United States -- Social life and customs -- To 1775; Women -- United States
Bishop Meade, in his _Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of
Virginia_, tells of one “scolding quean” who was ordered to be ducked
three times from a vessel lying in James River. Places for ducking
were prepared near the Court Houses. The marshal’s fee for ducking was
only two pounds of tobacco. The ducking-stools were not kept in church
porches, as in England. In 1634 two women were sentenced to be either
drawn from King’s Creek “from one Cowpen to another at the starn of a
boat or kanew,” or to present themselves before the congregation, and
ask forgiveness of each other and God. In 1633 it was ordered that a
ducking-stool be built in every county in Maryland. At a court-baron
at St. Clements, the county was prosecuted for not having one of these
“public conveniences.” In February, 1775, a ducking-stool was ordered
to be placed at the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers,
and was doubtless used. As late as 1819 Georgia women were ducked in
the Oconee River for scolding. And in 1824, at the court of Quarter
Sessions, a Philadelphia woman was sentenced to be ducked, but the
punishment was not inflicted, as it was deemed obsolete and contrary to
the spirit of the times. In 1803 the ducking-stool was still used in
Liverpool, England, and in 1809 in Leominster, England.
One of the last indictments for ducking in our own country was that of
Mrs. Anne Royall in Washington, almost in our own day. She was a hated
lobbyist, whom Mr. Forney called an itinerant virago, and who became so
abusive to congressmen that she was indicted as a common scold before
Judge William Cranch, and was sentenced by him to be ducked in the
Potomac. She was, however, released with a fine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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