Looking back on the title track for 1969’s Stand By Your Man, Tammy Wynette said she never figured that she’d spend more than 30 years defending a song that took 15 minutes to write. And you could easily see Wynette as a regressive figure in the political advancement of her sex—as producer and co-writer Billy Sherill (a man) later remembered, Epic Records marketed the song as “Tammy Wynette’s Answer to Women’s Lib” (which is what the culture called feminism before they took it seriously). But to anyone who gave the four-times-divorced Wynette the credit she deserved as an artist and observer of the state of marriage in America, Stand By Your Man isn’t about what women should do, but what, for better and worse, they did. Long before there was such a thing as goths or melancholy indie kids, Wynette found not only comfort in her suffering, but a nobility; shouldering her wifely burdens from inside a pop-country cocoon of pedal steel and string sections—weathered, but quietly proud. The title track is a foregone conclusion, and “My Arms Stay Open Late” an underrepresented classic. As for “I’m Only a Woman,” well, yes, only—and the rest of the songs on the album are there to tell you what a complicated thing a woman is to be.