Martha Stewart has entered the group chat.

Specifically, the one currently arguing about “tradwives.”

On a February 16 episode of The Skinny Confidential podcast, the 84-year-old business mogul casually declared herself “the original tradwife,” inserting herself into one of social media’s most polarizing lifestyle debates with the confidence of someone who built an empire on domestic perfection.

“I’m the original tradwife,” Stewart said, without blinking.

If you’ve been blissfully offline, the “tradwife” label — short for “traditional wife” — has exploded across TikTok and Instagram over the past two years. The aesthetic: homemade bread, flowing dresses, large families, pastoral kitchens, and a heavy emphasis on domestic devotion. The controversy: critics argue the trend romanticizes rigid gender roles and economic dependence on husbands, dressed up in soft lighting and sourdough starter.

Enter Martha.

Long before hashtags, before algorithm-friendly apron twirls, before Utah farm-core influencers were bottling their milk content for millions of views, Stewart was hand-churning butter on magazine covers and telling America how to fold a fitted sheet.

During the podcast interview with Lauryn and Michael Bosstick, Stewart made it clear that what she sees in today’s tradwife moment isn’t submission — it’s self-sufficiency.

“I had pigs. I made my own prosciuttos on the back steps and the great, big crock. I had goats. I milked my goats. I made cheese,” Stewart said. “I didn’t do it on a big fancy farm like Ballerina Farm does, but I did all that.”

It was less “obedient housewife” and more “domestic warlord.”

Stewart also expressed admiration for two of the internet’s most visible figures linked to the trend: Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Both women have become shorthand for the tradwife aesthetic — and both have publicly rejected the label.

Neeleman, who runs the Ballerina Farm brand with her husband Daniel in Utah, found herself at the center of a cultural firestorm in July 2024 when The Sunday Times profiled her as the “queen of the trad wives.” The article went viral. Neeleman pushed back hard, saying the portrayal misrepresented her life and marriage.

Weeks later, Nara Smith — the 24-year-old German-South African model known for her elaborate made-from-scratch cooking videos delivered in couture — clarified in Harper’s Bazaar that her content “really [is] not that deep.” She reiterated that sentiment during a December 2024 appearance on Today with Hoda & Jenna.

“I don’t understand where that came from because I’m a working mom,” Smith said.

Which is perhaps the core irony of the tradwife discourse: the women most associated with it are running businesses, managing brands, monetizing content, and operating at full entrepreneurial throttle.

Stewart, of course, did the same — decades earlier.

Before lifestyle influencing had a name, she turned homemaking into a corporate machine. Magazines. Cookbooks. Television shows. Home goods. The aesthetic of domestic competence became aspirational — and profitable.

So when Stewart claims the tradwife crown, she’s less aligning with a political ideology and more staking historical ground.

The internet, naturally, is split.

To some, Stewart’s declaration is tongue-in-cheek genius — the ultimate flex from someone who built a billion-dollar empire out of domestic labor long before it was algorithmic currency. To others, it’s another example of how quickly a complicated cultural conversation gets flattened into branding.

Because the tradwife debate isn’t really about goats or bread.

It’s about agency.

Are women choosing domesticity as empowerment? Or is the aesthetic quietly reinforcing old hierarchies under a filter?

Stewart’s answer seems characteristically pragmatic: if you’re going to do it, do it well — and monetize it.

In her telling, milking goats and curing prosciutto wasn’t about serving a husband. It was about mastering a craft. About excellence. About control.

Which, in classic Martha fashion, may be the most subversive twist of all.

If there is a “tradwife” origin story, it probably doesn’t begin on TikTok.

It might begin with a Connecticut kitchen, a stack of perfectly folded linens, and a woman who understood that domestic power, when wielded properly, is still power.

And if the internet wants to debate it, Martha Stewart will be right there — claiming the trademark.