“I May Need You,Peter,but You Sure as Hell Need Me Too”

Abstract

Observing that contemporary marriages now represent transactional efforts that benefit wives as much as their spouses, this article considers The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick alongside a list of real-life women, most notably Hillary Clinton, whose examples have helped to trouble and complicate the image of the betrayed wife. While marriage continues to register as a necessary complement to any political run, this fact is increasingly regarded with skepticism and a self-conscious admission that the performance of a happy union is often merely a tactical move, a reality that is well-evidenced in The Good Wife and the ABC drama Scandal. A meditation on Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, a real-life political couple who seem to be baldly borrowing from (or perhaps inspiring) these televised marriages, closes the piece and is used to suggest that political marriages may serve as professional boons.