The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (28 page)

In the course of the eighteenth century, poverty became the most common excuse, especially in the case of streetwalkers. Forty-four- year-old spinster Metje Fredriks testified in
1710
that she went to the cruising lane now and then ‘because she did not always have work’.
12
Of a group of street prostitutes who came to trial on
7
September
1712
, one said she had resorted to such means ‘of necessity’, another ‘from great poverty’, and a third, a woman of
48
,‘out of hunger’.
13
In
1739
a streetwalker called Mary Simons begged of the watchman about to arrest her that he ‘would let her go, out of charity, since she did it because she was so poor’.
14
Some said they had looked in vain for work. Along with the poverty argument, many women still employed the excuse that they had been seduced and abandoned.

For people of the lower orders, the eighteenth century brought harder times than the seventeenth, and the late eighteenth century in particular was a period of serious economic malaise.This affected men too, but the decline was greater and set in sooner for women, since the textile industry was not replaced by any alternative source of employ- ment for them, whereas destitute men could always enlist as soldiers or sailors. Prostitutes increasingly emphasized their poverty, and among the arrested streetwalkers there were more and more older and Am- sterdam-born women. As we shall see in the next chapter, earnings from prostitution dropped. At the same time, eighteenth-century tales of pecuniary distress suggest that judges became more sensitive to the poverty argument. In court, after all, people give the answers that will do most to excuse their behaviour.

‘From a bed onto straw and from straw onto the floor, such is the fate of the whore,’ went a saying of the time.
1
5
In literature too, prostitutes

generally end up in the gutter.The judicial archives provide many real- life examples of such a descent. Petronella Kropts, a maidservant from Bonn who claimed to be from a good family, had arrived in Holland by way of domestic service in Düsseldorf and Wesel. In Amsterdam she found work as a maid in a lodging house on the Singel, but after four years she allowed herself to be seduced by one of the lodgers, who abandoned her. Petronella gave birth to a child in the municipal hospi- tal and then worked as a maid in a whorehouse, where she eventually became a prostitute.When her brothel-keeper was arrested, she fled the city and moved to The Hague. In
1771
she was arrested there, as a street- walker. Her child had died as an infant.
16
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Petronella’s story was recorded by the Court of Holland in The Hague, where judges took the time to question women about their lives, and to make further enquiries. Maria de Vries, arrested in The Hague in
1786
, is another example. Maria was born in a village in the northern province of Frisia. Her mother died young and her father remarried.When her father died as well, her stepmother decided to try her luck elsewhere and took the girl with her to Amsterdam.There she started a coffee house and Maria helped her.The stepmother, however, met a new man, who threw the girl out, telling her to find a job as a servant. Maria met the proverbial wicked procuress and soon found herself a prostitute in a closed brothel, meaning she was not allowed out. She escaped and fled to The Hague, where she again worked in a brothel.When she contracted the pox, her bawd sent her to Amsterdam with a guilder as travelling money, to take a free cure at the municipal Gasthuis. But Maria did not dare show her face in Amsterdam; she was afraid of her former brothel-keeper, to whom she still owed money. Instead she returned to Frisia, where she worked as an agricultural la- bourer. In the autumn, when the harvest was over and the weather grew cold, Maria drifted back to The Hague, and after a few freezing nights on the streets surrendered herself to the police in the hope she would be given shelter, food, and medical care. She was only
19
.
17

Amsterdam’s surplus of women

Amsterdam’s rapid growth in population, from around
54
,
000
in
1600
to
200
,
000
by about
1650
and
240
,
000
by
1740
, can be explained only by large-scale immigration. Many immigrants brought their families

with them; this was certainly true of people fleeing religious persecu- tion who sought refuge in the
R
epublic. But there were also many single young men and women who came to find work. Prosperous regions attract people from poor regions, and for centuries Holland was a magnet in this sense, to Germans and Scandinavians in particu- lar.
18
In an era before passports and with limited population registers it was a simple matter to seek your fortune elsewhere. On the other

hand, life and work, particularly in cities, were regulated by privileges reserved for a small segment of the population. Sometimes it was pos- sible to buy into such a group by purchasing citizenship, but often it was necessary to have the right religious faith, the right gender, and the right family connections even to be considered for membership. Many immigrants therefore ended up in the least remunerative types of employment.

The women who came to Amsterdam looked primarily for posi- tions as maids; the men most often found work as sailors. Many prob- ably intended eventually to return to their native regions with the money they had saved, to marry there or set up small businesses, or to invest in a farm, but a large number never went back. The women stayed in Amsterdam, but for the men who went to sea the city was a place of transit. At the same time, numerous Amsterdam men were themselves away at sea. As a result there were many more women in the city than men, indeed in the lowest ranks of the population, where this kind of migration was most prevalent, the ratio of adult women to men may have been as high as
3
to
2
.
19

The female surplus meant that women of the lower orders had dif- ficulty finding marriage partners. This was especially true of those from outside the city, since men, whether born Amsterdammers or not, preferred to marry native Amsterdam women.The established, after all, generally have more to offer than newcomers in terms of family rela- tionships, social contacts, and economic prospects. Moreover, the daughters of Amsterdam citizens were given what could be seen as a dowry by the municipal authorities in the form of citizenship for their bridegrooms, a privilege that was worth fifty guilders, the equivalent of two months’ wages for a man of the labouring classes.
20

There were numerous poor single women in the city, many of them immigrants with little chance of achieving social and financial security by marriage. In addition, there were many married women with hus- bands at sea, whose contribution to the family economy consisted

more of their absence than their income. Half the adult women of the common folk of Amsterdam were, for all practical purposes, single. They had to support themselves in a labour market in which there were far fewer opportunities for women than for men, and where wages for women were less than half the amount men received for the same kind of work.
21
They must have managed by supplementing their regular incomes by means of odd jobs, tips, payments in kind, and shar- ing households with other women. Some qualified for poor relief. Others got by, or even did well, in the informal economy of the city.

The poorer districts of Amsterdam and its harbourside areas were female communities, with women running most of the taverns, lodg- ing houses, pawnshops, and stores selling used goods. They were also overrepresented in the more shady types of business, recruiting sailors and keeping brothels, for instance. Amsterdam had an unusually high incidence of female criminality. In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, half its thieves and nearly all those convicted of receiving sto- len goods were women.
22

Even in sixteenth century, foreigners found Dutch women bossy and were struck by their self-reliant demeanour, praising their good busi- ness sense but condemning their ‘unnatural domineering over their husbands’.
2
3
‘Here the hen crows and the cock can only cackle,’ wrote the German theologian Henrich Benthem in his travel account of
1698
. He adds: ‘A Dutch woman will not lightly marry a German, since she will have heard that Krauts keep their wives under their thumbs.’
24
Women of the lower orders were also in the forefront of riots and dis- turbances.Among the ‘rabble’ that was consistently blamed in reports of such episodes,‘women and sailors’ always receive special mention.
25

Female independence may have been less unusual and more ac- cepted in the Dutch
R
epublic than elsewhere, but it was still frowned upon by contemporaries. In his periodical
De Hollandsche Spectator
(
1731
–
5
), Justus van Effen more than once attacks ‘Amsterdam women of the common and middling sort’ who pay no heed to their natural subordination to men. He claims that the city ‘has gained an unfortu- nate reputation through the domination of women’. This was espe-

cially true of districts where the labouring classes lived, as illustrated by a complaint from a spokesman for van Effen:‘Sir, you have no notion of how things are in such quarters; all the men in the whole street are hen-pecked and have not a word to say.’ He wished all those ‘conniv- ing females’ could be sent to the Spin House.
26

Clients
‌
‌

Men who visited prostitutes were no less guilty of breaking the law than the women whose services they bought, but that was in theory rather than practice.When married men and Jews were arrested, they usually opted to buy off the charges. Unmarried non-Jewish clients were rarely prosecuted.The bailiff occasionally had the son of an estab- lished Amsterdam family removed from a brothel or from the home of a prostitute at the request of his parents, but generally speaking clients are mentioned in the Confession Books only in passing, unless accused of some other offence.

This leniency towards clients was the rule in other Dutch cities, too, but there is one exception. In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, in that part of The Hague that fell under the jurisdiction of the High Court of Holland, clients of all kinds were arrested and tried, without exception after about
1790
. Several dozen men were brought to court. Occupations, ages, and nationalities varied widely, some were married, others unmarried, and they included several valets, Jews, and foreigners. They often excused themselves by saying they had been drunk or that the woman had seduced them. Clearly in these years of economic hard- ship there were women who offered themselves very cheaply, or even went along in the hope of receiving some small reward. An innkeeper tells how, after an argument with his wife, he got drunk and spoke to a streetwalker for the first time in his life.
27
Another man explained that he had gone to the whores because he was too poor to marry; another, whose wife, a children’s nurse, was staying with her employee’s family at their summer residence, did so ‘because once married it was not possible for him to live without a woman’.
28

Although the Amsterdam Confession Books offer only a sketchy, impressionistic picture of clients, it does largely correspond with the prejudices of contemporaries. First of all, many seamen were among those found with prostitutes or in whorehouses. Next came a large number of skippers and crews who worked in inland shipping, and whose families presumably did not live in Amsterdam.Then there were farmers who had come to the city on business and spent a night on the tiles—with a full wallet, as described in popular literature, since the Dutch farmer was famously wealthy—and foreigners, including many tourists, who were easy prey to swindling and theft and who, unlike

Amsterdammers, were not too embarrassed to go to the bailiff with their complaints. In short, customers often seem to have been outsid- ers, just passing through, people we might traditionally expect to find among prostitutes’ clients in any large city.

Of the prostitution trials in which clients were identifiable,
115
con- cerned Jewish men, who were specifically forbidden to have sex with Christian women, even if they were prostitutes. In half these cases we are able to categorize the men:
80
per cent were ‘Portuguese’, in other words Sephardic Jews. Of the ‘chambered whores’ referred to in the judicial archives, a relatively large number were maintained by ‘Portu- guese’ (Sephardic Jews).Twenty-one-year-old Isack Velje, for example, born in Brazil, was found in bed in a whorehouse in
1665
with Mar- ritje Jans, three years his junior. He had been visiting her for a month and ‘said he was intending to make her his kept mistress’.
29

The ‘Portuguese’ were a small group and tended to be wealthy. Only in a few exceptional cases was a Sephardic Jew found to have been involved in the organization of prostitution and no‘Portuguese’women have been found in the records either as prostitutes or as bawds.
30
The ‘High German’ or Ashkenazi Jews, the majority of whom were poor immigrants from Germany and Poland, constituted a quite different and much larger group. In the eighteenth century, when their numbers increased, Ashkenazim were caught visiting the poorer whorehouses (‘Yids’ whorehouses’) in and around the Kerkstraat.They did not keep mistresses, but some lived with or married Christian women and had children by them. This was particularly common at the margins of society and within the criminal subculture, where they could be found among the male partners of bawds or as brothel-keepers in their own right. Later in the eighteenth century the records increasingly mention ‘High German’ women as bawds and prostitutes. Their involvement with the prostitution business dates from the seventeenth century, when Ashkenazi violinists played in music houses, although according to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
mostly in the poorest establishments and as a fall-back option, because of the inconvenience of their refusal to play on Friday and Saturday evenings.