Marriage Quote by Kin Hubbard

A “good wife” as a home remedy isn’t just quaint nostalgia; it’s Hubbard’s neat little capsule of early 20th-century American common sense, where the household doubles as clinic, pharmacy, and moral institution. The line works because it pretends to flatter while quietly giving the game away: the “remedy” isn’t medicine at all, it’s labor. Domestic care gets recast as a cure-all, and the joke lands precisely because the audience already understands how much unpaid work is smuggled into the phrase “good wife.”

Hubbard, a Midwestern newspaper wit, wrote in an era when professional medicine was modernizing but still unevenly trusted, and when “home remedies” were both practical and cultural identity. By ranking a wife above poultices and tonics, he’s riffing on that frontier pragmatism: what fixes you fastest is not a bottle, it’s someone who will feed you, fuss over you, manage the house, and absorb your bad mood without billing you by the hour.

The subtext is less romantic than transactional. “Good” doesn’t mean loving; it means competent, compliant, ever-present. The humor depends on the assumption that a wife’s role is to keep the man functioning, like a maintenance crew that also smiles. Read now, it’s a barbed artifact: a one-liner that captures how sentimentality can sanitize inequality. It’s funny the way old jokes often are-funny, and a little too honest about who was expected to do the healing.