Honey, I'm Home
- lps493
- Dec 9, 2021
- 2 min read

Shania Twain is a modern country artist who came from a working-class background but because she was reaching stardom in the late 20th century, her songs about men do not revolve around what to give them or how to love them so they don’t leave you. Twain had quite the opposite approach.
In her song, “Honey, I’m Home,” Twain takes the hardships of being a working-class woman and expands the boundaries into a gendered space. While at first it does not seem like this song has any working-class interventions, the lyrics: “This job’s a pain/It’s so mundane/It sure don’t stimulate my brain/This job ain’t worth the pay” (Twain) describe the kind of work working-class people are often forced to do in order to make money and sustain themselves. She goes further, however, by using this as the foundation for demanding a certain kind of treatment from her husband. This is incredibly interesting because, as discussed in the blog post dedicated to Tammy Wynette, a woman’s working-class status was often used as a justification for bad treatment by her husband. The woman needed the man not only financially but also in order to be a socially acceptable woman or reflect authentic country womanhood. There was an acceptance of certain flaws in a husband because society forced women to need their husbands.
“Honey, I’m Home” shows an inversion of this. While still highlighting her need to work, Twain conveys the message that, because of the work she has to do at a place where she is not compensated adequately, she is deserving of special treatment when she returns to her home. Society has largely stopped telling women they need husbands in order to be considered real women, so she does not have to settle but instead is able to demand certain things from men. It is also interesting because the title of the song seems to allude to husbands in old sitcoms who would come home from a long day at work and greet their wives with the phrase, “Honey, I’m home,” so said wife could begin to wait on him. Twain co-opted this because, a woman of her generation, she knows that she can still feel like a woman by inverting the gender norms of her household, asking her husband to make her dinner and give her a massage because she has had a long day as a working woman and is deserving of it.
Twain might still be talking about a man in her song, but she is centering herself and her needs in the narrative. This is a leap from how country music performed by women used to be.
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