Martha Stewart was a Stockbroker, Martha Stewart, née Martha Helen Kostyra (born August 3, 1941, Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S.), American entrepreneur and domestic lifestyle innovator who built a catering business into an international media and home-furnishing corporation, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc.
Raised in Nutley, New Jersey, Stewart grew up in a Polish American household where the traditional arts of cooking, sewing, canning and preserving, housekeeping, and gardening were practiced.
She started planning birthday parties for neighbour children while she was in grammar school, and she paid her college tuition by taking modeling jobs in New York City.
She married law student Andrew Stewart (1961; they divorced in 1990) while studying at Barnard College (B.A., European history and architectural history, 1963); their daughter, Alexis, was born in 1965.Stewart worked as a stockbroker at a small Wall Street firm (1965–72) until she and her family moved to Westport, Connecticut, and turned their ambitions toward restoring Turkey Hill, a Federal-style farmhouse. With yeoman labour they gardened, restored, and decorated, acquiring the skills and the setting for books and TV shows.
