ducking-stool

• “Captain; “for the tamned woman with the besom might have some advantage in that long dark passage, knowing the ground better than I do — tamn her, I will have amends on her, if there be whipping-post, or ducking-stool, or a pair of stocks in the parish!””

  Saint Ronan's Well

• “Stocks for the men, a ducking-stool for women, and a pound for beasts.”

  The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D.

• “Dragon will not be so civil as I am, or be contented to leave you to the charge of the constable and ducking-stool.”

  Old Mortality

• “I laid her enormities clearly before her, and I threatened her, in sae mony words, that I would have her to the ducking-stool; and she, on the contrair part, miscawed me for a forward northern tyke — and so we parted never to meet again, as I hope and trust.”

  The Fortunes of Nigel

• “Cameron, his thought babbling over the good old days of the ducking-stool, poured himself carefully a highball that was brown.”

  Defenders of Democracy; contributions from representative men and women of letters and other arts from our allies and our own country, edited by the Gift book committee of the Militia of Mercy

• “Your sex are in general suspected by ours, of being too much addicted to scandal and defamation; a suspicion, which has not arisen of late years, as we find in the ancient laws of England a punishment, known by the name of ducking-stool, annexed to scolding and defamation in the women, though no such punishment nor crime is taken notice of in the men.”

  Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World

• “In old times, a woman who was convicted of being a common mischief-maker and scold, was sentenced to the punishment of the ducking-stool; which consisted of a sort of chair fastened to a pole, in which she was seated and repeatedly let down into the water, amid the shouts of the rabble.”

  Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World

• “The ducking-stool may have been a very needful piece of public furniture in those days, when it was deemed one characteristic of a notable housewife to be a good scold, and when women of a certain description sought, in the use of vituperation, that sort of excitement which they now obtain from a bottle and a glass.”

  The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 13, No. 374, June 6, 1829

• “Scolds and railers were set on a ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running water, if possible.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 71, September, 1863

• “It was the law, made and provided, that a ducking-stool should be set up”

  Virginia: the Old Dominion

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