"Slick and sophisticated, Wife Inc. is a fascinating look at the figure of the wife as a mediated phenomenon. As the first book to treat the wife as an icon of post-feminist media culture, this is an extremely timely intervention. The stakes of what Suzanne Leonard sheds light on, especially with regard to political wives, are dramatically raised in our current time.

— Hannah Hamad, Leeds University

Tracking the image of the wife and the aspirant wife across multiple zones of popular culture, Suzanne Leonards brilliant, timely book elucidates the new stakes of wifehood in early twenty-first century culture, unpacking it as a status category, a state of risk and a mode of female labor that demands critical reflection, and the kind of fresh take that she is ideally suited to provide."

— Diane Negra,University College Dublin

"A smart and trenchant examination of the notion of the & wife as both a popular culture phenomenon and an economic powerhouse. Suzanne Leonard has once again proved herself to be an incisive interpretative voice.

— Brenda R. Weber, editor of Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television

"Leonard explores how American women look at and experience marriage. For centuries a pragmatic economic arrangement, modern marriage has become bound up in the pursuit of happiness. . . . Yet even after getting married which is seen as the prize at the end of the romance narrative women often find themselves saddled with another job: the work of being a wife."

— Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

"Leonard unearths the complexity of femininity and marriage in the modern day, with attention to the inescapability of women’s historical presence in the domestic sphere ... Readers will gain intriguing insights from Leonard’s assertions on market-controlled constructions of feminine connection."

—Communication Review