Colonial dames and good wives

by Alice Morse Earle

Special punishment was provided for women. Old Dr. Johnson said gruffly to a lady friend: “Madam, there are different ways of restraining evil; stocks for men, a ducking-stool for women, pounds for beasts.” The old English instrument of punishment,—as old as the Doomsday survey,—the cucking-stool or ducking-stool, was in vogue here, was insultingly termed a “publique convenience,” and was used in the Southern and Central colonies for the correction of common scolds. We read in Blackstone’s Commentaries, “A common scold may be indicted and if convicted shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking-stool.” Still another name for this “engine” was a “gum-stool.” The brank, or scold’s bridle,—a cruel and degrading means of punishment employed in England for “curst queans” as lately as 1824,—was unknown in America. A brank may be seen at the Guildhall in Worcester, England. One at Walton-on-Thames bears the date 1633. On the Isle of Man, when the brank was removed, the wearer had to say thrice, in public, “Tongue, thou hast lied.” I do not find that women ever had to “run the gauntelope” as did male offenders in 1685 in Boston, and, though under another name, in several of the provinces.

Women in Maine were punished by being gagged; in Plymouth, Mass., and in Easthampton, L. I., they had cleft sticks placed on their tongues in public; in the latter place because the dame said her husband “had brought her to a place where there was neither gospel nor magistracy.” In Salem “one Oliver—his wife” had a cleft stick placed on her tongue for half an hour in public “for reproaching the elders.” It was a high offence to speak “discornfully” of the elders and magistrates.

The first volume of the American Historical Record gives a letter said to have been written to Governor Endicott, of Massachusetts, in 1634 by one Thomas Hartley from Hungar’s Parish, Virginia. It gives a graphic description of a ducking-stool, and an account of a ducking in Virginia. I quote from it:—

The day afore yesterday at two of ye clock in ye afternoon I saw this punishment given to one Betsey wife of John Tucker, who by ye violence of her tongue had made his house and ye neighborhood uncomfortable. She was taken to ye pond where I am sojourning by ye officer who was joyned by ye magistrate and ye Minister Mr. Cotton, who had frequently admonished her and a large number of People. They had a machine for ye purpose yᵗ belongs to ye Parish, and which I was so told had been so used three times this Summer. It is a platform with 4 small rollers or wheels and two upright posts between which works a Lever by a Rope fastened to its shorter or heavier end. At the end of ye longer arm is fixed a stool upon which sᵈ Betsey was fastened by cords, her gown tied fast around her feete. The Machine was then moved up to ye edge of ye pond, ye Rope was slackened by ye officer and ye woman was allowed to go down under ye water for ye space of half a minute. Betsey had a stout stomach, and would not yield until she had allowed herself to be ducked 5 severall times. At length she cried piteously Let me go Let me go, by Gods help I’ll sin no more. Then they drew back ye machine, untied ye Ropes and let her walk home in her wetted clothes a hopefully penitent woman.

I have seen an old chap-book print of a ducking-stool with a “light huswife of the banck-side” in it. It was rigged much like an old-fashioned well-sweep, the woman and chair occupying the relative place of the bucket. The base of the upright support was on a low-wheeled platform.

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.

Women curst with a shrewish tongue were often punished in Puritan colonies. In 1647 it was ordered that “common scoulds” be punished in Rhode Island by ducking, but I find no records of the punishment being given. In 1649 several women were prosecuted in Salem, Mass., for scolding; and on May 15, 1672, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered that scolds and railers should be gagged or “set in a ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times,” but I do not believe that this law was ever executed in Massachusetts. Nor was it in Maine, though in 1664 a dozen towns were fined forty shillings each for having no “coucking-stool.” Equally severe punishments were inflicted for other crimes. Katharine Ainis, of Plymouth, was publicly whipped on training day, and ordered to wear a large B cut in red cloth “sewed to her vper garment.” In 1637 Dorothy Talbye, a Salem dame, for beating her husband was ordered to be bound and chained to a post. At a later date she was whipped, and then was hanged for killing her child, who bore the strange name of Difficulty. No one but a Puritan magistrate could doubt, from Winthrop’s account of her, that she was insane. Another “audatious” Plymouth shrew, for various “vncivill carriages” to her husband, was sentenced to the pillory; and if half that was told of her was true, she richly deserved her sentence; but, as she displayed “greate pensiveness and sorrow” before the simple Pilgrim magistrates, she escaped temporarily, to be punished at a later date for a greater sin. The magistrates firmly asserted in court and out that “meekness is ye chojsest orniment for a woman.”

Joane Andrews sold in York, Maine, in 1676, two stones in a firkin of butter. For this cheatery she “stood in towne meeting at York and at towne meeting at Kittery till 2 hours bee expended, with her offense written upon a paper in capitall letters on her forehead.” The court record of one woman delinquent in Plymouth, in 1683, is grimly comic. It seems that Mary Rosse exercised what was called by the “painful” court chronicler in a triumph of orthographical and nomenclatory art, an “inthewsiastickall power” over one Shingleterry, a married man, who cringingly pleaded, as did our first father Adam, that “hee must doo what shee bade him”—or, in modern phrase, that she hypnotized him. Mary Rosse and her uncanny power did not receive the consideration that similar witches and works do nowadays. She was publicly whipped and sent home to her mother, while her hypnotic subject was also whipped, and I presume sent home to his wife.

It should be noted that in Virginia, under the laws proclaimed by Argall, women were in some ways tenderly regarded. They were not punished for absenting themselves from church on Sundays or holidays; while men for one offence of this nature had “to lie neck and heels that night, and be a slave to the colony for the following week; for the second offence to be a slave for a month; for the third, for a year and a day.”