"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."
I agree with most of this. I think what made Martha successful was her ability to simulate an expensive minimalist chic -- for the price of a glue gun and a lot of work. Her style contrasted dramatically with the lush kitsch that was offered by most women's decorating mags: House Beautiful, Redbook, etc.
In reality, what she offered was more fantasy than actual projects, which most women no longer have the time to do. I do not know a single woman who actually did a Stewart project. So the experience of watching the show or reading the mag was more like, "Yeah, I could do that if I had the time." The Martha fantasy accorded with the "bubble" zeitgeist of the last twenty years: "I can create a little Dickensian-house-universe and have a comfortable, aesthetically pleasing, harmonious life while the rest of the world goes to hell." Her country "home" was a medieval enclave--a bubble complete with garden, pottery room, etc. dedicated to celebrating the creativity no one actually enjoyed in their work. The message was "you will never have this creativity except in the most inconsequential context. If you accept this, you will be happy and you will fit in."
What people don't understand about her personality, which defined new levels of repression, is that it was exactly the personality required of the survivor of the neo-liberal era: you suck it in, work hard, and achieve your little bubble dream because that's the most you can ever achieve.
Given this, her "scapegoating" may be an expression of the unconscious anger that people feel about the quality of this ambition and the effect of its purveyance on what we have decided to accept as a life worth living. Our conscious or unconscious glee at the prospect of Martha making elegant license plates has less to do with feminist bashing and more to do with the realization that we may all wind up making elegant license plates -- having followed the living-in-a-bubble dream of the last twenty years. So why shouldn't Martha too live the logic of her "ideas" right through to its miserable end.
She has absolutely nothing to do with feminism either for or against.
Joanna