The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (13 page)

and stories did the rounds about merchants and bankers who let out properties to people who ran music houses.
82

It would be all too easy to conclude that Amsterdam’s burghers were generally hypocritical, condemning prostitution while surreptitiously profiting from it. Much economic exchange in fact took place within dishonourable circles—seamstresses and maidservants who worked in brothels, for instance, were often former or future prostitutes—and house owners were often not willing to have whores and brothel-keep- ers as tenants. Ernest Jacobs sold his house in an alley off the Nieu- wendijk in
1710
, because the man who was renting it from him had set up a music house there and Jacobs wanted nothing to do with it.
83
Landlords sometimes lodged complaints about prostitution by their tenants. In
1739
Mietje van der Stiebel, an Amsterdam seamstress and ‘silent whore’, was warned by her landlord’s wife to cease her ‘improper living’. Mietje answered:‘What’s it to you? I shall play the whore.’ And when the woman said:‘I’ll fetch the bailiff ’s men,’ Mietje answered: ‘Go on then, for there’s good bread in the Spin House too.’
84

‘Silent’ or ‘secret’ whoring brought no obvious disturbance or scan- dal to the neighbourhood and may indeed have been tolerated to some

extent. Naturally we have no information about women who success- fully kept their trade a secret, but there are occasional references to the practice in notarial archives.A man who wanted to annul a promise of marriage might try to demonstrate that the woman in question was a whore by calling upon her neighbours to give evidence before a no- tary. In the case of ‘silent whore’Anna Nederman in
1701
, for example, no fewer than eight neighbours or former neighbours were prepared to make detailed statements. Anna had been on friendly terms with most of the women and had talked a great deal about her past, her problems, and her hopes for the future. The neighbours even knew that she had been sexually abused by her father when she was a child. She was quite open about her life as a prostitute, telling people she was regularly fetched to whorehouses in the evenings, detailing exactly where she had gone and which clients she had been with, sometimes even showing them the money she had earned.
85
A similarly friendly relationship emerges from a deposition given in
1705
about Maria van Weste. Late one evening Maria had come to a neighbour’s house and cried bitterly because she had been robbed of the money she had just earned by prostitution.
86
All this intimate female companionship and the avoidance of scandal and nuisance by the prostitutes concerned was not enough to dissuade their neighbours from giving incriminat- ing evidence against them.

The nuisance caused by public prostitution was considerable, but it was also clear who was honourable and who was not. Clandestine prostitution, whereby a woman secretly profited behind an honourable facade, may have been a source of still greater annoyance. It was cer- tainly of crucial importance to all the women of a neighbourhood that a clear distinction be made between honourable and dishonourable residents. A neighbour of Anna Nederman followed her one evening out of curiosity, her apron over her head, and watched as she visited two addresses which, as Anna had told her herself, were infamous whorehouses. She now knew beyond doubt that Anna was a whore. In another case, a number of women came to the conclusion that two sisters living in their street were whores after observing their comings and goings for several weeks from a public privy.The moment the girls stopped behaving discreetly and began kissing men in public, the neighbours decided something had to be done. ‘It has now gone far enough; they allow themselves to be fondled in the street,’ one of them said to her husband.
87

The Jonkerstraat and the Ridderstraat
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The elite generally regarded ‘the rabble’ as a homogenous mass, within which it made no difference if a person was a whore or a thief. For a long time historians too regarded the common people as an undifferentiated mass in which the sexual norms of the respectable citizenry did not apply and where honour was an unaffordable luxury. This is simply not true. Even among those of the lowest social strata, honour and the symbolism that went with it were important considerations. The ‘respectable poor’ felt it was vital to distinguish themselves from the ‘disorderly and godless poor’ and they were prepared to fight to defend their honour.
88

In
The Fable of the Bees, or, PrivateVices, Publick Benefits
(
1714
), Bernard Mandeville writes that the music houses of Amsterdam were not re- garded as a problem by those who lived near them:

In the first place the Houses I speak of are allowed to be no where but in the most slovenly and unpolish’d part of the Town, where Seamen and Strangers of no
R
epute chiefly Lodge and
R
esort. The Street in which most of them stand is counted scandalous, and the Infamy is extended to all the Neighbourhood round it.
89

This perfectly expresses the attitude of the elite: prostitution is concen- trated in areas already so rough that it makes no difference as far as the local population is concerned.

It is certainly true that the large and well-known music houses on the Zeedijk and the Geldersekade seldom gave rise to neighbourhood quarrels or formal complaints. This is perhaps understandable, since these establishments were watched and at times regularly raided by the police, and therefore took care to keep to strict opening times and to employ doormen and ‘minders’, in other words bouncers, to prevent any nuisance that might prompt the authorities to intervene. People may have believed their complaints would be ignored, since the situa- tion was clear, the limits were firmly laid down, and anyone who ob- jected would simply have to move house, but Mandeville’s comment that the entire area in which the music houses stood was regarded as disreputable would certainly have been disputed by the residents.

The streets most often named in the Confession Books in connection with neighbourhood initiatives against whorehouses are the Jonkerstraat and the
R
idderstraat, two parallel and fairly long streets leading off the

Geldersekade. Here rents were low and overcrowding was common.
90
Locals included an abundance of ‘seamen and strangers of no repute’. In these streets, according to Tobias van Domselaer in his
Beschryving van Am- sterdam
(
1665
) (Description of Amsterdam),‘there currently lives an atro- cious throng of common sailors and manual labourers that earns its bread at the wharfs and at sea, aye, sometimes with four entire families in one house, in the front-house, the back annex, the cellars, the front and back rooms upstairs, such that it is beyond belief ’.
91
The two streets were practi-

cally a byword for neighbourhoods housing the lowest of the low. Histo- rian Jan Wagenaar, writing in
1760
about the Undertakers
R
iot of
1696
, talks of ‘the rabble...that pours forth from the Jonkerstraat and
R
idder- straat via the Nieuwmarkt into a chaotic heap’.
92

There was a great deal of prostitution in these particular streets, in whorehouses often no larger than a basement or one-room apartment. The clients they aimed to attract were simple folk. ‘I now had no money left to go to the big music houses,’ writes the protagonist of
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
(
1775
), ‘so I decided to go to the smaller

ones,such as those in the Jonkerstraat and the
R
idderstraat’.Here Dutch gin (
jenever
) was drunk instead of wine and the prostitutes were poor

women who in daytime ‘sold mussels on the streets or turned the grinding wheels in diamond workshops’.
93
This kind of prostitution was public.Whores displayed themselves in doorways to tempt men to go in.Anna Lijsbeth Lodewijks and her girls, for example, were said to draw men inside by snatching their hats from their heads and tossing them into the house.Anna denies this, but says it does happen at other whorehouses in the same street. She was convicted of fighting with a man who had been enticed into her house but had then tried to leave, seriously injuring him with a stick the neighbours said she always car- ried under her skirts in the evenings for self-defence.
94

Stories like these create an impression of public prostitution and daily violence. Local residents did not simply resign themselves to the situation, however. The nuisance caused by brothels must have been enormous in such a densely populated part of town.
R
eports of argu- ments indicate that they often escalated to fever pitch, with consider- able aggression on both sides. On
7
September
1689
there was a ‘great uproar and confluence of people’ when a drunkenVOC sailor claimed

money had been stolen from him in a whorehouse.
95
Less than three weeks earlier, a male brothel-keeper had caused a commotion by threatening people on the street with a knife,‘purely because they had

admonished him concerning disturbance to the neighbours’.
96
In
1683
Jannetje Jans’s neighbours got together and filed an official complaint against her. According to their petition, Jannetje had

lived for several consecutive years in the Jonkerstraat, keeping a brothel or whorehouse, debauching in the said house many young men, burghers’ chil- dren of
16
years old, leading a godless life day and night with her concubines and her riff-raff, because of which dissolute life night and day, with smashing of windows, chopping and carving at doorframes and doors of neighbouring dwellings, and other such acts of wanton violence, it is impossible for the neighbours to live there any longer.
97

It was also in the Jonkerstraat, one morning in
1745
, that local people opening their shutters complained to two brothel-keepers and their whores about the din they had made the night before and were an- swered with ‘insults and curses and indecent gestures’. The prostitutes proceeded to knock on people’s doors and one of the bawds came to blows with a ‘burgher woman’, to whom she then ‘pulled up her skirts

and said yet more offensive things’.
98
A dozen years earlier, when Engeltje Valk, alias
R
oo Engel, was arrested along with her girls in a major raid in November
1732
,‘there were loud cheers and people said it was a good thing that this whorehouse too was being cleaned out’.
99

There are plenty more examples.The Jonkerstraat and the
R
idder- straat were generally regarded as rough back-streets with a fluid divid- ing line between the honourable and the dishonourable. In fact,

however, it was precisely in the near vicinity of dishonourable behav- iour that the honourable poor felt it crucial to defend their position. Prostitutes were cut off from the world of honest folk because they openly disregarded the first requirement of a woman’s good name: chastity. They could not expect their neighbours to accept them, let alone to approve of what they were doing.

‘The caterpillar in a cabbage, the canker in the leg’: Attitudes to Prostitution, Prostitutes, and Women

P

rostitution stood at one extreme end of the dichotomy ‘honour- able versus dishonourable’ and the whore was seen as ‘the other’,

to be kept at a distance from the honourable lives of reputable burgh- ers. Public whoredom belonged in the brothels of harbourside neigh- bourhoods, where prostitutes catered toVOC sailors and other lowlifes. Illicit sex could then be regarded as something indulged in by outsid- ers, especially foreigners. To give an example, young men from good backgrounds setting out on the Grand Tour were emphatically warned about the immorality of the French and Italians.
1

A particular connection was made between whoredom and the ‘other religion’, Catholicism. In sixteenth-century Protestant propa- ganda, the pope was equated with the Whore of Babylon in the Book of
R
evelation; Martin Luther and other leading figures of the
R
efor- mation referred to ‘whores’ and ‘papists’ in the same breath.
2
There was also a widespread belief that prostitutes favoured Catholicism.Accord- ing to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, whores and bawds were ‘mostly her- etics and dreadfully godless’, but those who wished to seem pious

attended Catholic churches, since ‘there is no religion easier for a whore than the
R
oman’.
3
Catholics, after all, believed that confession could absolve them of sin. The influential Amsterdam clergyman and writer Petrus Wittewrongel claimed that adultery was more common in Catholic than in Protestant countries—understandably so, since

Catholic nations held God and His Word in contempt. Protestants were convinced there were tens of thousands of whores in
R
ome, serv- ing the Catholic clergy, and that the pope himself profited from the trade.
4
Gregorio Leti, an Italian who had moved to Amsterdam and converted to Protestantism, wrote about them in his book
Il puttanismo
R
omano
(
R
oman Whoredom), published in Dutch in
1678
under the

title
Onkuisse t’zamenrotting, of gilde der
R
oomse hoeren
(Lewd Assembly, or the Guild of
R
oman Whores).

In their diaries and travelogues, the Dutch generally kept quiet

about prostitution at home, but they were quick to make reference to it abroad.
5
In Paris in
1778
, a Dutch merchant called Jacob Muhl was enthralled by the sight of so many beautiful women at the Place
R
oyal and the dance-hall ‘Le Vauxhal’. He and his companions whispered to each other that they were virtually all
filles pour chaqu’un
(girls for everyone). Some were said to be no more than
12
years old, which drew the response from Muhl:‘Holy, holy, our Amsterdam, where no