Martha Stewart with Sarah Archer

This week we’re dishing up a mouthwatering feast of history, gossip, and white collar crime. Guest Sarah Archer tells the tale of Martha Stewart, a girl from New Jersey who achieved world domination by letting us look at her basket collection. Digressions include prairie dresses, condensed soups, and how to tell if your tween is reading Sunset Magazine.

Some Notes:

• K-Mart Commercial
• Early Martha Stewart Living TV show
• Martha on Letterman post-prison
• Snoop and Martha, 2008
• Martha's Princess Peony Announcement Part 1
• Martha's Princess Peony Announcement Part 2
• Martha and Snoop lighter ad
• SNL Martha / K-Mart bankruptcy 
• Everything Martha eats in a day

Here's where to find Sarah Archer:

Website
Twitter

Support us:

Bonus Episodes on Patreon

Donate on Paypal

Buy cute merch

Where else to find us:

Sarah's other show, You Are Good 

[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Links:

https://www.sarah-archer.com/
https://twitter.com/Sarcher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI7hGjIwRsY
https://youtu.be/6ko8WoHhmTc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtZ2SZyJhgA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ocre0kXgvg
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5uPYlpZK7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5uPYlpZK7/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb5u2hqpHzW/
https://youtu.be/y8jAtLBF_Lk
https://youtu.be/Yme4gdvYi3U
https://youtu.be/lKh2IkbCbQo

http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com

Transcript

Sarah Marshall: And I have an idea for an HGTV show where you think you're house hunting, but then it's surprise couples counseling.

“Once you finish painting out your pattern, allow the paint to set and dry, then check for any imperfections. Do a little touch up if you have to, peel off the tape, and enjoy your stencil.” 

“I'm Martha Stewart and I'm Kmart's new consultant for Entertaining and Lifestyle. I'll be helping millions of Kmart customers with tips on just about everything for the home and entertaining. So come to Kmart”. 

“What were you convicted of?” 

“I don't know. I don't. I dunno”.

 Sarah Marshall: Hello, you. I am Sarah Marshall, and you are listening to You’re Wrong About. We are talking today about Martha Stewart, an episode I have been wanting to do since the beginning of this show, and maybe you've been wanting it, too. My guest today is Sarah Archer, author of The Mid-Century Kitchen: America's Favorite Room, from Workspace to Dreamscape, 1940s-1970s. Which, as you can imagine, is my favorite book. And you can find more of her writing at sarah-archer.com.  This episode is a soup to nuts story about Martha Stewart's rise and fall and rise again. And along the way is a meditation on domestic war of housework, how we navigate gender, and doing the dishes in America today. I really loved making it. I hope that the joy I felt at getting to discuss why I was the kind of seventh grader who subscribed to Martha Stewart Living is palpable here. We have some hot and ready bonus episodes for you as always at patreon.com/yourewrongabout. And also starting this week, if you want to get that content a different way, you can do that by subscribing to bonus content on Apple podcasts. You can find links for all of the above in our show description. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy this episode.  Welcome to You’re Wrong About, where we are crafting a new podcast for you every night at the kitchen table. And with me today is Sarah Archer, domestic historian, Philadelphian, Martha Stewart enthusiast, woman after my own heart. Sarah, hello? 

Sarah Archer: Hello. How are you? 

Sarah Marshall: It's a Sarah to Sarah. This has never happened before.

Sarah Archer: It's a Sarah/Sarah podcast. I love this.

 Sarah Marshall: Contrary to everything about my house and the way I live, I love any aspect of history about homemaking and housekeeping. And I also love hot gossip about Martha Stewart. And we are combining those two things today.

Sarah Archer: The two best good things in the universe. 

 Sarah Marshall: Yes. I read Martha Stewart Living in middle school, which is fascinating. My room was a sty then, my house is a sty now. And I feel like this speaks to sort of what this whole thing is about. There are some people who are doing the crafts and emulating the lifestyle. And then for every one of those people, maybe there's 10 people - including tweens - who just want to read about it. 

Sarah Archer: Oh, I think it's more than 10, it's like most people. But I still love to read her magazines and books. The magazine, the print edition, sadly is no more. It's digital only now. 

Sarah Marshall: Really?

Sarah Archer: Yeah. The last issue was in, I think May of this year.

 Sarah Marshall: The fact that I'm having a genuine emotional response to this is maybe the key to why we're unpacking this at all.

Sarah Archer: Why do people have such strong reactions? And I have a theory about why this is, and it concerns the question of whether domestic activities are leisure, labor, or some third entity.

 Sarah Marshall: It makes sense to begin with me telling you in brief kind of my history with the subject and what this looked like to me also as a tween watching this go down, or I guess maybe this happened in 2001, Martha Stewart getting- 

Sarah Archer: Actually I think it was 2002, 2003.

 Sarah Marshall: These years all blend together, because I was just wearing the same Gap sweatshirt the whole time. And I think there's no more revealing arena of sort of human relationships and gender dynamics and economics than who is doing the dishes and how.  And how we feel about it. So when I was growing up, I had, what I still think of as a very weird and also to me still totally sensical obsession with Martha Stewart Living, Martha Stewart weddings and also Sunset Magazine, which is a west coast thing. 

Sarah Archer: Oh, I love Sunset. Oh my God. 

 Sarah Marshall: And obsession with home making as a concept was something I think I was drawn to as a way of sort of fantasizing about adult life and what it would look like, and this idea of all the lovely things that you can surround yourself with and be in charge of. I think that when you're a kid, you can't really control very much, so there was a fantasy of control for one thing. And also guess the aesthetics were great. I also loved Pier One import ads. 

Sarah Archer: Oh God, those were great. 

Sarah Marshall: It's from a Pier! Yeah. 

Sarah Archer: I guess maybe lots of kids do this, but I associate it strongly with little girls if you have a doll house or some, Barbie's dream house, some version of that. And being a woman about town, having her own space and my mom, as women of the boomer cohort, really had the rules changed on them. In that they were born in a time when it was not expected and in fact, would've been considered odd for them to be quote unquote, career women. Whereas when I was a kid, certainly, and you were a kid, probably the idea of not working was not a thing and that shift is a fascinating thread that runs through Martha's story. 

 Sarah Marshall: And clearly, we're living in the world that Martha helped build. I think just the whole concept of watching people do domestic chores on TikTok or looking at people's kitchens on Instagram, I think she anticipated all of that. And it's an interesting question, when does being a little girl, playing with your dollhouse and my Zillow habit begin? And I would say that they're essentially the same thing. Sort of the flip side of that is my interesting sort of tween devotion to Martha is that she annoyed the shit out of my mother who was a busy lady who worked a lot of hours, and she saw and sees Martha as basically this figure who's trying to pressure you into doing all these difficult things. And I think because I was a child and I felt like I was not seeing my current responsibilities, I was seeing this sort of dream life as a shadow lane that I aspired to someday. I was like, no, you don't do the things. You watch her do the things and then you don't necessarily do it. 

And she built this empire. She made an unbelievable amount of money off of her personal brand in a time when that phrase also didn't exist. Then she went to prison for, I believe, insider trading. And I think even when this was going on - and again, I was a Martha partisan - I was like, I don't feel like this is something other people aren't doing So you're telling me that basically somebody gave her a stock tip and was like, “Hey, the market's going to do this, act accordingly.” And she did. And you're saying that all these other Wall Street guys aren't doing that? There was just this unallied glee in the media when this happened. It was like, finally, Martha fucked something up. Finally, we have her, we've been waiting for this. She's been too powerful and too perfect for too long. It's like watching somebody spill red wine on a wedding dress. You're just like, ah. 

It now seems like she did her time and then remarkably, she came out and she got back to her old life without missing a beat, essentially. And now we're allowed to like her and now she's this kind of I'm sure there's a lot of people who she's still profoundly annoys and that that is still there, but it seems as if she has been accepted into the Pantheon of people that we just accept as part of our character. And we're not scared of her anymore. And I wonder if that's because we needed her or we needed to feel that she had been given her great big, humble pie and had to eat the whole thing, like Bruce Bogtrotter, not to mix a cake and pie metaphor. 

Sarah Archer: I think that's absolutely true.

 Sarah Marshall: Or is it because culture caught up with her and we realized that she made the world we're now living in.

Sarah Archer: She has a clear sense of humor about herself in a way that she didn't always, and I think there was a real seriousness to her approach and her affect that I think some people loved, there are people I've heard it described as kind of ASMR, she has this very soothing speaking voice, but there are other people who really, because she didn't approach it as like the semi-homemade category of Sandra Lee, Rachel Ray. Here's a little secret, your husband won't know they're actually coffee crystals, you're saving a little time and you're getting one over on the husband and kids. Basically husband and kids can fuck off. Martha is teaching you how to do something highly skilled that's really good quality and delicious. And there's not really a lot of mention of others. 

 Sarah Marshall: Yeah. There's no Jeffrey, is there? Jeffrey's never coming home.

Sarah Archer: He's going to In and Out Burger, he's on his own. Can I have you read a fascinating thing? There's an article by the great Margaret Talbot. It’s called Les Très Riches Heures de Martha Stewart

 Sarah Marshall: “Every age gets the household goddess it deserves. The 1960s had Julia Child, the sophisticated, French chef who proved as permissive as Dr. Spock. She may have proselytized for refined foreign cuisine from her perk at a Boston PBS station, but she was always an anti-snub, vowing to take a lot of the lottie dot of French cooking. Faintly Bohemian, and a little tatty, like a yellowing travel poster. She was messy and forgiving. When Julia dropped an egg or collapsed a soufflé, she shrugged and laughed. You were alone in the kitchen. Nobody can see you and cooking is meant to be fun.” You can't not do the voice, come on. 

Sarah Archer: You have to do the voice. So that's paragraph one. I shall read paragraph two. “In the 1990s and probably well into the next century, we have Martha Stewart, corporate overachiever turned domestic super achiever. Martha is the anti-Julia. Consider the extent of their respective powers. 

At the height of her success, Child could boast a clutch of bestselling cookbooks and a game-ish TV show shot on a single set. At what may or may not be the height of her, here's what Stewart can claim.” Again, this is in 1996, “A five year old magazine, Martha Stewart Living with a circulation that has leapt to 1.5 million, a popular cable TV show also called Martha Stewart Living, filmed at her luscious Connecticut and East Hampton estates, a dozen wildly successful gardening, cooking, and lifestyle books, a mail order business, Martha by Mail, a nationally syndicated newspaper column called Ask Martha, a regular Wednesday slot on the Today Show, a line of $110 a gallon paints in colors, inspired by the eggs her Araucana hens lay, and plans to invade cyberspace. In short, an empire.”

Sarah Marshall: How dare.

Sarah Archer: I know! So I would love to hear your thoughts about it. 

 Sarah Marshall: Okay. One of the things that this reminds me of is our beloved friend of the show, Jamie Loftis’ standup special, basically in character as a girl boss pastiche named Shell Gasoline Sandwich. And one of the things that Shell does, I think as part of her morning routine is to yell, ‘girl boss’ into the mirror until it breaks in every morning. The first thing that comes to my mind when this author is like, Martha has a way bigger empire and she has more tentacles going into more forms of media and that's her being a corporate overachiever, regardless of what that meant at the time, it feels like today that is not just the least you can do, but the least you are allowed to do. If you were going to make a living in media in any way, if you're going to be relevant in a way that involves, God help me for using this phrase, but producing content for people, which is what I am doing right now, you have to diversify in as many media platforms as you possibly can, because if you don't, you are more likely to collapse, like one of the dinosaurs in Fantasia.

Sarah Archer: Yeah, pretty much. One of the things that you hear about Martha a lot mentioned is she's a snob, she's waspy. So here's the deal with Julia and Martha: Julia was relatable in part because she didn't learn how to cook until she was almost 40, because she grew up in a wealthy household with staff. It's almost if Prince Charles had a gardening show, it would just be like 85%. 

 Sarah Marshall: Oh, I would watch the hell out of that. 

Sarah Archer: It would be like 85% him apologizing for things. And then just kind of not, just try this. 

 Sarah Marshall: And pretending to have a fake arm.

Sarah Archer: Exactly! Julie was able to have, “and you don't know how to cook French food because you're American”, so let's not know what we're doing together. Martha really was the exact opposite. I mean, she grew up basically working class, at sort of the bottom drawer of the middle class and had to learn how to do everything because there was nobody else to do it.  

 Sarah Marshall: It is old money behavior to allow your stuff to get a little tatty. If you're really rich, you can have a moth hole because you're not worried about people judging you for having falling apart clothes because you're rich. No, one's going to judge you. Who cares?

Sarah Archer: Exactly. It's nonchalant. 

Sarah Marshall: You can drop the omelet. You're fancy. It's fine. 

Sarah Archer: Yeah. and it's a different kind of confidence than the confidence that comes from being a self-taught expert, which is what Martha is. Martha's taste is quite waspy. These exquisitely restored 19th century homes and really good antique furniture. She knows what she's looking at. She's not a Philistine. She doesn't decorate like a Nuevo rouge person. 

 Sarah Marshall: It's like being a butterfly with spots that look like eyes or something. Nobody's going to eat me now. 

Sarah Archer: Exactly. She's born in 1941, she grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, which is not a fancy place. Her family had a three-bedroom house and there were six kids. She went to Barnard in the late fifties, and that's very unusual. I mean, that was an era when it was really, for the most part, it was still debutants. And she's from a Roman Catholic family and she was working as a model. She was a very successful model who appeared in commercials. It sounds crazy now, but back then, that was a big deal. 

 Sarah Marshall: It's fascinating to go back in time to, I guess, yeah, when Martha would've been in college in 1960, when there was a Catholic president.

Sarah Archer: I am old enough to remember, and I'm only in my mid-forties, there were debutante balls when I was in prep school in the nineties where Catholics and Jews were not allowed. Let's back up a little bit to talk about Martha getting married and becoming a stockbroker. Martha meets Andy Stewart, her husband, who is a Yale law student, and they get married in 1962. Or 1961 and then she graduated from college in 1962. And they had their daughter Alexis in 1965. They are living in New York city and he's doing his law thing. Martha is still kind of trying to make a go of it a little bit as a model. She'd had some very fancy clients, she had modeled for Chanel. She is staggeringly photogenic.

 Sarah Marshall: And she's putting in her hours learning how to work with the cameras.

Sarah Archer: Oh yes. The stockbroker job was sort of not really as dazzling as you might think. Part of the Martha lore that she was this killer, like Gordon Gekko figure on Wall Street. Somehow in the sixties and seventies, Andy helps her get a gig with a small kind of down at the heels firm called Monness, Williams, and Sidel. She took a brokerage course at the New York Institute of Finance, gets licensed as a securities broker in 1968. But she mostly works as front office glamor. She was a salesperson, she was a saleswoman, but this was an era when there were basically hardly any women on wall street, right? 

 Sarah Marshall: The timeline doesn't line up with her being a shark.

Sarah Archer: I don't doubt she worked her tail off. 

 Sarah Marshall: Is she Joan in this scenario? Joan Mad Men? 

Sarah Archer: She might be Joan. She was a superb saleswoman. When it came to the actual kind of handshake deal making, that was left to the men. 

Sarah Marshall: Natural. 

Sarah Archer: She kind of is like over it by 1973, 74.

 Sarah Marshall: As many women were over a lot of things. 

Sarah Archer: As many women were, right? Over a lot of things. And the two of them are exhausted. New York is gnarly and it's so expensive. And so they say, okay, we're going to move to Connecticut. Andy gets a new job as in house counsel at a company that happens to have headquarters in Greenwich. So it makes sense for them to live in Westport, which is where Turkey Hill is. 

Turkey Hill is an early 19th century farmhouse, which is basically derelict when they buy it. They get a great deal on it, but it's like the money pit, right? No heat. She teams up with Norma Collier who is an old pal from her modeling days. So the two of them are beautiful. It's these two women, they started a firm called, The Catered Affair in 1976. They are a smash hit. They have clients including Paul Newman and Joan Woodward, Ralph Lauren, Robert Redford. The Catered Affair has kind of a gambit, which is that they take all of your serving pieces away in the station wagon, make all the food, put it in all the things and then kind of deploy it in your house, so that it looks as though you have done all the work.

Sarah Marshall: That is brilliant. 

Sarah Archer: There's a point at which Martha starts taking side jobs and not telling Norma. And so Norma understandably doesn't respond super well to this news. So they part ways. Martha begins selling pies and cakes at this kind of slightly crunchy gourmet food store in Westport called The Common Market. That becomes the origin of her working as a caterer on her own. 

 Sarah Marshall: This is another classic wasp thing where the fancier the store, the humbler the name. If you have something where a loaf of bread costs $14, it's going to be called The Bread Shack. Nothing fancy.  

Sarah Archer: And this is where we get to kind of the shifting domestic landscape of the 1970s. And this is my, the gifwhere, I don't even know where it comes from, but there's a guy kind of gesticulating in front of a red string wall. 

 Sarah Marshall: Oh, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. You should know this.

Sarah Archer: I should know that. 

Sarah Marshall: Pepe Silvia. 

Sarah Archer: Yeah. So my version of that is I have this timeline. By 1970 50% of single women and 40% of married women were participating in the labor force. Also in 1970, Jessica McClintock buys Gunny Sachs and begins producing Perry dresses. Also in 1970, Gloria Vanderbilt appeared in a quilt extravaganza called Gloria's Great Patchwork Bedroom in the pages of Vogue. 1971, Wilson's Needle Point show premiered on PBS. 1972, Hobby Lobby opened. 1973 Roe vs Wade is decided. Betty Friedan debates Phyllis Schlafly on TV, and Michael's Craft Stores open. 1974, Little House on the Prairie premieres on NBC. Women can apply for credit in their own names. 1976, Yves St. Laurent presents his peasant collection, and 1978 passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. So what strikes you about this span of time?

 Sarah Marshall: From the data points you're giving, it feels like there's a direct correlation between women gaining legal rights and the aesthetic of an imagined past domesticity becoming ascendant. And what is the Prairie dress for people who don't sit around thinking about these things or wearing them for that matter?

Sarah Archer: So there was this very popular thing, starting in the late sixties and it kind of emerges a little bit from big poufy sleeves up to the neck lace, high waist, long skirt. 

 Sarah Marshall: It's also what everybody's wearing in the Stepford Wives movie, I would say. 

Sarah Archer: That's precisely it. Yeah. That brings me to a very incisive piece from Margaret Talbot's article. “If Stuart is a throwback, it's not so much to the 1950s as it is to the 1850s, when the doctrine of separate spheres did allow married or widowed women of the upper classes a kind of power. Unchallenged in minion over day-to-day functioning of the home and its servants in exchange preceding the public realm men. 

At Turkey hill, Stewart is the undisputed shadow lane, micromanaging her estate in splined isolation. This hermetic pastoral is slightly marred, of course, by the presence of cameras. Here, the domestic arts have become ends in themselves, unmoored from family values and indeed from family.” And I think this is so interesting because it completely overturns the logic of industrial kitchens that we have had really since the 1920s. I mean, the kitchen, as we know it today, is rooted in the principles of scientific management. I mean, it was the time and motion studies of the factory. 

 Sarah Marshall: Doesn't the Cheaper By the Dozen guy do this. He was an efficiency expert. 

Sarah Archer: That’s exactly it. So this is pretty much the same generation. So the idea is housework is a profession.

 Sarah Marshall: Not a paid profession, of course, but yeah. 

Sarah Archer: Oh, heaven no!

Sarah Marshall: In every way, but compensation.

Sarah Archer: Because you're being rewarded with the superior currency of love and devotion. Basically, this is feminism in 1926. Women deserve things to make their work easier. And what's super fascinating about this is that then what happens with the makers of appliances as water, gas, and electricity are coming into more and more homes and apartments, appliance makers realize advertisers start casting appliances as invisible servants. And it's kind of sending the message that you can become a different kind of person or more specifically a different class of person. Then by the time we get to mid-century, you have this advanced kitchen and you're not a housekeeper. You're not getting splattered with things, you're not on your hands and knees cleaning the floor. You are elegantly managing your desk and the information center.  

 Sarah Marshall: You get to be the boss. 

Sarah Archer: Exactly. You're the boss. You are the boss lady. It was such a thing. And then just dropped off a cliff around 1970, around Prairie dress time. And sort of the packaged-ness and efficiency and ease is helpful. I mean, people like it, but there is also something, a little dehumanizing about it. If machines are doing everything for you, where is the creative energy? And Martha turned a version of performative domesticity into her business, but to do this, she had to sort of unravel all of the efficiencies that made housework more streamlined. So it manifests a world where the kind of housework you do is only the kind that you like. And the presumption is that you have someone to help you do the other stuff. And in that respect, it sounds a lot like being a man.

 Sarah Marshall: That's why it seems so fun. Oh my God. We cracked it. 

Sarah Archer: Exactly. And it's why people are so angry. 

 Sarah Marshall: There it is. How like men have one thing that they make? Some men are wonderful and diverse cooks and that's wonderful. And I thank you. And this is not even a dig, but I feel like it's such a classic thing for your dad to be like, he never cooks anything, but he has this pork chop recipe that he busts out a couple times a year and it's dad's pork chops. And he just kind of wanders in when he wants to cook something for fun. And then he goes away. 

Sarah Archer: Exactly. It is almost inevitably imbalanced because men are oh, you're so worried about being clean and just chillax. Well, no you can't because then it's treated like a crime against humanity.

 Sarah Marshall: I flip flop between thinking that I have the domestic life of a man, which is that I do dishes when I feel like it, which is not particularly often. And it doesn't get done if I don't feel like it. And a lot of the essential tension people experience in the household is based on this idea that men and women are essentially trained for different standards and that if the home was left to the care of men, and I place myself in that category, really, then things would just never get done. And yeah, they don't, it's not great. My house does not look great.

Sarah Archer: And so I think this idea that you're sort of doing what you like and that you're also monetizing it big time is very threatening to people. I've been doing all the chores and I'm not a billionaire. Because it exists in a different category. Whereas, Martha is professionalizing domestic work cause she's a caterer, right? This is her profession. 

 Sarah Marshall: What if everyone's standards could just get lower? Because of this, I think that women's work will always be terrible as long as it remains women's work and not like domestic work for people who have a house and husband means house bond. It means that you are married to the house, and it used to be a mutual responsibility to take care of this place that was taking care of you. And then as men moved out of the home and into the workforce, it became the woman's job and that things have been fraught and fairly miserable ever since, everyone has their own comfort zone. But I want to push on that and say what makes you happy? What are the things in your house that need to be clean or organized for you to have a good quality of life? And how much of it is just like a fear of being judged? And for some people you really do need a very organized house to be functional. And if that's what you need, then you should get what you need. But do all of us need that? Or are we performing for God or somebody?

Sarah Archer: Oh, totally.

Sarah Marshall: I mean, my other idea is like, what if domestic work was paid? What if we were paid by the government for housekeeping and raising babies, which I think is also a great idea, but is farther off.

Sarah Archer: And probably will never happen because having it unpaid means that women are dependent on men.

 Sarah Marshall: And of course that's how things must be because otherwise we would eat everyone.

Sarah Archer: The Martha answer to that basically is to kind of say, okay, this is the world I belong in. So I'm going to be creative and enjoy it. Andy gets a job with Abram's Publishing, and he becomes its new president and CEO. 

 Sarah Marshall: What’s Andy like, by the way? Not to get submerged in Andy gossip, but what's his deal?

Sarah Archer: That's a great question. So my understanding is that Andy's family is blue blood adjacent. He's charming, he's handsome. He's six foot something or other. They eventually divorce. You probably know that they, at some point in the late eighties early nineties, they separated.

Sarah Marshall: That was the thing to do at the time.

Sarah Archer: That was, that literally was the thing to do. But Andy is a doll. And so it's this relationship with publishing that indirectly kind of triggers the beginning of entertaining. So they have a big launch party. Martha caters it and Crown Publishing says, gosh, these hors d'oeuvres are sensational, and meets Martha and is dazzled by her charm and beauty and smarts. And basically says, we should do a book. And Entertaining is a huge hit. It was in its 30th printing at some point, it's basically the biggest selling cookbook since Julia Child. 

Sarah Marshall: Really? 

Sarah Archer: Yeah. It's huge. Wow. It's atmospheric and stylish. It's very much designed to position Martha as a tastemaker. It's a cookbook in the same way that the Wizard of Oz is a travel log or something. Look at the chapter about kitchens, it's mostly Martha gardening.

 Sarah Marshall: I remember she's like, here I am with my chickens, and she's got 40 fucking chickens. And you're like, Martha, this is a lot of chickens, lady. 

Sarah Archer: How do you have time? This is also shot through in the magazine later as well. That a lot of the photographs you see of Turkey Hill are sort of nearby buildings. They look like they could be photographs or drawings from the 19th century. It's almost as though you're looking at a version of American material history in which plastic had never been invented. 

 Sarah Marshall: Yeah. Wow. Which is keeping with the kind of modern, not to say hipster, but I guess the overall millennial aesthetic of keeping everything in repurposed glass jars.

Sarah Archer: Oh, she invented it. You're skewing convenience, which again is a calling card of affluence. Visually, by saying, well, our family prefers not to buy plastic things. Well, good for you. 

 Sarah Marshall: Right. So, which means my family can afford to put the time and energy into doing that. Something that we just hear kind of in talking about stages of American cuisine, but this sort of Julia versus Jell-O binary, this idea of like before Julia Child, American women didn't know what the fuck they were doing. And they just poured soup over everything. And they're so dumb. That always bothers me because I'm like, soup cooking exists for a reason and it's because you have to feed your family like multiple times a day. I will not stand for cream of condensed soup being maligned as a shortcut in recipes. There are so many recipes like that for a very good reason.

Sarah Archer: Exactly. So imagine you're not rich, you have an ice box, you have a budget to buy food. You're living through the Great Depression or it's rationing during World War II. Your food will go bad if you don't cook it the right way at the right time. And if it goes bad, there's not infinite money or credit or whatever to replace it. So if you then turn around and say, here's a brand-new refrigerator that will keep things fresh and a whole repertoire of canned goods, where if something goes sideways, you can always rely on mushroom soup. I mean, that’s heaven. I mean, it's not like a trivial thing,

Sarah Marshall: Soup for you.  Not for me.

Sarah Archer: Exactly. Not for me. And so this is a super interesting moment to kind of get into the weeds on Kmart. Would you like to read a passage from the New York Times, a 1997 article about Martha's ongoing complicated relationship with Kmart?

 Sarah Marshall: Oh my God. I would like nothing more. “She prodded average Americans to consider Quince preserves. She ratcheted up their sense of inadequacy because they did not press their vintage linens and whip up exotic omelets with eggs from their own chicken farms. Now she wants to take away their burgundy sheets. She of course is Martha Stewart, and her remaking of the American bed and bath is part of a joint venture with the Kmart corporation. Next month, Ms. Stewart will roll out her new line of sheets, towels, pillows, and bed throws at Kmart stores. The idea behind Every Day is to lower middle Americans away from what Ms. Stewart sees as the often dismal offerings of lower priced stores, dark colors, polyester fabrics, fruit prints, by giving them a taste of what shoppers with a lot more money and time for glue guns get from fancier outlets.” So, this is framed as if she's doing something very sinister, which is interesting. 

Sarah Archer: It’s so fascinating. And also, she's schooling taste and you know how people love that. Martha's books, it was Entertaining and then followed by weddings and tarts and all these other books that did amazingly well. She's starting to appear on TV shows here and there. And she's developed a cult following. So there's a woman named Barbara Lauren Snyder, who was brought into a brain trust for Kmart by the soon to be CEO, Joe Antonin. And Joe says, aesthetically, we suck, we really need to kind of start like branching, kind of upping the aesthetics, the quality.

 Sarah Marshall: This is a very ignorant question, but it's just hard to know which giants have fallen recently. Is Kmart still around? I don't feel like I see Kmart’s anymore. 

Sarah Archer: It sure isn't and that actually figures into our story a little bit. So there was this desire to sort of quote unquote revitalize Kmart, which spoiler alert ultimately did not succeed. But when Martha was involved, they had a good run. So Barbara Lauren Snyder explores bookshelves and is seeing Martha Stewart everywhere. And she's like, gosh, this woman is photogenic, and people are showing up to her events and droves, what if I could bring her on? 

 Sarah Marshall: And is this mid late eighties? When are we now? 

Sarah Archer: This is mid-eighties. Martha is not yet on TV, but she's a known quantity in books. 

 Sarah Marshall: She’s like Alison Roman. 

Sarah Archer: Exactly. But better. So they ultimately carve out a deal where she gets $200,000 a year. This is in the mid 1980s. And $3,000 a pop for each one of 30 appearances where she goes to a Kmart event. The relationship begins to get complicated because Martha understandably wants more and more influence on the aesthetics. So she's kind of going through the shelves and this is all like the polyester count. The thread count is too low. This is Ugh, the colors. And there's a point in the early nineties where she says, what if we could do fancy mustards and cookies and sort of tea and cat stuff. We could do Martha Stewart branded grooming tools, treats and toys. And Joan Antonini is like, what the fuck? In 2002 Kmart went bankrupt. And I put it to you that if they had permitted Martha to sell branded cat stuff, that may have unfolded differently. I'm just saying. And the tension that ran through at the entire time was this question of taste, the color palette she was advocating for, the Araucana hens, was too unusual, too eccentric.

 Sarah Marshall: And what colors is she talking about that America wasn't ready for?

Sarah Archer: Basically like, it's all the colors that you see now on HGTV. It's like turquoise blue, celadon green, lots of grays. It's actually very Farrow and ball. So they have this wonderful, almost instantly historical feeling. They look as though they've been on the wall for a hundred years. That is not a look that everybody wanted in 1990. This was the era of, it was like Frazier's apartment. We're coming off the high of the 1980s. Everybody wanted neon colors. 

 Sarah Marshall: Why glass brick? Either people used to organically have these opinions, or they're being coached to go in and be like, blah, blah. Oh, these cabinets are oak, and oak is from the nineties and we need everything to be stainless steel and pale granite. And it's you know that this, anything of a time is going to look stupid and dated within your lifetime, right?

Sarah Archer: It's interesting to look at what Martha does that a lot of her interiors have a kind of colonial 19th century eternal quality, they're not trendy. So she struck a deal in 1990 with Time Venture to develop the magazine that became Martha Stewart Living. And the response to the initial test issues blew the executives away. They were kind of expecting it to bomb. They were just like, ah, we're going to try this, whatever. I think we'll try things.

Sarah Marshall: Once again, we don't just want more women in the corporate hierarchy because it's nice. But also because you'll make more money, you idiots. 

Sarah Archer: Yes. So it peaked in 2002 with 2 million copies per issue. And the magazine industry is… the world has changed, that probably will never be the case again.

 Sarah Marshall: That moment was probably as big as magazines were ever going to be. Right? 

Sarah Archer: Yeah, and she, meanwhile, in 1993, began working with a company called Group W. Productions where she started a weekly half hour TV show also called Martha Stewart Living. And that's basically when the magazine comes to life. The magazine on TV expanded in 1997 to an hour on all weekdays and then a half hour episode on the weekends. This runs until 2004, because something occurred in 2004, went to prison, and she was appearing on the Early Show and the Today Show and having holiday specials, this, that, and the other. There's a producer involved, Richard Sheingold who was like, I guess we’ll do this. But eh, why do people who live in big cities, and that's most of the viewers, want to watch a TV show about gardens when they don't have gardens? 

 Sarah Marshall: Because they live in big cities you guys, come on. Why do we watch James Bond movies even though we don't work for MI6? God. 

Sarah Archer: So at this point she meets a woman named Sharon Patrick, and I would like you to guess where and how they met. Knowing that Sharon Patrick is a business lady. Sharon Patrick is a very impressive business lady. 

 Sarah Marshall: Okay. Flea market. 

Sarah Archer: That's actually a great guest. They were hiking Mount Kilimanjaro together. So as one does. Martha is like an incredibly Intrepid traveler. She's hiked Machu Picchu. She travels all over the world. She expresses this desire to Sharon that I'm being paid $750,000 a year from Time Warner, which is nice, but given how much money I am making for all of these entities, I want more. And I want more control. 

 Sarah Marshall: Just like the Backstreet boys said in the late nineties.

Sarah Archer: Right. You want some ownership and frankly, the business world or the business side of the creative life is littered with people who tried to do this and failed like Halston. It is incredibly hard to do that because usually people who are aesthetically gifted, for that to be in the same package, as somebody who is incredibly business savvy and creative in that regard is extremely rare.

 Sarah Marshall: Or to be savvy in choosing the right person to partner with, if you're able to outsource that, I bet. Yeah. 

Sarah Archer: Sharon Patrick basically says you need your own company. So she sort of signs on to help Martha kind of write a vision statement, carved out a role business plan, what would this actually look like? It's a multimedia entity where everything run kind of revolves around her.

 Sarah Marshall: Like where she's the Rupert Murdoch to compare her to the most sinister person possible. 

Sarah Archer: If he were creative. One thing that's interesting about Martha Inc the book and the movie on which it is based is that it's a little bitchy here and there. And I dislike those parts of it where there's kind of armchair psychologizing about why Martha is brisk with people in the elevator, whatever. 

 Sarah Marshall: Oh, my God. Don't you love how there's biographies of great men and it's sure he murdered his wife, but on the other hand, those sentences. And then a woman can like, not necessarily that running a giant company is like a great thing to do. I think the way that the girl boss concept obscures the broader and inescapable senses of capitalism is one of the many issues with it. But on the other hand, the fact that women are punished as much if not more in mainstream media for occasional rudeness than men are for murder. I'm not exaggerating here. It's quite something. 

Sarah Archer: You don’t hear a lot about well, why was Steve jobs so rude and mean to people? 

 Sarah Marshall: Because that's what geniuses do, you dumb, bitch. At least if they're men and they go on crazy diets too. 

Sarah Archer: So they go to Time Warner, and we want my interests back. We want to buy you out. And they're like, ha, okay. It's 85 million. Martha at this point is doing great, but not like hundreds of millions great. Right. So Sharon walks her through, they get financing and part of it is an advance on Martha's re-upped contract with Kmart. So they're able to cobble together that was like 16 million from Kmart. The initial stock offering is underwritten by Morgan Stanley. That's the IPO. I am not sure whether the loan she got, she had some sort of a very large four-year loan, which she immediately paid back. Came from Morgan Stanley or some other source. In some fashion, she puts together this mammoth package. And time Warner is stunned and they're basically like, okay. And this new entity is born. Martha's the CEO. Sharon Patrick became chief operating officer, and the stock went public on October 19th, 1999, initially offered at $18 a share. It closes at 38. And by closing, Martha Stewart is the first self-made billionaire in the United States.

 Sarah Marshall: And that’s billion with a B.

Sarah Archer: Billion with a B. I mean, this is in 1999. So this, and so people on Wall Street, like at this point still, as now, mostly dues are like, holy shit. How did she do this?

 Sarah Marshall: Because it's banking on people not believing in you for one thing. 

Sarah Archer: Absolutely. Oh yeah. She starts to get all this attention. This is also when the lore of Martha as being kind of like up before the chickens and running miles per day and just being this kind of incredible sort of Uber woman is born. So she sort of famously is like, oh, I only need three hours of sleep. The myth and legend of Martha, not just Martha Stewart Living magazine, but sort of Martha's lifestyle becomes very much fodder for magazine articles and fascination. 

 Sarah Marshall: I feel like the fastest way to get the public's attention is to tell them you sleep an obscenely tiny amount. And they're like, what? No, really? 

Sarah Archer: Maybe that's true. I mean, I guess there are some people for whom that's true.

 Sarah Marshall: I don’t know. I want to write an aspirational lifestyle book for people who sleep all the time. That's me.

Sarah Archer: Like cats 

 Sarah Marshall: As much as possible. 

Sarah Archer: Even now she's 80 years old as we're recording this, she does not have the kind of wealth that she did when MSLO first went public, but she has plenty of money. She's fine. People with much less money than she has now don't work. And she's on TikTok selling skincare. I mean, she works, she has never stopped working. 

 Sarah Marshall: I mean comparing this to like the Theranos model of becoming a self-made blonde lady billionaire, which obviously I still can't stop thinking about. If you must, then it does seem like rather than selling a giant promise that science already knows is impossible and then committing evermore ornate varieties of fraud to keep the ball rolling forward, what if you just figure out what you like doing and then force people to pay you ever increasing amounts of money to do it?

Sarah Archer:  Oh, absolutely. I mean, isn't it Dolly Parton who said basically figure out what you're good at and then do it on purpose.

Sarah Marshall: Yeah, it sounds right. 

Sarah Archer: She, so she was really writing high until the crime. Now, do you have a memory of the crime?

 Sarah Marshall: This happened, if not in the immediate aftermath of her becoming the first female self-made billionaire, then in this era of her career where she was standing above us all. The joke was like all about her super competence and her Uber frow-ness. Yeah. I just think the feeling that she had become uncomfortably powerful. And again, I think there's a lot to be said reasonably about the discomfort of living in a country that is controlled by moguls and at a certain scale, ethics are impossible, especially if you're partnering with companies and with manufacturers and that kind of thing. 

Sarah Archer: Investment banks. Yeah.

Sarah Marshall: Yeah. Exactly there's all kinds of extremely valid criticism to bring to Martha Stewart and her kind of rise to the level of fame that she had. And to talk about the problems with her as such a prominent public figure. But I don't think we were talking about that as much. I think primarily the concern was, this is a woman who's become extremely powerful, kind of, without us noticing until it was already happening, and we're stressed about that, basically. I don't remember the circumstances. I just know that she, I always picture it as like a lovely sort of informal summertime, you're eating canopies at someone's lovely estate in the Hamptons or whatever, and someone's oh Martha, bye the bye. You might want a short Pfizer or whatever.  

Sarah Archer: So again, this is the fall of 2001. So it's like Tom Broca's assistant is getting mailed anthrax letters, 911 has happened. There's a lot going on. 

 Sarah Marshall: Yeah. Everyone's very stressed. 

Sarah Archer: So Martha had at this time, this gigantic portfolio of her own stock, and that is what made her a billionaire. In addition to that, she had what we normal people would consider a huge investment portfolio with her money manager at Merrill Lynch. Several million, maybe 10 million, something like that. One of the holdings that she has is a company called Inclone. And on December 27th, 2001, she sold all of her shares. The SEC alleges that she avoided a stock loss of about $45,000, 40 to 50 by selling on the 27th. 

 Sarah Marshall: That's like nothing to her.

Sarah Archer: It’s literally a rounding error. So on the 27th, because on December 28th, it was announced that Herbotox, which was an experimental cancer drug the company had been developing, was not going to get FDA approval. The doctor who founded the company, Sam Waksal, who's a friend of Martha's, I think they actually dated at some point, and his father and his daughter all sold their shares. And she sells her entire position, which is about $230,000. 

Bacanovic claimed that there had been a pre-existing agreement to sell the stock if shares dipped below $60, and there was a notation in his files that had sort of the @ symbol, which was at the time we didn't associate with Twitter that said 60, which was later shown to be written in a different pen. It's odd because in a situation like this, normally you'd have a stop loss order in place so that you don't have to call, this is what I want to do. If it goes below this amount I want to sell. And you have all of those in place so that you don't have to worry about it. 

So this happened very quietly at the end of 2001. Months go by. In October of 2002 Douglas spaniel, who is Bacanovic’s assistant at Merrill Lynch, pleaded guilty to the feds to taking a payout in exchange for keeping quiet about the sale. 

 Sarah Marshall: Why is he being questioned by the feds initially? Is this with regards to this or something else and he happened to mention it.

Sarah Archer: The SEC was on the whole Herbatox Ione situation.

 Sarah Marshall: Okay. And is this something that other clients did or is it just a Martha thing that they're looking at? 

Sarah Archer: Martha and the sort of Sam Waksal circle of influence is they're the best known. I think it was only people in this inner circle who knew about it, but that's actually a great question. I'm not totally sure about that, but the feds are onto the timing of this. And so they're sniffing around. So the day after that, October 3rd, she resigned her position on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange. And months later in June 2003, she was indicted on nine counts, including charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. So on that day, she voluntarily steps down as CEO and chair of Martha Stewart Living Omnimed, but stays on as chief creative officer and goes on trial famously in January 2004. And to this day, she insists that she didn't know. There are incriminating details, like the little @60 indication. There were things like she asked her assistant Annie Armstrong to change the call log on December 27th. And then thought better of it and asked her to change it back. And Annie Armstrong has said repeatedly that Martha never asked her to lie. But her testimony becomes very key. So you may be surprised to know that the charges of security fraud were ultimately dropped, and she's convicted in March, 2004 of felony charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice. 

 Sarah Marshall: Don't obstruct justice you guys, that's how they get you.

Sarah Archer: All of that stuff ultimately leads her to be sentenced in July 2004, to serve a five month term in a federal correctional facility in Alderson West Virginia, which is like a schlep from New York. And that was kind of like an annoying, added detail. So she's there, I believe it was a two-year period of supervised release. And so she's up in her house in Bedford, New York after that. In the lead up to this, it would probably be an exaggeration to describe Jeffrey Toobin as a friend of the show. 

 Sarah Marshall: He's a recurring, how would you describe him? He's something.

Sarah Archer: He's something else. And I have to say his article Lunch at Martha's, which appeared in the New Yorker kind of once shit had started to really hit the fan, but before she was sentenced or before she was convicted, is a masterpiece. 

 Sarah Marshall: He's a hell of a writer. And he always said some weird ass shit about women and both these things are true. Yeah.

Sarah Archer: So in describing her plate, she says, “okay, that's puzzling and also confusing because my public image has been one of trustworthiness of being a fine editor, a fine purveyor of historical and contemporary information for the homemaker and that I have been turned into or vilified openly as something other than what I really am, has been really confusing. I mean, we've produced a lot of good stuff for a lot of good people and to be maligned for it, that is kind of weird.” And Jeffrey writes, “when we took a lunch break, it was clear that the wounds of the past year ran deep. After I admired the silver chopsticks that had been set out, Stewart said, in China they say the thinner, the chopsticks, the higher, the social status. Of course I got the thinnest I could find. After a pause, she added, that's why people hate me.” 

 Sarah Marshall: Oh, Martha. And she's right, right? 

Sarah Archer: Well, yes and no. I mean, I think we elected a president with a gold toilet. 

 Sarah Marshall: Well, yeah, man, with a gold toilet. Crucially. Yes. 

Sarah Archer: Crucially. It's not wealth per se. I think it's something like perfection or its pursuit that really just makes people nuts about women. So she goes to jail for five months. She basically thrives, it sounds like her description. I mean, there's this amazing interview she does with David Letterman where he, to his credit, kind of apologizes and basically is that, we really made pay out of all of this and I'm very sorry. Most people who go to prison in this country do so for no good reason and have it much worse, which is true. The justice system, she talks about expired food, and this is at a prison that's pretty nice by comparison. I mean, these are like white collar crimes. It's not a place where you go and you're scared. It's a place where you go and you're like, Ew, this is expired. Which is not great. 

But compared to the absolutely nonsense offenses that send people away to terrifying places for years and years is evident. So she becomes, when she's in jail, a kind of advocate or sort of liaison between the brass and her other inmates. There's footage of her leaving and kind of getting on her private plane with her daughter. And she's wearing a knitted poncho, or a crochet poncho that I think was made by one of her fellow inmates that was one of her friends.  

 Sarah Marshall: Prison is a place where people do crafts if they have the time and the supplies.

Sarah Archer: I mean, what else are you going to do?

Sarah Marshall? That's what I love about escape from Alcatraz, all the crafts.

Sarah Archer: And then she's out. And she bounces back into Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia like gangbusters. Martha Stewart Every day, Kmart, interior paint line, goes on the apprentice.

 Sarah Marshall: I think I knew that in some like far off part of my brain where very old vintage wines are stored.

Sarah Archer:  I think the plan was that she was going to replace, you know who, and that didn't happen. But anyway, so she's on the apprentice briefly. She publishes a book called the Martha Rules, which is her sort of rules for success. She comes out with the Baking Handbook, the Home Keeping Handbook, all of these beautiful new books from Clarkson Potter. She's on the Today's show demonstrating crafts. She has a call-in show on Sirius radio. She on an episode of Law and Order SVU playing the head mistress, this is true. You'll find she plays the headmistress of a prep school. 

Sarah Marshall: That's a good role for her.

Sarah Archer: Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia begins selling craft supplies at Walmart. Kmart is bankrupt, remember. She made a deal with the Hallmark channel, Toast a Show, her cooking school show debuts on PBS in 2012. She partners with 1-800-FLOWERS, Home Depot, it's like on and on. She's doing a version of what she did before. In the fall of 2016, VH1 premieres her new show, Martha and Snoop's potluck dinner party. 

 Sarah Marshall: Do they become friends because they do the show together or is it built around a preexisting friendship?

Sarah Archer: So I think this started when somebody got the idea to have Snoop be a guest on Martha's TV show, helping her make mashed potatoes or something. They have a rapport. 

Sarah Marshall: You just got to go with it. 

Sarah Archer: When that happens you got to go with it. And there's famously this photo, this sort of an early meme, that circulates that has the photo of the two of them and says like one of these people is a convicted felon.

 Sarah Marshall: They're both people who have really created a valuable asset out of their personalities and their creativity. I feel like it makes sense that they would be friends. 

Sarah Archer: And they're both fans of, she's involved with a company called canopy growth as of 2019. That's a Canadian marijuana company. So she's, as ever, ahead of the curve, legal weed.

Sarah Marshall: That's how you make money.

Sarah Archer: She doesn't show any signs of slowing down. So hopefully she'll be a fixture in the American landscape for as long as the Republic exists. 

 Sarah Marshall: So for another three years, 

Sarah Archer: Until 2024, and then we'll see. 

 Sarah Marshall: It's interesting again, to compare this to Elon Musk, who I feel like, she's doing all the stuff that his fanboys kind of like to think that he's doing in a lot of ways. Beyond the question of should we have tycoons as role models? It's like, well, if we're going to, because clearly that's something that's happening and we can't put that genie back in the bottle. Shouldn't it at least be someone who has actually been successful? 

Sarah Archer: I mean, she is really truly self-made and that's pretty rare. 

 Sarah Marshall: And unlike Donald Trump, she actually made money at any time, even one time in her life, not just that, but the whole time. 

Sarah Archer: One thing that I've always really admired about Martha is that she's not into pseudoscience.

 Sarah Marshall: An increasingly rare trait. It must be noted. 

Sarah Archer: Yeah. Basically every other sort of woo influencer is telling you about berries that will reduce inflammation, which is kind of an unspecified problem that people seem to have and that you have to.

Sarah Marshall: And she's not doing wellness.

Sarah Archer: Yeah. And to the extent that the magazine covered health stuff, she'll talk about sunscreen, right. She'll interview or have one of her writers interview dermatologists. We'll talk about the under-reported incidents of heart disease in women. Actual medical wellness and not oh, you need to buy this piece of Jade because then your sex life will magically become Jade-like. I guess, I don't know what is supposed to happen. 

 Sarah Marshall: Or if you hustle enough, you'll get my lifestyle. Yeah. I think what I've always responded to about Martha Stewart, kind of getting back into this very complicated world of domesticity and media about it, is that she's not telling you that if you do X, Y, Z thing, you'll be radiant and well and have the beautiful skin of a celebrity. And she's not telling you that if you hustle hard enough, you can become her. She doesn't want you to be her. She wants to be her. And I feel like the idea is if you want to do one of these crafts, you should do this craft because it's fun. And if you don't, you can watch me do it, which is also fun. And that’s a viable product.

Sarah Archer: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I totally agree. 

 Sarah Marshall: For people who haven't maybe given this as much thought as you, what, why are you drawn to this? 

Sarah Archer: I was so fascinated by this idea of kind of, the cultural meaning of what we do at home. And how powerful that is and how much it's denigrated, but it's so important. And it remains, here we are recording at a time when our reproductive rights are probably about to pivot back to pre-Little House on the Prairie, the TV show, not the actual Prairie. 

 Sarah Marshall: But you know, hard to tell at a certain point. 

Sarah Archer: There's this notion because of the whole sort of separate spheres doctrine that it's not political. Every white woman with a yoga mat you meet gives, well, I'm not political. I don't want to think about that. And just deciding that it’s okay for you to opt out is very political. 

 Sarah Marshall: I mean, being capable of opting out is already saying that you're a fairly specific kind of person.

Sarah Archer: The home is not your retreat from that. That is where you live out those values every day. And I think the idea that you sort of only want to talk about the domestic. Well, the personal has always been political, right? That's not a new idea. I mean, it was newly articulated. For instance, in this country, we've had a formula shortage and we have right now op-eds being published in sort of ultra right-wing conservative outlets, like the National Review about how gosh, all these school shootings kind of make homeschooling sound appealing, don't they? Well, gee, that plus the fact that nobody can find formula. So you're terrified of your kid getting shot. It kind of almost sounds like it would be easier for women to not take part in civic life, doesn't it. And I don't see how you can look at that and think that all of this stuff is separate from, that is not part of political life or civic life. Who takes care of your kids, who makes the food, who cleans your house is integral to how we live.

 Sarah Marshall: My approach to that, the way that I would sell this concept of why study the domestic sphere is a), because if something seems not worth studying and it's also something largely done by women, at least historically, then it's that's probably why that bias even exists, whether or not you harbor it. 

But also, I guess the fact that the domestics fear is where a lot of women's lives and women's work have taken place historically as well. And so to study the history of that is to study women throughout history, women elsewhere in time. I don't think that this is like a rah-rah girl boss. Isn't she the greatest story? You can definitely see it that way and it's definitely there, but to me what's exciting about this is like somebody figured out basically how to acquire enough power to only do the domestic things that she liked doing. And then to share that as something that other people might have the freedom to do, and it's this thing that makes domestic life and home making neither this obligatory constant slog nor something that is stupid because women have to do it. That's meaningful to me. 

Sarah Archer: It's not frivolous just because the starting point of that inquiry is personal.

 Sarah Marshall: My wish for everybody is that they have the domestic life that they want. That is about resources and it's about creating the institutional support that people need in order to have the daily lives and the home lives that they deserve to have as human beings. But I think that as you kind of study these things, you also get to notice what you like. And just thinking about design is by definition, like taking seriously what you respond to aesthetically and what kind of improves your mood and makes you happy. And I think all of us deserve to have the time and the freedom to enjoy the space where we spend our lives. That's not available to everybody, but it should be

Recording:

 Every now and then I would make jokes about, I heard, yeah. 

We had a TV. 

And I felt horrible about it because I just felt well, I’ve known this woman for a long time. We're very good friends. And here we are making jokes about a terribly unfortunate situation. So it's nice that you've come back.

Well, I know it was all in good fun, and it is your job and I always stick up for your job. 

Well, thank you. 

I do. 

I appreciate that. Now, let's…

 Sarah Marshall: And that was our episode for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learn something. I hope America learns something, eventually, and that someday the dishes are done in a way that is equitable and freeing for all humans. 

And as always, we have bonus episodes for you. And now a second way to subscribe to them. You can do that at patreon.com/yourewrongabout or starting this week at apple podcasts. And if you don't want to spend money on that, you can spend it on anything else that makes your life better, like a hot dog. 

Thank you as always to our amazing editor and producer, Carolyn Kendrick, who I will be making a pie for as soon as I see her again. And thanks as always to you, our wonderful listeners, you're the best, we hope you're having a neat summer.