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Ducking-stool.

The English colonies in America continued for a long time the manners and customs of their native land; among others, that of the use of the ducking-stool for the punishment of inveterate scolding women. Bishop Meade, in Old churches, ministers, and families in Virginia, says, “If a woman was convicted of slander, her husband was made to pay five hundred-weight of tobacco” ; but the law proving insufficient, the penalty was changed to ducking. Places for ducking were prepared at court-houses. An instance is mentioned of a woman who was ordered to be ducked three times from a vessel lying in the James River. The woman was tied to a chair at the longer end of a lever, controlled at the shorter end by men with a rope. The stool being planted firmly, the woman was raised on the lever, and then lowered so as to be plunged under the water.

Harper and Brothers Publishers. . New York. 1902.

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