[lbo-talk] Free Martha!

[Liza Featherstone]

What I understood Doug's friend to be saying was not that Martha was a
"feminist icon" but that her way of being obsessed with the home is not a
traditionally feminine one, in which the home is Christopher Lasch's "haven
in a heartless world" (he was of course borrowing Marx's characterization of
religion) - just the opposite. Martha's home is competitive, and it is big
business. Nobody's saying that's at all admirable, just that it's not
traditionally feminine and it makes people uneasy.

There's a case to made that Martha is sort of a Catherine Beecher/Beverly
LaHaye character, one of those women who makes a very impressive career for
herself out in the world by encouraging other women to stay home. But her
approach to the home seems so cold and businesslike, and so detached from
the family, motherhood, marriage or anything else related to traditional
values, that I tend to think not.

As for class, Martha is not from the WASP upper crust whose decor she
celebrates - and has utterly reinvented - her point is to democratize this
aesthetic. She wants everybody's house to look like something in Greenwich.
It may not be to your taste -- I myself am too lazy even to aspire to it,
it's a lot of work -- but I don't think its intended to be exclusionary.

Liza  


> From: "Michael Dawson -PSU" <mdawson at pdx.edu>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:52:20 -0800
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Free Martha!
> 
>> Actually, I do not think it requires any particular feminist insight or
>> feminist intent for Martha to suffer sexist double standards.
> 
> But that's not the point.  Anti-feminist women are also victims of sexism,
> no doubt.  The point is that Doug's friend claims Stewart is somehow a
> feminist icon, is somehow challenging gender stereotypes.  I say that's
> complete poppycock.  How am I wrong?  How is MS promoting feminist things in
> any way, shape, or form?  Sure, she's rich and a boss, but what is the
> actual direct message of what she does in print and on TV?  I say the latter
> is pretty damned regressive, on both class and gender (hell, it's pretty
> damned white, too) issues.  In my book, the latter stuff is the direct
> message that impacts her audience, and far outweighs MS's status as an
> independent woman.  Most people who like her like her for her sly
> endorsement of shopping and social climbing, not because she's George Soros
> in a bra (which she isn't).
> 
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk