In the early days of the United States, colonists imported from England a set of regulations that were ostensibly meant to maintain the public peace. They were called, collectively, “common scold” laws, and they targeted women—it was almost always women—who had a habit of loudly quarreling with their neighbors. A woman convicted of such a law might be made made to wear, as punishment, a scold’s bridle—an iron mask that fit over the head and depressed the tongue, to prevent her from further speech; more commonly, though, as one 18th-century summary stipulated, she would be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking stool, which in...
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