Martha Stewart Mystique

What is it about the allure of Martha Stewart and her glossy artsy photo spreads of white-wrapped boxes with grosgrain ribbons? Women thumb through her magazines marveling at the zoo animal sugar cookies with perfectly piped border frosting and wreaths made of natural materials only available in some obscure part of the country.


We plop down our credit card to purchase spring-form pans, willing to fork over money in exchange for the promise of perfection even if, in real life, we can’t make a cake from a box. We buy into the still-life dream of a simple lifestyle punctuated by elegance normally reserved for women of means with a large full-time staff--when, in fact, we can’t manage to keep a bathroom counter free from toothpaste streaks let alone wrap our antique tablecloths (if we owned them) in tissue paper to prevent creasing. I’m also pretty certain that I will never find the time or the desire to move my foodstuffs into matching stainless steel jars with chalkboard-paint labels even though the photo of her matching pantry makes me believe for a moment that I just having those jars in my pantry would improve my culinary skills.

The hectic housewives of today may long for a simpler life, especially one as stylish as the one presented on the pages of Martha’s magazines, but we haven’t a clue how to go back and the hallmarks of the simple life of yester-year would be positively infuriating today. One of the reasons why women managed their homes with efficiency and skill was because they only owned a single car and their husband had taken it to work—there was no where else to go. Then there was the household budget. Because families were operating on a single income, women were generally only given control over the grocery budget. Managing that budget required creative accounting if you had any hope of saving a few dollars for yourself. I’m not sure we’d be as willing to embrace simplicity if it meant having the mini-van taken away and carving our mad money out of the household grocery budget.

The women we are today just aren’t built for the simple life. We manage homes, high-stress jobs, and super-busy kids while keeping our marriages hot and our retirement accounts growing. Martha Stewart sells the dream and we live the reality. I’ll probably keep my subscription, but I’m officially giving up the idea that I’m going to replicate anything I see on the pages of the magazine.