The Fierce Wives' Club

Question: who earned for herself the title of “world’s bravest wife” when clad in a pink blazer in front of the world media, she leapt with little thought for her own safety to save her husband when he was suddenly and very publicly attacked, in a historic moment when time stood still?

If you answered Wendi Murdoch you belong irrevocably to the Twitter generation and there’s no hope for you. The correct answer to that is: Jackie Kennedy.

Can anyone forget the morning of November 22,1963, when the president of America and his beautiful wife flew into Dallas’s Love Field on Air Force One accompanied by Texas Governor John Connally and his wife?

Elegant as ever, Jackie was in a bright pink Chanel suit seated next to her husband while they were being driven in a motorcade to the trade mart where the president was scheduled to speak. They had turned the corner into Elm Street when the first lady heard what she first thought was a motorcycle backfiring, until the occupants of the front seat screamed.

It was after two more shots that she realised her husband had been grievously wounded. History tells us that she then leaned towards him and climbed out of the back seat of the car, crawled over the trunk in an action that her secret service agent, Clint Hill, later told the Warren Commission appeared as if she was reaching across the trunk for a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown off and only returned to the vehicle when she was ordered to by her bodyguard, as she herself was in grave danger. As the car sped away to the hospital, she cradled the president’s shattered head in her hands.

There are many avatars of fiercely brave and bravely fierce wives throughout history.

Nusrat Bhutto’s fearless campaign that prompted her, ailing and old, to walk the streets of Pakistan to fight for the release of her incarcerated husband Zulfikar is just another example of martyred political wives and their struggle for justice. Perhaps, ironically, it served as the inspiration for her estranged son Murtaza’s widow Ghinwa to take on the powerful Bhutto family and name them as her husband’s killers.

Ghinwa’s crusade was not confined to rabble rousing. In 2002, barred from standing for Pakistani elections on the grounds that she did not posses a university degree, Ghinwa, who until then had been a housewife and mother, enrolled herself as a student of Punjab University earning herself a first class BA degree in 2007.

There are many different ways in which wives have chosen to show their steadfastness and reliability throughout history.

From Catherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII, whose spousal devotion and loyalty won her many admirers, to the fictional Lady Macbeth who got her own hands bloodied to buttress her husband’s career, the devotion of wives down the ages may have been perhaps not as dramatic as that of Wendi Murdoch’s, but as unequivocal.

Some wives, to the dismay of feminists, have proven their loyalty not by acts of physical courage but by their simple act of standing by their man in the face of accusations of sexual impropriety like Hillary Clinton, Ann Sinclair, Danielle Mitterand, Silda Spitzer and Suzanne Craig.

Wendi Murdoch’s recent agile pie-defence has earned her a place in this Fierce Wives’ Club.

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer