Mary Chapin Carpenter is an American rock, folk, and country music singer-songwriter who signed in the late 1980s with Columbia Records, who promoted her as a country singer. One of her most famous songs is her 1992 hit, He Thinks He’ll Keep Her. This song is widely credited with illustrating the salvation of a woman freeing herself from the traditional atomic family into the workplace. The song begins by documenting a few items that make it evident that she is a housewife – one who appears to do everything for her husband. For example: making his coffee, his bed, doing his laundry, and keeping him fed. Following a few of these examples, the verses, “When she was twenty-one she wore her mother’s lace and said “forever” with a smile upon her face,” briefly touch on the “norm” of marriage as something that is supposed to happen when coming of the right age. The lines that come after continue to paint the picture of outdated stereotypical gender roles: taking care of the kids; putting on a surface front that portrays a perfect family despite her unhappiness that is prevalent in this song; and her keeping everything in line and on time like clockwork. The line, “He thinks he’ll keep her,” is inserted occasionally at the end of some verses, alluding to the strength that she will eventually find to leave the husband that takes her for granted and confines her abilities. This does indeed happen and there is a shift when she talks about being thirty-six and finally putting her foot down to leave him. One line that I think carries a lot of weight is “for fifteen years she had a job and not one raise in pay, now she’s in the typing pool at minimum wage.” I feel these verses highlight the difficulty of working hard for many years without any sort of compensation other than a rabbit-hole of a comfort zone that can seem extremely terrifying to leave. More importantly, she does in fact leave and even though she is starting from the bottom, she is slowly working to make her own way. 

This can be tied back to a few of the readings we did in class. For example, in Towards Equality, it highlights that marriage and motherhood should not be disabilities for women and in this song – it is very clear that the duties being performed by the woman are constraining both her happiness and ability to go out and do things for herself. Additionally, in Our Bodies, Our Selves, it emphasizes choice over destiny and I feel like this relates back to women being not properly educated about their bodies and having children that they did not necessarily want or getting married simply because that is what “everyone” did by a certain age. In a similar way, The Feminine Mystique, discusses that housewives feel trapped within themselves and their own minds – convincing them of the falsehood that motherhood and marriage is all that life has to give them. In this song, it isn’t until she leaves her husband that she finds her own life and what she wants. 

The song, however, does have specific limitations as a representation of feminisms broadly constructed. For example, her limited scope of just female and male relationships excludes the LGBTQ community and it implies that the type of situation being described in the song only occurs between heterosexual members of the community.

“Mary Chapin Carpenter – He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.” Genius, https://genius.com/Mary-chapin-carpenter-he-thinks-hell-keep-her-lyrics.