I recently read Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, the story of a modern-day mother and social media influencer who presents her well-curated life as a Tradwife to millions of followers. It’s a fascinating study of fame, wealth, women’s roles, and more. Natalie’s picture-perfect (literally) life falls apart in ways you couldn’t predict, and in ways you see coming all along, but what I can’t stop thinking about is the way that “women’s work” is considered both unattainable in its perfection and humble, worthy of Instagram admiration, and yet somehow not worth our time.

And both things are true.

In the 1990s, when I was figuring out how to “make house”—starting with roommates and then with my first husband—Martha Stewart’s Omnimedia was in full swing. The “Upscale Domesticity” phenomenon was everywhere, and Martha was the walking, talking, flower-arranging face and voice of the brand. I was a devotee. I subscribed to Martha Stewart Living, saved recipe cards, collected cookbooks, and pored over seasonal offerings like Martha Stewart’s Homemade Christmas.

In the Netflix documentary, Martha, her rise from stockbroker to lifestyle mogul is presented as the complicated story it was. She was a perfectionist, but she got beautiful results. Notoriously, she was difficult, if not impossible, to work with and was considered ruthlessly ambitious.

Tradwife she was not.

If anything, Martha Stewart represented a woman who transformed domestic labor into power. She wasn’t retreating from ambition; she built an empire from it. I always felt she was targeted because she flew too close to the sun for the boys she beat at their own game of Monopoly in publishing, branding, and media. Martha wasn’t selling submission. She was selling mastery.

And honestly, I understood the appeal immediately.

I still do.

I make dinner many nights of the week, depending on sports schedules and the general chaos of modern family life. Sometimes it’s simple tacos; other times, I take on more complex dishes like butter chicken or roasted salmon with a gochujang-and-honey glaze. I make bread frequently and bring brownies for teams and sourdough for neighbors and friends. Nobody complains when you show up carrying fresh bread or a still-warm batch of chocolate chip cookies.

But I am also terrible at housekeeping.

My husband does the laundry because early in our relationship we discovered he is simply much better at it than I am, a fact I accepted with tremendous relief. I cook; Tim cleans. I mostly grocery shop online, but he does the giant Costco runs. I handle school obligations, field trips, homework checks, and calendar management. We both pay bills. He can fix nearly anything around the house and handles vehicle maintenance. Our household runs less on ideology than on practical negotiations and accumulated habits.

Which is perhaps why I find the Tradwife phenomenon equal parts fascinating and unsettling.

Because what bothers me is not the homemaking itself. I genuinely love feeding people. I love the rhythm of breadmaking, the sensory pleasure of cooking, and the deeply human act of creating comfort for others. What troubles me is the performance of effortless perfection surrounding it—the implication that domestic labor is most valuable when it appears natural, feminine, beautiful, and frictionless.

In reality, women’s work has never been frictionless.

It is repetitive and logistical and physical. It requires planning, skill, emotional management, patience, and usually money. It is often invisible until it is not done. And despite decades of feminism and workforce participation, we still cannot seem to decide whether domestic labor is sacred or embarrassing, aspirational or regressive, art or obligation.

So we continue turning women who perform it beautifully into celebrities.

Martha Stewart did it with empire-building ambition and perfectly folded napkins. Today’s Tradwife influencers do it with soft lighting, intricately braided bread, and carefully curated submission. The aesthetics may overlap, but the message underneath feels fundamentally different. Martha Stewart never suggested women belonged in the kitchen because they were women. She suggested the kitchen itself could be a site of expertise, authority, creativity, and even power.

That distinction matters to me.

Because for all my skepticism of the Tradwife performance, I understand the pull of domestic labor in a way I perhaps could not if I did not love it myself. There is something deeply satisfying about creating tangible comfort in a world where so much of modern life feels abstract and ephemeral. So many of us spend our professional lives making presentations, answering emails, moving digital pieces across digital boards—important work, often meaningful work, but work whose results can feel strangely untethered from the physical world.

Bread is not abstract. Dinner on the table is not abstract. A child eating a treat you made just for them at the end of a long week is not abstract; it’s a reminder that they are safe and loved and home.

Perhaps part of the enduring appeal of homemaking is that it offers a kind of wholeness modern life often does not: the chance to make something real, to nourish people we love, to exercise creativity in ways both practical and beautiful.

The gift of modern marriage, at its best, is not that women have abandoned domesticity. It is that we are freer to choose how it fits into our lives—to build homes based on partnership rather than prescription, to divide labor by skill and inclination rather than by gendered expectations, to make bread because we love it, not because anyone told us that is where women belong.

That, to me, is the difference between performance and freedom.