Feminism and Communicative Injustice

Abstract

The last recorded instance of the use of the ducking stool as a form of punishment in the UK was in the year 1809. The accused was a woman named Jenny Pipes; her crime was that of being a ‘common scold’, and for having uttered ‘foul and abusive language’.1 The ducking stool was frequently used to discipline women who were deemed to be ‘gossips’ and ‘shrews’ in Europe and the English colonies of North America. It was a wooden chair into which the offender was strapped, which was then submerged in water—in this particular case, Jenny Pipes was ‘ducked’ into a cold English river in the small town of Leominster, Herefordshire. This practice, which became prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was designed to publicly shame and humiliate those women whose language was deemed to be transgressive, threatening, rebellious or otherwise unbecoming of women. The story of Jenny Pipes—otherwise known as a ‘furious wench’—caught my attention for many reasons, but mostly because the location of this historic punishment was a town just a few miles from the place where I grew up. The term the ‘ducking stool’ was actually very familiar to me, as a pub in Leominster is named for it. I spent many an evening in The Ducking Stool, but without ever questioning, or being told about, the origins of its name. Jenny Pipes took on a particular