• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, November 7, 2024

By now, some 60 countries worldwide have succeeded in electing a top leader who is female. Most recently, academic and scientist Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish woman, was elected president of Mexico in a landslide. (This in a predominantly Roman Catholic, and macho, country.)

And yet, our most recent presidential election proves that the U.S. is still not ready for such firsts.

So amid all the post-game soul-searching and blaming that Dems will do, the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman, and a woman of color, seems a foundational, if previously overlooked, reason for why she lost.

We thought we had made more progress than that.

Journalists have called Trump’s resounding win “a Rorschach test” for the country.

Voters said that they were attracted to his “strength.” Many Republicans predicted that Harris would never get the respect of other world leaders.

It was certainly a wake-up call, especially in a year when the “gender gap” was supposed to deliver Harris in a squeaker.

Will we ever be ready?

I hope so.

In the meantime, my thoughts turned to Martha Stewart, the first American female self-made billionaire.

At the time of her greatest rise, she was also considered a walking Rorschach test for American women -- a dissonant figure, both revered and reviled.

The Martha paradox has always been this: With an iron will and superhuman work ethic, she built a business empire bigger than Time-Warner by selling housewives and working women on the excellence of honoring traditions, rituals, and the secrets of tasteful “homekeeping.”

As such, she made herself the first living brand.

And in owning that power, and in her less-than-modest way, she named her company Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

In the past decade, she’s been ever more candid about how hard it was. "I had opposition, and that kind of opposition to a woman-built business was really outrageous," she told People magazine in 2020.

"Even my own lawyers were negative about the possibility of success. I remember one lawyer sending me an orchid, saying, 'Oh, you did it. Wow. What a surprise.' What a piece of garbage that guy is."

The last line illustrates her trenchant, frequently angry but colorful takes on her once-perfectionistic life and career. That’s exactly what she does in “Martha,” the R.J. Cutler documentary that started streaming last week on Netflix.

Now 83, having reinvented herself, restoring and reengineering her businesses post-prison, just as she did from the ground up with old houses, she has also become relevant to young people. It started when she became Snoop Dogg’s television colleague, where she showed a penchant for weed, comedy and off-color language.

She also became a cover model, and one of the leading spokespeople in contemporary advertising, where she often makes fun of her taskmistress image.

The doc is well worth watching, as she divulges some surprisingly intimate history, including that she had a “very brief affair” with a “very attractive Irish man” while a young, married mother working as a stockbroker in the late 1960s, which she repeatedly dismisses as “nothing.”

But she is unforgiving of her ex-husband Andy’s “numerous affairs,” including an especially humiliating one with a young woman on her staff, whom Andy moved into a cottage on their estate grounds, and whom he later married.

In retrospect, she offers some no-nonsense advice: “Young women, if you’re married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he’s a piece of s---. Get out of that marriage.”

She speaks equally candidly about her five months in prison, over a minor insider trading incident, for which she proclaimed her innocence and refused the idea of a plea deal.

With friends (and a billionaire boyfriend) cutting her off, and her businesses plummeting, she says, she had to”'climb out of a f***ing hole."

"I had to do all that crap that you see in the movies - you... you can't even believe that's what you're going through," she says, mentioning that she was strip-searched.

But ever the indomitable Martha, she spent her time teaching her fellow inmates her skills.

Another surprise: Shortly after the doc broke, she critiqued it scathingly in an interview with The New York Times.

As the experienced TV diva she is, she complained about the “ugliest” camera angle of the three trained on her that Cutler chose for the interview portion.

And she was not happy about the ending.

“Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden?.... I hate those last scenes,” she said. Martha told the Times that she was limping because she had just had her Achilles tendon operated on, a detail never mentioned in the film.

Still, much footage was given over to her touring one of her estates, where she planted hundreds of trees and cultivated acres and acres of amazing gardens. Driving around in her open three-wheeled vehicle, she looks like a boss, or Ronald Reagan at his ranch on a horse.

Overall, she muses, "I have two mottos. One is, 'Learn something new every day.' And the second is 'When you're through changing, you're through.'"

And after taking the doc to task, in the end she praised it. She said that young women have told her that watching the film “gave them a strength they didn’t know they had.”

Which was the point of documenting her many different lives and experiences.

“That’s what I wanted the documentary to be,” she said.

“It shouldn’t be me boasting about inner strength and any of that crap. It should be about showing that you can get through life and still be yourself.”

And that’s what we, the American people, are still resisting.

We need to learn to trust women in all their human complexity, as themselves, and understand that as searching male and female people in the 21^st century, we are more alike than different.