The duties of the average corporate wife were spelt out in the 1997 divorce case between Lorna Wendt, still the world's most famous corporate spouse, and her husband, then head of GE Capital Services, Gary Wendt. "I knew what was expected of me," she told the court. "I was first of all to be his wife, his helpmate, his partner, his social facilitator while he carried on the business end of it."

Ms Wendt won a $34 million settlement, half her husband's assets, after testifying that she had handled all the many family relocations, all the childrearing, organised company dinners at home, travelled with her husband and advised other GE wives on "appropriate dress and conversation".

According to Margaret McCartney, managing director of the relocation consultancy Expat International and herself a former corporate wife, those duties haven't changed, especially for the wives of top executives. But over the last 15 years - and increasingly over the last five years, social change has been remodelling the role of the corporate wife, adding another dimension - and a further degree of difficulty.

Around one in five wives accompanying their husbands on corporate ladder-climbing overseas and interstate moves now want to pursue their own careers - or a version of them. Almost nine in 10 wives moving interstate expect to continue their own careers.

Deborah Dorsett, whose marriage to a top insurance company executive has seen her managing moves through nine US cities and on to Hong Kong and Melbourne, has been walking the working corporate wife tightrope for more than 20 years.

"My career has changed a lot because of my husband," says the mother of two, who started her career in the training and development department of a US restaurant chain. Along the way she did her masters degree, taught business communications, finally moving on to a more portable career as a consultant in managerial change management.

The most difficult of the 20 house moves she's done over the last 25 years was the transition from Louisville, Kentucky, to Hong Kong, which involved shifting from a huge house to a small apartment, the sorting, selling, storage, and inventory of many rooms of furniture.

"There were five sets of forms to fill out and I had a fever and a temperature of 103 degrees. Our plane was going the next day and my son's passport hadn't arrived. I was on the phone to the passport office and I broke down sobbing. My husband was 'helping' . But I was the one to deal with everything."

Dorsett is president of the local branch of the American Women's Auxiliary, which raises money for the Royal Children's Hospital and runs a series of groups and activities for locally-based American women. But she still does a little consulting and is currently trying to organise a two-week job in Houston, organising training workshops.

"Putting your career on hold is scary. You think 'Are my skills becoming rusty? Do I still have what it takes?' And I think there is sometimes this assumption, by other people, that your husband has all the power and you're just this bit of fluff on the side. But most of us are these amazing, practical managers." International moves can also stress a marriage.

"Suddenly you're really dependent on your husband . It's common to 'hit the wall' after six months. You realise how essentially different the US and Australian cultures are. And you think 'Oh my God, what have I got myself into?' You're sitting with the phone book to look something up and you can't find the Australian word for it. You are used to being competent and suddenly you feel incompetent."

Being a corporate wife, Dorsett says, is "a unique and difficult role".

"It means being a good spouse, playing the politics, doing whatever it takes. The wife is the one who moves the kids into schools, manages the packing and unpacking, finds a dentist, and a doctor. And then there's the dinner party role." As the wife of the managing director of a major American insurance company, Dorsett took on the hostess role as company conventions.

While her husband always consulted her on moves, she's often agreed to decisions that she found personally inconvenient.

"It's looking at the marriage as a unit, rather than two individuals," says Dorsett, whose husband was her high school sweetheart in the west Texas desert oil town of Odessa. Their song was always We've gotta get out of this place.

"But the wife doesn't always get asked. It depends on the marriage. It goes back to how you define your role. If he is the breadwinner, you do what it takes for his career. You have to move in order to move up (the corporate career ladder). And if he doesn't take the job, then someone else will."

Recently arrived American lawyer Tamara Homburg has seen a lot of women respond to their new life as a corporate wife with rage, grief and an overwhelming sense that their whole life has been "stolen".

The mother of two daughters remembers sitting at a "welcome to newcomers" coffee morning at the American Women's Club in Brussels. At the time, she herself was already an experienced advocate whose husband's job had taken her from Seattle over to the Hague, back to Iowa, down to St Louis and then back across to Brussels, taking a new set of bar exams each time she moved between states in the US.

But when she'd introduced herself to the women's group, she'd done it in classic "corporate wife" style, with a "Hi, my name is Tamara, my husband is with (the giant multinational agri-chemical company) Monsanto and we have two daughters, one five weeks and one two." Then another woman spoke up.

"My name is Gretchen," she announced." And I'm not going to say who my husband is with, because I'm an individual in my own right and I don't define myself through what my husband does."

Until recently that woman had been a high-level executive in a chain of US department stores. She'd had to quit the job when her husband got a promotion to Brussels - and she was mad as hell about it.

"I've seen a lot of women who've been dragged kicking and screaming from their careers," says Homburg, 45. "Gretchen was one that was screaming the hardest. She was not a happy camper. She wasn't working, she'd lost her career and her identity." By the end of that first horror year, however, Gretchen had decided to use the enforced break to do something she had always wanted and was working on a children's book.

Melbourne-born lawyer Christen Dell, 29, has taken her husband's transfer to a job with a US computer security company in Rome as an opportunity to evaluate her former life as a solicitor doing medical negligence litigation with the Canberra office of the giant legal firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

"I was committed to it, but not desperately competitive," she says, by phone from her tiny third-floor apartment near the walls of the Vatican.

"For me, it's not 'Who stole my life?' but 'Thanks for giving me a life', for helping me out of that stressful environment and into this beautiful historic place." Dell is keeping herself busy, taking four hours of Italian lessons a week, and teaching herself about Italian art and cultural history.

But her new life, in which her visa status specifically rules out work, has presented her with some new and confronting questions of identity. "I'm financially dependent for the first time in my life, which I find difficult. When I was working in Canberra we had a cleaning lady and cooking was what you threw together after work. "Now I'm ironing Andrew's shirts. I feel like I've turned into my Mum."

And then there's the problem of how to answer the perennial "What do you do?" question. "I say 'I'm living, I'm enjoying'. But how do you define yourself? Work is such a large part of your life. I've been determined not to say 'I'm doing nothing, but in Australia, I was a lawyer'. It is difficult not to say that, because you want people to know that you're intelligent, you're not just here doing the dishes, and ironing your husband's shirts."

But what happens to the corporate wife who embraces the idea of "jumping off the treadmill"? GP Janet Piehl had surprised her husband with the speed of her agreement when he came home from his job, as a senior executive in the Seattle head office of the giant aircraft corporation Boeing, and said 'What about Melbourne?'

"I said OK," recalls Piehl, 36, who has recently returned to Seattle after the two and half-year posting to Melbourne.

He said "Don't you want to think about it?" She didn't. A classic high-achiever, she was the mother of a 10-month-year old and a four-year-old - and exhausted. The Melbourne job offer came up just after she had signed a contract to join a group general practice in Seattle, signing up for four days instead of her preferred three, in order to secure her place. Within a few weeks of arriving in Melbourne, Piehl was depressed. The family were living in temporary furnished accommodation while they waited for the container of their own furniture and household goods to arrive. Meanwhile her husband seemed to be forever travelling on business.

"He'd feel that he wasn't gone if he came home the same day, or was hardly gone if only gone one night. But I counted the number of bedtimes that he missed, so catching the 6:30pm flight home from Sydney meant him being gone for bedtime. With two little children, 5-8 pm was the hardest part of my day.

"I was stuck in this little house with two little kids, and no outlets. I didn't have any friends. I was bored and lonely.I just picked little things to argue over. My husband was very supportive. He took a fair bit of yelling and arguing from me - both when he was away and when he came back."

Work as a GP seemed an impossibility, because Piehl's American qualifications were not recognised here. Fortunately, for her own sanity's sake, Piehl eventually managed to land a a part-time university research job. But her husband's constant interstate and overseas business travel remained an issue. "I remember shouting at him 'You moved me 8000 miles away from my family and friends. And now you're gone all the time. I'm going to go back home and get a job as a doctor'."

By December 2002, Piehl had passed all the necessary exams and had gained her licence to practice as a doctor in Australia. But the deadline for return was looming. By last April she was well into the "logistical nightmare" of the last three months of the posting - a period, in her view, as difficult of the first three.

Between May and September Piehl had sole responsibility for managing the packing and unpacking for moves through four different houses From their bayside house (the lease had run out) and into a temporary house. Then, into a temporary house in the US (while they waited for their tenants to move) and, finally, back into their own house. "Once I started thinking of myself as 'the project manager' I felt better," she says.

Tamara Homburg has a hypothesis to explain the fury experienced by corporate expat wives when doing yet another round of unpacking and settling into a new country. She invokes US marketing expert Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" theory, which says that once basic requirements such as the need for food and shelter have been satisfied, people move on to higher needs, which he called "self-actualisation" - fulfilment of creative and intellectual potential. "You're used to working up the top of the hierarchy - in the self-actualisation area. Suddenly you're working down the bottom, dealing all the time with food and shelter."

After 16 years on the move, Homburg can speak as something of an expert. Her husband's job has now taken her overseas four times - to The Hague, twice to Brussels and now, early this year to Melbourne, where her husband has started a small pharmaceutical company. Impressively adaptable, the lawyer has always found work, even when local regulations made it difficult, although she's regularly had to give up or cut back because her husband's constant business travel made it impossible. But after ten months in Melbourne, she is still looking for a job. "I'm a bit bored," she says. "Part of it is that the girls (now 15 and 12) need me less and I've had trouble finding meaningful outlets and interactions beyond the purely social."

Homburg still isn't complaining, however. "I signed on for this," she says. "I always wanted to travel."

Copyright c 2003. The Age Company Ltd