**When Authorities Dunked Outspoken Women in Wate**

Duck the scold! Duck the scold!”

If local legend is to be believed, these are the words that Jenny Pipes heard as she was paraded through the English town of Leominster in 1809. Strapped with irons to a wooden chair, she was held high above the crowd and wheeled toward Kenwater Bridge. Though it probably would have been of little comfort to her, Pipes was about to make history by becoming the last woman in England to be “ducked,” or immersed in water while tied to an apparatus known as a ducking stool. Her crime was simple: She was a common scold, accused of speaking ill of her husband once too often.

Pipes’ tormentors tied her chair to the end of a long, maneuverable wooden arm—the preferred mechanism for dipping troublesome women in water. Like other ducking victims, she was sentenced to be plunged as many times as needed to “cool her immoderate heat,” in the words of French writer Francois Misson. The punishment wasn’t designed to be fatal (though it sometimes was), but rather a humiliating spectacle aimed at discouraging whatever behavior precipitated it. Ducked in full view of her friends, family and neighbors, Pipes ended her ordeal by unleashing “oaths and curses on the magistrates,” according to one eyewitness.

Records of Pipes’ ducking are few and far between, a mixture of local folk history and short passages in history books. What is known is that she was a woman of limited financial means who likely worked in the local wool-based industry. And her public humiliation was far from unique: Between the mid-16th and early 19th centuries, an untold number of women in England (as well as Scotland and colonial America) underwent ducking as a punishment for speaking out of turn. Largely forgotten today, the practice speaks to the lengthy history of policing women’s voices—a trend that continues today.

“There were various rituals for silencing women,” says Marion Gibson, a scholar of Renaissance and magical literature at the University of Exeter. “They have their roots in fear of women's speech and fear that women will attack other people in their community, that they gossip too much, that their voices are dangerous, that they may, in extreme circumstances, also be witches.”

Though the women who ended up on the ducking stool risked being accused of witchcraft, the punishment—contrary to popular misconception—wasn’t used to determine whether someone was a witch. A separate test, known primarily as “swimming” a witch, involved throwing a bound victim into a body of water to see whether they’d float (a sure sign of guilt in the early modern imagination). Subjects who sank were deemed innocent but could still wind up dead if they weren’t rescued from the water in time.

Ducking a scold is a punishment. Swimming a suspected witch is a test,” says Gibson. “It’s a different part of the process.”

Still, the scholar adds, both practices involve “throwing women into water in order to harass them in some way. … It’s misogynist, and it’s vile.”

Ducking stools were also distinct from cucking stools, which an 18th-century writer in Cornwall described as “a seat of infamy, where strumpets and scolds, with bare feet and head, were condemned to abide the derision of those that passed by.” The two terms are often used interchangeably, but cucking stools represented a less severe punishment, as victims weren’t dunked in water. While ducking was reserved largely for women, cucking stools were used to punish both men and women.

Few records about the women who were ducked survive. Much more information is available about the ducking stools themselves: their upkeep, how much was spent on their construction. In the borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire, for example, parish accounts show nine entries for repairs of two stools between 1703 and 1737. The frequency of these repairs suggests the stool was in regular use—a supposition supported by William Andrews’ 1899 book Bygone Punishments, which details the history of ducking stools and similarly obsolete devices, from the Scottish Maiden to the drunkard’s cloak.

In towns and villages across England, authorities kept ducking stools close at hand. Typically consisting of a wooden or iron chair fastened to a beam from which the victim could be lowered into and raised out of the water, the seesaw-like contraptions were often mounted on wheels. Some communities stored them out of sight, ready to be moved to ponds or rivers at a moment’s notice, while others proudly installed them in permanent waterside positions.