as important as the flavor. In Fun explains how to prepare appetizers for 200 people or a brunch for 60, because there is no impossible challenge for an organized hostess like Martha teaches you to be. The goal is to transform every home reception into an unforgettable experience.
Over the course of her career, Martha Stewart published more than one hundred books, but Fun played a fundamental role in consolidating her success as “queen of housewives”. She contributed significantly to building that image – which had little to do with the reality of Martha herself – to the point of making her the definitive hostess and a sort of pop icon.
After the premiere of the documentaries The Many Lives of Martha Stewart (CNN) e I’m Martha Stewart (Netflix) in 2024, the figure of this character full of lights and shadows has aroused renewed interest, especially among younger generations. Although some in the United States remembered her because their mother watched her show or had one of her books or magazines at home, many encountered for the first time a woman who, in addition to serving as a housewife, ran a million-dollar empire and had a reputation for being cold, calculating, and extremely ambitious, characteristics that were widely criticized at the time—and which, on the other hand, are often praised as virtues when the businessman in question is a man.
She is aware that a large part of her market niche is now there, in Generation Z, and also refers to this on her website: “Martha has become a topic of fascination on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where trends virals romanticize his life as the first influencer REAL. (…) The new generations are looking for all those good things that Martha has been teaching for decades.” The truth is that, at 84 years old, Martha Stewart has been able to adapt like no other to the social media ecosystem and speak its language, often publishing memes in which she laughs at herself, joining the viral conversation of the moment and embracing the stereotype of the demanding, edgy woman with which she is so identified. Of course he also uses one of the most popular appeals lately, nostalgia, by posting old videos of his cooking shows or images of his it seems nineties Without going any further, one of the aesthetic trends of this summer according to a Pinterest report was the “Martha Girl Summer,” which proposed embracing the lifestyle that Stewart has advocated for decades: organizing meals at home, doing manual labor and growing vegetables and flowers.
Fury over a 43-year-old cookbook
Generation Z’s fascination with the figure of Martha Stewart has a lot to do with the businesswoman’s ability to personify some of this generation’s desires. Him detox Digital – the practice of reducing or limiting the use of mobile phones and computers to bring attention back to the analogue world – has become a necessity for many young people, saturated with screens and notifications. The image of Martha Stewart picking tomatoes in her garden fits the rather romanticized idea we might have of a world without screens, more connected to nature. A time when everything seemed simpler.
The tendency to spend more time at home and party less which is often linked to generation Z – a complex phenomenon that has to do with the changes that technology has introduced in the way of socializing or enjoying free time, but also with other factors such as the increase in the cost of living or the fact that people drink less alcohol than other generations – would also have a link with Stewart’s good reception. If we stay home, it better be a pleasant and enjoyable experience, as the TV show Martha never tires of saying.
Furthermore, it ties into the interest this generation shows in quality food, home-cooked food and organic ingredients, essentially the pillars on which Stewart built his empire. The aesthetic of relaxed perfection that he exhibited in his programs and publications offers, at the same time, an image to aspire to and an escape route in the face of the world’s hostility. Fun It’s a sort of paper Pinterest board, a haven full of beautiful photos and elaborate food presentations to go to for inspiration and happiness.
It is inevitable to refer to the phenomenon of tradwiveswhich promotes an idealized vision of what it means to be a housewife, inspired by the United States of the 1950s, and which is usually framed by the conservative turn exhibited by some of the youth. The irony is that, like most tradwives who triumphs on social networks, Martha Stewart did not spend her days stuck in the kitchen with a broken leg, but rather building a brand and a million-dollar business around herself.
All this became the fertile ground for a cookbook published more than 40 years ago that has succeeded in the recipe age. online and quick preparation videos on social networks. To all this we must add the complexity of the character. Many thought that Martha Stewart was just a housewife who became famous, but by watching the documentaries of 2024 they discovered that, in reality, she was a strong woman and always very clear about what she wanted to achieve.
Rise, fall and resurrection
Martha Stewart’s CV could be summed up like this: she was a model, then a stockbroker on Wall Street, she had a successful restaurant business, she achieved fame thanks to her books and television programs and, in the meantime, she became a millionaire. However, in this unconventional journey, there are some twists that even led her to prison and which contain the essence of the charm that Martha Stewart awakens in people.
It is impossible to separate its success from the context in which it was forged. In the documentary I’m Martha Stewartexplains journalist Caitlin Flanagan, when she made the leap to magazines in 1990 with Martha Stewart livingwomen didn’t want to be housewives, they wanted to work and have power. But Martha was able to touch a key by speaking of beauty and perfection as something powerful. “You have the right to be the artist you want to be,” he said. Joan Didion described her as a woman capable of personifying the “Everywoman”, as opposed to the “Superwoman” that many women refused to be after realizing that entering the world of paid work meant carrying the infamous double shift on their shoulders. “I was like any other reader and they knew it. That authenticity was important. They knew that I cleaned my house, that I raised my daughter, that I had my husband and I had a garden.”
It was, of course, the influencer original, capable of making everyone believe that she was “like other women”, when she was already accumulating millions and leading a lifestyle different from that of the majority of her audience. She never really liked her role as a wife and mother, but she liked what that image represented and how far it allowed her to go. When they attacked her for promoting the idea of the perfect housewife, she dismissed everyone necessary, calling herself a “modern feminist” and claiming that what she did was a tribute to all those domestic tasks that had been so criticized throughout history and that she, sincerely, conceived of as an art.
On the other hand, in the 1990s there was an entire generation of women whose mothers had not raised them as housewives and who had quite a few gaps in their household chores. With her books, magazines and programs, Martha Stewart has become a bit like everyone’s mother or a friend to ask when you don’t know how to do something. And all this without losing that aspirational point that is everything influencer must have.
But when you build an empire tied to the image of a single person, reputation is everything, and that reputation came crashing down in 2004, when Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison for the dubious reasons that led her to sell shares she owned in a pharmaceutical company just before their value plummeted on the stock market. Before that, it had already received criticism for its treatment of its employees and accusations of having plagiarized many of the recipes that appear in Fun.
Far from keeping a low profile after leaving prison, Martha announced her return with great fanfare and continued to make programs and publish books. Paradoxically, this “mistake” with justice, added to the difficult separation from her husband after he cheated on her with another woman and the conflicts she had with motherhood, which she never saw as something natural for her, brought Martha Stewart closer to the public than ever. The image of righteousness and perfection that was his personal trademark has survived, but has now given way to that of the human being behind it. And it turned out to be much funnier than we expected, as evidenced by her unexpected alliance with rapper Snoop Dogg and her publications on social networks, in which we clearly see that Martha Stewart still understands perfectly how all this works.
