Domestic Arrangements
WOMEN HOLD UP HALF THE SKY, AS THE SLOGAN ONCE WENT, but we also, historically, hold down the fort. Since the concept of an “angel in the house” took hold in Victorian times, Western culture has elevated the image of woman as domestic goddess while consistently undervaluing, if not just plain denigrating, the actual content of domestic work—a contradiction that has often made, in the modern age, for major antagonism between the so-called female realm and the actual living, breathing women who occupy it.
Okay, so you probably wouldn’t know that from watching an average set of television commercials on any given network in any given prime-time slot. Check out this woman who’s cheerfully scrubbing out the toilet while her children and golden retriever look on. Man, she looks happy. Here’s another woman practically speaking in tongues because she’s so thrilled that her dishwashing detergent doesn’t leave spots on the glassware. Like Vanna White on a letter-turning bender, she runs her fingers ecstatically down the side of a glass in close-up. And sweet fancy Moses, here’s a woman who is apparently so taken by the new Swiffer duster that she’s dancing, dancing in her Mom Jeans, around a home that’s not even hers. That’s right—this cleaning gadget is so incredibly unputdownable that this woman is fanatically dusting a house where the dirt’s not even her responsibility.
TV commercials have remained the one constant of angel-in-the-house
propaganda through the years, staying bright-eyed and smiling even as more complicated truths about housework, “women’s work,” and happiness have been revealed through other cultural channels. The stereotype of the 1950s housewife as a satisfied homemaker cradled in the bosom of her shiny chrome appliances was stripped bare by
The Feminine Mystique
; the frantic underbelly of housewifery was exposed by movies (
Diary of a Mad Housewife, Pleasantville
), books (
Up the Sandbox, The Stepford Wives
,
The Ice Storm
), TV (
Desperate Housewives
), even music (the Rolling Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper”). But the happy, fulfilled homemakers of commercials and print ads still remain as evidence that even though we’ve seen women rebelling, in real life and in pop culture, against domestic imperatives, the idea of home and hearth as an intrinsically female realm has never been sufficiently challenged by popular culture. (No,
Mr. Mom
does not count.)
There’s an idea floating around out there that a revolution occurred sometime during the heyday of second-wave feminism, a moment of collective consciousness when women flung down their aprons and dustpans and, like
Network
’s Howard Beale, announced that they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Then they streamed out of suburban houses en masse and, perhaps led by Gloria Steinem herself, flooded the wood-paneled hallways of corporate America, never to return to the drudgery of domesticity. This didn’t actually happen—or at least it didn’t happen that way. For one thing, the choice between working inside the home or outside of it is a fairly modern development enjoyed only by middle- and upper-class women; it’s long been meaningless to women who never had the economic option not to work. For another, married or partnered women who worked outside the home invariably kept working when they got home, taking on what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “the second shift” in her book of the same name—all the cooking, cleaning, and child care that was still expected of women even if it wasn’t their paid work.
The idea has always been that women inherently
want
domesticity, and the media is quick to report facts and figures that support this notion. In 2000, for example, a study by the market-research firm Youth Intelligence found that of three thousand married and single women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, 68 percent said they would opt to live a domestic life if it were economically feasible; that same year,
Cosmopolitan
revealed
that of eight hundred women polled by the magazine, two-thirds would choose to be a full-time housewife rather than a worker bee. More recently,
The New York Times
has been tireless in running “trend” stories trumpeting the desire of Ivy League–educated women for good old-fashioned housewifery; though the stories themselves (Lisa Belkin’s 2003 article “The Opt-Out Revolution” and Louise Story’s 2005 “news” item “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood”) have been widely criticized for overly anecdotal and sloppy methodology, the fact that the paper is so eager to make them front-page news says it all.
A slew of “new domesticity” coverage in the media accompanied Cheryl Mendelson’s exhaustive 1999 homemaking guidebook
Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House
as it ascended bestseller lists alongside other happy-home tomes like Nigella Lawson’s
How to Be a Domestic Goddess
. The shelter-magazine category has exploded all over the newsstand, with the high-end (
Wallpaper, Domino
) shoulder to shoulder with the slick but DIY (
ReadyMade
).
This is not to say that there’s no interrogation of all this domesticity going on. Indeed, there’s a ton of it. Motherhood in particular has been under the cultural microscope for the past several years, as the subject of media debates over gay mothers, stay-at-home vs. working mothers, public breastfeeding vs. putting those things away, and fertility treatments vs. adoption machinations. How we mother, how the media thinks we should mother, and how it’s nobody’s damn business how we mother have been the subjects of incisive and thoughtful books by the likes of Judith Warner (
Perfect Madness
), Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels (
The Mommy Myth
), and many more. Still, for all the hand-wringing that goes on about mothering, one could argue that such attention just won’t be as helpful as it could be until there’s a correspondingly in-depth media look at equally crucial parenting topics—stories, for instance, on fathers’ roles in the work/parenting balance, on foster parenting, on the effects of domestic violence on the children who live with it, and on gay and/or transgendered parents as more than just novelties. And a true conversation on the changing roles of women and domesticity—as opposed to the sensationalized woman-abandons-home! salvos launched by the likes of
Time
and
Newsweek
—would also require an acknowledgment of our corporate culture and its resoundingly unsupportive policies on child care, flextime, and other family-conscious necessities.
On the more generally domestic tip, feminist magazines like Bust and websites like GetCrafty and Not Martha have called for a new revolution on the home front, positing that the reclamation of domesticity is, in fact, a worthy feminist project. Jean Railla, editor of GetCrafty, writes in the introduction to her book of the same name, “I’m not suggesting that every woman should enjoy knitting and cooking and embroidery. But I am suggesting that we give women’s work its props as something valuable, interesting, and important … Skill, love, and creativity go into creating a nice home, making things by hand, and raising children. It’s not stupid and it’s not easy; it’s damn hard work that we need to respect. Moreover, it’s our history, and dismissing it only doubles the injustice already done to women who didn’t have any choice but to be domestic in the first place.”
And then, of course, there’s Martha. Fearsome, scandalous, contagiously domestic Martha Stewart, who has knocked the stereotype of the docile homemaker on its aproned rump even as her bruised-but-not-broken empire continues to make bank off its tenets. Martha, in fact, was one of the first domestic icons Bitch tackled back in the day (and you’ll find our 1996 take on page 221): Back then, prescandal and before she accumulated quite as much powerful-woman baggage as her iconhood carries today, she was a quintessential example of pop culture’s mixed messages about women, domesticity, and satisfaction. Her work and her public image played as much on fears that women who are too self-sufficient are doomed to remain alone as on women’s anxieties about not being “good enough” at supposedly innate domestic tasks.
Whether you’re a chicken-raising, wreath-making dynamo or a woman who can’t boil an egg, the home front is endlessly evolving and endlessly complicated. We know that there are far more women struggling with how to reconcile their personal choices with domestic imperatives than there are shiny, happy detergent-commercial denizens, and it’s always been Bitch’s pleasure to hear their stories.—A.Z.
Goddess, Desperate Spouse-Seeker, or Feminist Role Model?
Jennifer Newens / FALL 1996
MARTHA STEWART: WHAT TO DO WITH HER?
Marry her off, says the mainstream media. Her single status is just too darn confusing. How can she be America’s favorite housewife if she’s not a wife at all? Perhaps people are so obsessed with Stewart’s singlehood because she makes her fortune by performing the tasks that were once reserved for stay-at-home wives in conventional heterosexual marriages. No one can admit that her activities really aren’t those of a housewife, because that would mean radically re-viewing what it means to be a housewife—and by extension, what it means to be feminine. But because her power stems directly from the feminized realm of homemaking and decoration, she can’t be explained away as a masculinized female. So how does the mainstream media resolve this paradox? Not by questioning traditional notions of femininity or anything as potentially progressive as that, but by drawing attention away from how Martha Stewart has used housewifely duties to build an empire and instead focusing on her lack of a husband. From highbrow intellectualized fare like
60 Minutes
to trashy supermarket tabloids like the
Globe
, from the “male” perspective to the “female”—everyone wants to get her hitched. Not coincidentally, the two sides come to the same conclusions, but for different reasons.
60 Minutes
represents the “masculine” viewpoint: Unless she is married, Stewart’s power cannot be considered legitimate and must be denied.
She needs a man to make her less threatening—but she’s a woman with too many masculine qualities, so men don’t find her desirable. The
Globe
’s typically “feminine” perspective, on the other hand, portrays her as someone who cannot possibly be happy without a man by her side, but whose tendency to dominate sends men running to more feminine candidates. A photo gallery of possible Mr. Rights makes Stewart seem hysterical, searching desperately but fruitlessly for a meaningful relationship.
60 MINUTES
’ TAKE ON STEWART IS ESSENTIALLY CONTRADICTORY. Interviewer Morley Safer acknowledges Stewart’s power, describing her as a “multimedia corporation bringing in something like $200 million a year, probably the only one-woman, one-person conglomerate.”
But simultaneously, he practically denies her very existence, repeatedly referring to her as an otherworldly icon. Rather than talk about who she actually is—a driven, committed woman who works hard and achieves big—he calls her a “goddess,” an “image,” a “symbol.” He talks of her as if she were a queen, going “out to meet the multitudes.” If we’re not paying attention, we might mistake Safer’s regal words for compliments. But symbols and images are not real people with real achievements and real power. Queens these days are merely figureheads, like the trophy wives of wealthy businessmen and politicians. Goddesses are passive objects of worship. Using a trope that’s analogous to the treatment of many wives in traditional marriage relationships, Safer puts Stewart up on that pedestal of femininity, the place where women have historically been contained under the guise of admiration.
And even though he acknowledges her media power, he mocks her status and suggests that her business savvy is just something that makes it harder for her to find (or keep) a man. He says that “she neglects to mention the perfect husband, Andy Stewart, a publisher, who became imperfect and left her after twenty-nine years of marriage.” Poor Martha! he implies. All alone. And she tried to hide it from us, too. (Oh, is there some rule in the Morley Safer universe that requires people to recount painful episodes in their lives during interviews?) Throughout the interview, Safer persistently refers to the negative facets of Stewart’s personality, perhaps as a way of explaining why she couldn’t keep her marriage together—and has been unable to remarry since. Some examples he cites are her “bossiness,” “humorless[ness],” and “overpowering
neatness.” Also, the fact that she “doesn’t abide frivolous activities” (read: doesn’t like to have fun), observers are “driven up the wall” by her perfection, “there’s no separation in her life,” and “wherever Martha goes, Martha’s agenda must be kept.” (By the way, why does Morley insist on calling Stewart by her first name? In every other piece on that particular night’s program, the male subjects are referred to by their surnames.)
So her power is both unreal and the root of all her problems. Because of her position she’s a symbol, but the very concrete drive and skills that got her to the top send men scurrying to the hills. She may make a lot of money, but everyone hates her. She’d better refine her subservient-female act, says the subtext. But she seems to be doing just fine. She’s happy with her life: with her career, with her single status, with her own perfectionism. But Morley Safer’s not really paying attention to that little bit of info. It would interfere with his “reporting.”
The final minutes of the piece only serve to cement the let’s-get-Martha-married ethos. “Can such a woman find true happiness?” queries Safer, as if true happiness can be found only in a conventional male-female pairing. “Is there a George waiting for our Martha?” We couldn’t be more battered by his point if he applied it with a sledgehammer, but just in case we missed it, Safer spells it out with his metaphor: If Martha Stewart is America’s first lady, then she’s quite literally nothing without a man by her side. (Bonus insult: throwing in a reference to the one job that women still can’t have in this country.)
60 Minutes’
masculine message: A woman without a man is somehow not a legitimate woman; a woman who takes traditional femininity and forges masculine power from it is scary and threatening. Martha Stewart is all of the above, so she must be lonely and bitter, without the “true happiness” that would come from a straight marriage.
A BANNER AT THE TOP OF THE TABLOID RAG THE GLOBE ADVERTISES what it thinks people standing in line at the grocery store want to read: “Martha Stewart’s Desperate Search for Mr. Right.” The tabloid concurs with
60 Minutes’
theory that Stewart needs to get married and fast, but for different reasons. Unlike Morley Safer, who reveals that others are uncomfortable with her single status, the
Globe’
s Candace Trunzo focuses much more on the emotional life of Stewart herself, rather than on an outside
opinion of it. Also in contrast to the
60 Minutes
piece, there’s no mention here of the self-made media force Stewart has become. Since the article focuses on her as a woman, not as a person, her accomplishments are rendered irrelevant. The reporter takes for granted that her readers worship Stewart and lures them into a discussion of why her life isn’t happy and fulfilled. The reader, therefore, becomes concerned about Stewart and empathizes with her plight. Rather than seeing her power as a threat, the
Globe
sees it as an impediment to her own happiness. Trunzo insinuates that Stewart can’t have a satisfactory life unless she has someone at home to nurture—and she won’t find someone unless she stops being so ambitious and becomes more, well, womanly.
The
Globe
quotes Stewart on the breakup of her marriage: “I never thought this would happen to me … Maybe I didn’t spend enough time polishing [my husband’s] shoes.” Trunzo uses this to validate her own thesis that Martha Stewart should strive to be more feminine (read: slavish and willing to coddle a man) in order to get remarried, but—hello in there—do you think Stewart was being sarcastic? Just maybe? I can see the headlines now: “Top Marriage Secrets Revealed! Shoe Polish! Turn to Page Three!”
Trunzo also depicts Stewart as an airheaded socialite who frequents trendy Manhattan restaurants with a never-ending stream of gentlemen. “Since her nasty divorce from Andy Stewart in 1991,” explains the reporter, “Martha, 54, has been playing the field with a stable of men—and fielding the plays from prospective suitors to keep them at arm’s length, say pals.” The purposeful mention of her age here reinforces the urgency Stewart, and a reader who finds herself in the same circumstance, must feel at being single at such an advanced age. That “stable of men” must be made up of potential grooms, right?—because a fifty-four-year-old single woman could never just have some male friends.
The
Globe
, like
60 Minutes
, assumes that Stewart’s career negatively affects her private life. Trunzo quotes a New York psychotherapist who claims to know why Stewart hasn’t married again: “She’s an ambitious woman who may only become involved with men who can further her career.” The therapist implies either that Stewart is acting like a man might—seeking a trophy husband to make her look good in the public eye—and, since she’s not
a man, having no success, or she’s looking for some guy in publishing or TV to help her out. The shrink conveniently ignores the fact that Stewart’s career doesn’t need any furthering—she’s done just fine on her own. We’re also treated to an oh-so-psychologically-sound theory about why men might not want to marry Stewart: She “may be a control freak who likes to do things her way. Publicly, she doesn’t seem to exude that warmth and caring nature men enjoy.”
The
Globe’
s feminine message: A woman cannot be happy without a man to validate her existence. Men don’t marry women who display masculine characteristics and/or are more powerful than they are. (Here, the
Globe’
s perspective carries over into the assumption that no man wants an achieving wife.) Therefore, if you want to be married—and of course you do—try your damnedest not to make $200 million a year and try to be sweet, gracious, and meek. Otherwise, you’ll end up lonely and bitter. Gee, what’s a woman to do?
ISN’T THERE ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK AT THIS? DESPITE THE gripping analysis by these two media giants, it seems that Martha Stewart is a woman who’s better off unmarried. Only after trying and “failing” at a traditional marriage was she able to successfully infiltrate traditional male power centers and become a prosperous and powerful media force. Even Morley Safer admits it; he notes that the breakup of her marriage “was just about the time Martha Stewart became Martha Stewart.” Divorce, it seems, has been good to her. Yes, she’s rumored to be a bitch: She’s impulsive, insulting, and demanding, and she takes credit for other people’s work. But even if we believe the buzz, it just means that she’s doing the same things men have always done—and gotten away with.
Even though some see her as the ultimate feminine überwoman, a cook, decorator, and hostess-with-the-mostest, Martha Stewart may also be the ultimate feminist antihousewife. Why? She demonstrates that a woman’s existence does not need to be justified, completed, or otherwise muddled by a conventional heterosexual marriage. The timing of her success even suggests that marriage is bad for women.
Furthermore, Stewart’s empire brings a little refinement and allure to the chores previously deemed excruciating to the homemaker. Married
women, as everyone knows, are not the only people who perform these tasks. She shows her fans—male, female, straight, gay, married, or single—that daily household tasks can be enjoyable, and maybe even a little glamorous. So why not let Martha Stewart be an example to all of us lured by the notion that marriage is a requirement for a happy and fulfilled life? If we’re paying attention, we can all learn something other than the proper way to vacuum.