The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (11 page)

who disguise themselves as sailors or attempt to stow away to the Dutch East Indies as ‘prison beasts, Spin House whores, drunken street sows, and thieves’.
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Elias Spillebout, a notorious whoremaster, claimed that in his tavern he harboured no ‘Spin House cattle’.
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‘You’re a whore, a sow, a Spin House whore, a brandy beast,’ one woman shouts at another in a seventeenth-century joke, of which the punchline is that the other woman, in the heat of the moment, answers: ‘What the devil do you have to boast about, you she-devil. I’m as good as you are.’
36
Outside music house De Parnassusberg (Mount Parnassus) a fight erupted after the woman in charge called a man a whoremaster (
kochel
) and he responded by calling her a ‘whipped whore’.
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There are dozens of comparable examples.

Insults and abuse were no doubt often accompanied by blows and by gestures, and although these are less well documented than what was said, the Confession Books give some graphic examples. Women displayed their contempt by lifting their skirts and showing their bare backsides—they did not wear underwear in this period—then slapping

their naked buttocks and even urinating. In
1655
, when the prostitute and swindler Saartje Christoffels was arrested, she ‘picked up her skirts and made her water on the floor’.
38
‘I shit on you, Marry . . . and I wipe my arse on your phiz,’ snaps one whore to another in
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
.
39
Showing a bare bottom was a typically female gesture; a typically male gesture was to mime ‘the slicing of the chops’.This re- ferred to the cutting open of the opponents’ cheeks, starting at the corners of the mouth. It was also a common verbal threat, as in the ex- pression ‘I’ll give you a red ribbon’.Women might occasionally be the victims, as the nickname of the notorious underworld figure Femme with the Scar suggests, but they did not perform the act themselves; carrying and using knives was a male privilege. At most they threat- ened to have it done. Anna Maria Piernau, a thief and the wife of a thief, who settled accounts with another woman by ‘slicing her chops’, dressed up as a man before doing so.
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The ‘slicing of the chops’ left the victim with a prominent scar (a ‘red ribbon’) and a deformed face. Since the head was the seat of hon- our, such disfigurement was a disgrace in itself. Hair and headgear were another sensitive matter. In an argument a woman might snatch her opponent’s bonnet or cap off her head, at which point hand-to-hand fighting ensued. It is striking that such almost ritualized fights oc- curred only between women who did not differ greatly in social status, and even so a subtle hierarchy existed. It was the woman with the lower status who lifted her skirts or grabbed the other woman’s bon- net, symbolically bringing her down to her own level.

Women generally fought with women, men with men, and they used different techniques.Women deployed their hands and teeth and specifically female accoutrements like wooden mules, bunches of keys, ladles (sometimes full of steaming porridge), pans, and brooms. They usually grabbed each other’s heads and hair. Men carried knives, which they used first as a threat and then in earnest, cutting an op- ponent’s clothing to shreds, stabbing his buttocks, and ultimately slic- ing the other man’s ‘chops’.

The margins of society

The people who most obviously belonged to the dishonourable margins of society were prostitutes and all those involved in

prostitution.Thieves and other criminals were also automatically re- garded as without honour, and the same went for showmen, sooth- sayers, quacks, and street singers, as well as the lowest types of soldiers and sailors serving the East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) or the West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, or WIC).

The way of life and the norms and values of such people were seen by honest folk, no matter how poor, as the opposite of everything that was good, respectable, and honourable. In the imagery of the time, the tavern was seen as the antithesis of the church and the whorehouse as the antithesis of a respectable burgher’s household. A whorehouse was the mirror image of a normal home, with the whores as members of a family and the bawd in the role of mother. In this upside-down house- hold all values were turned on their heads and virtue ousted; the world of prostitution was seen as a subculture characterized by a reversal of values, even as a protest against the dominant culture. It was not un- known for brothel-keepers and prostitutes to behave in a deliberately provocative manner.The introduction to a collection of farces entitled
De gaven van de milde St. Marten
(The Gifts of the Mild St Martin), published in
1654
, suggests that it was precisely the ‘filthiest houses’, the ‘taverns and stews’, that liked to feature saints on the signs they hung out. There are indeed examples of such signs. One tavern fre- quented by thieves and whores around
1700
was called De Goddeloze Kerk (The Godless Church).
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In the eyes of respectable burghers, whores and bawds were simply disreputable scum, since they had no sexual honour and had often been in prison or on the scaffold.Within these despised groups them- selves, however, there was undoubtedly a system of honour and norms, and it was important for a person to defend his or her standing and status. This was not true only of Amsterdam. Elizabeth Cohen de-

scribes how prostitutes in seventeenth-century
R
ome challenged in- sults all the way to the courts.
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They needed to accord themselves

some self-respect in this way, to feel assured that there were others more despicable than they were. Burghers noted this tendency and described it with contempt;‘whores and scoundrels always talk of their honour’ was a well-known adage.
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Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
says of brothel-keepers:

The longer a wench has played the whore the more reputable she longs to be once she is married, and even if such a person keeps the most infamous

whorehouse that could ever be kept, she will always start out by saying that she is an honest woman, and that no one has a bad word to say against her; for such creatures imagine that honour lies purely in not allowing themselves to be used by anyone but their husbands, and that they may otherwise do what- ever they wish without diminishing their honour in the least, even were they to make their profession purely that of lying and deceiving, as these brothel- keepers usually do.
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In this world, theft was regarded as worse than prostitution. ‘I’m a whore, but no thief,’ was how one prostitute defended herself against allegations of robbery, and another confessed in court that she walked the streets ‘because she had no work and no place to sleep and she thought it was better than stealing’.
45
‘Married man’s whore’ and ‘Jews’ whore’ were among the insults they bandied about. From documented altercations it appears that to be a ‘great whore’, in other words a pros- titute with many clients, was seen as particularly despicable. One woman said of herself ‘I’m a whore, I admit it,’ and then hurled at an- other woman ‘the most dishonourable insults, saying she was every- man’s whore, and that she took medicines to drive out her children’. This last accusation, of attempted abortion, was the worst of all. The confrontation took place in public, of course, in daytime, outside her opponent’s house.
46

Among bawds—and in court—the most important rule was that no ‘honest’ girl should be led into prostitution. A brothel-keeper in The Hague called Maria van Leeuwen insisted before the bench in
1775
that ‘she had never tried to lead honest young daughters astray but had merely given lodging to such girls’.
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Among
besteedsters
—registered intermediaries providing servants and other staff—there were some who also procured girls for brothels. It was a popular literary cliché that innocent girls were ruined in this way, but in court such women invariably protested they had never placed honest girls in whorehouses. In
1719
Margrietje de Meyer who had been hired as a live-in seam- stress in a whorehouse for a few days was forced to have sex with a man, despite her protests that she was an honest girl. At her bawd’s trial, the woman who had placed Margrietje in the brothel appeared as a witness. She claimed she had specifically been asked to provide an ‘honest and decent girl’, but the brothel-keeper countered that she had merely requested a girl who was ‘decent’.
48
In
1737
Anna Broersen admitted that she had sent girls to bawdy-houses as whores, but said she ‘examined first whether they were honest or not’.
49

There was a remarkable similarity between the moral norms that prevailed among prostitutes and those of honourable citizens. Even at the very lowest levels of society, norms governing mutual trustworthi- ness over money and the meeting of financial obligations were strictly adhered to. Poverty and a lack of private space made this essential. People carried their meagre possessions with them, items that could easily be stolen in shared lodgings, and they were often forced to en- trust belongings to others. Sailors might leave several years’ earnings with their landlord or even a brothel-keeper. Most deals—including the settlement between a whore and a bawd—were sealed by verbal agreement. It was crucial for such unwritten contracts to be respected and those who broke them knew that violence might be used to en- force them.

Money earned through prostitution was tainted, as demonstrated by a story told by Margrietje de Meyer, the girl hired to sew linen in a whorehouse who was forced to have sex with a client. When Mar- grietje had completed her work, the brothel-keeper gave her fifteen stivers more than the amount due for her sewing.The extra coins rep- resented half the sum the man had paid for sex and at first the girl was unwilling to take them, but she was eventually persuaded to do so,‘say- ing she would give the money to a poor person’.
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To the brothel- keeper the extra fifteen stivers were an indemnity against possible charges as an accessory to rape; to the girl this was tainted, dishonour- able money that would brand her a whore and the only way she could cleanse it was to give it as alms to the poor.

The proceeds of prostitution were earned by female means and this was another sensitive matter. In cases where a prostitute called on a man for help in recovering an amount due, he would never claim the woman was owed money for sex; instead he might enforce pay- ment on the pretext that the customer had refused to pay a drinks bill, or had accosted his wife or sister and must pay compensation. In
1679
Anthonie Engelbregts, a baker’s apprentice from Germany who earned fees as a ‘protector of whores’, insisted in court that the money came from his sister. He finally acknowledged the truth, saying he had felt too ashamed to admit he had earned it from prostitutes.
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But money is money. Successful bawds had little difficulty finding male partners, as is clear from the fact that the men who lived with them were often younger than they were, sometimes much younger.

A man’s honour was bound up with the chastity and sexual loyalty of his wife, his authority as a man over a woman, and the avoidance of ‘women’s work’. For men whose partners were involved in prostitution, these criteria were impossible to meet. Sailors who embarked for the East Indies leaving their sweethearts behind in music houses where it was obvious they would prostitute themselves, or who had met their lovers or wives in whorehouses, could make no great demands of their sexual ex- clusivity.While a sailor was still around, however, it was unacceptable for his wife or paramour to have sexual relations with anyone else.
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Just as norms current among prostitutes differed relatively little from those of the respectable world, the same symbolism was used. In
1693
Geertruy Lucassen, whose underworld nickname was Truy Labberlot, took effective revenge on a client who refused to pay the supplement agreed upon. She pulled his wig off his head, stuck it in a chamber pot and defecated on it. The man had demanded ‘many excesses’ of her, ‘undressing until naked, flagellating him and suchlike’.
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Even a person who lived by deliberately inverted values had only the established rep- ertoire of gestures, symbols, and behavioural rules to draw upon.This is further illustrated by the story, again from
1693
, of Jacoba van de Heyden, a prostitute born in The Hague who had been convicted several times and did not care about moral values of any sort. During a term of imprisonment she had sworn, ‘saying may the devil other- wise take her life and soul’, that she would see to it that the ‘Spin House father had his neck broken and the Spin House mother her chops sliced’. She regaled her fellow prisoners with the story of how, as a street whore, she had once waylaid a well-to-do burgher who was returning from a funeral. She got the man very drunk and robbed him of his money, hat, coat, and shoes, before putting a women’s bonnet on his head and dragging him off to the Oude Kerk, one of Amsterdam’s largest churches, where she left him lying on the steps.
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Neighbourhood conflicts over prostitution

In pre-industrial cities, rich and poor did not usually live in separate parts of town; instead the living space within a given neighbourhood was divided according to wealth and status. In Amsterdam the better- off lived on the main streets and in waterfront houses along the larger canals, while the poor lived in narrow side streets and alleys or in

annexes built on to the backs of buildings. In many houses each storey was rented out separately, the poorer families living in basements and on the highest floors, the wealthier on the lower floors. Social segre- gation was deliberately incorporated into the layout, however, when major extensions to the city were built in the mid-seventeenth cen- tury. The main new canals—the Herengracht, Keizersgracht, and Prinsengracht—were designed as housing for the rich, while the nearby Jordaan was built as an area in which artisans and labourers would live and work.The most pronounced examples of segregation concerned the Jewish areas, even though in theory Jews could live wherever they liked.Vlooienburg, Marken, and Uilenburg (small is- lands, like many Amsterdam neighbourhoods) were largely inhabited by poor Ashkenazi or ‘High German’ Jews, while many of the wealthy ‘Portuguese’ (Sephardic Jews) lived on or near the Nieuwe Herengracht.
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