The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (35 page)

A prostitute’s income depended of course on how many clients she had. A streetwalker could serve many men to make up for her low fee, but we do not know how many was the norm. In whorehouses prosti- tutes seem quite often to have received only a very small number of customers per day, even per week. Organizing the liaison and entertain- ing the client took up a great deal of time: often a woman had to be fetched, the pair would dance, drink, and eat, and sometimes the man stayed the night. He might go out on the town with one of the girls several days in a row. The supply of customers varied with the seasons. As we have seen, in Amsterdam the high season for prostitution was late summer, when many VOC sailors were in town, signing up or recently discharged, and the September fair was held.

Aside from the sex, a client would pay for food and drink, which sometimes amounted to a banquet.
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
tells of plates of confectionery and salted fish;‘fleeced Gys’ in the
Boereverhaal
enjoys pickles, nuts, sprat, chestnuts, and almonds with his girl, fol- lowed by a plate of ‘turnip with knuckle of pork’ and for breakfast, after dancing all night, warm buns. In another music house they eat oranges and almonds, later there are mussels with sauce, later still potatoes with haddock, all washed down with great quantities of wine,

and for part of it the girl’s bawd joins them. It is Gys who has to pay for all this.The few references to food to be found in the Confession Books are quite astonishing too. In
1677
a prostitute says she ate ‘sev- eral codfish’ with a man.
122
In
1703
there is mention of an ‘oyster- house and bawdy-house’ and brothel-keeper Johanna den Hartog (Poxy Anna) once had
150
oysters brought in.
123
Oysters, which feature so prominently in paintings of brothels, seem to have been eaten in reality, too.

A man who spent several days with a prostitute might sometimes pay her by buying gifts. In
1686
Lijsbeth
R
iesenbrinck, who was with the same man from Friday to Monday in the whorehouse where she lived, received from him two gold rings ‘for the dishonest use of her body’.
124
One Sunday in
1737
Alida Tiken earned ‘the slippers she has on her feet’ by the same means.
125
This kind of arrangement enabled

both parties to pretend that what was going on was a relationship, not a business transaction. Business it very much was, however, and the women had ways of wheedling gifts out of customers. Lodewijck van der Saan tells us from his own experience that English prostitutes used the tactic of initially refusing to accept money from a client they sus- pected of being wealthy. Later they would ‘borrow’ money from him and start asking for presents: ‘What shall you give me; give me a pair of gloves.’
126

It is seemingly impossible to ascertain from this jumble of factors just what the income of a prostitute living in a whorehouse would have been. One indication of average earnings is the fact that ‘going halves’ was a normal arrangement, while three guilders a week was the standard price for board and lodging. If a whore needed to hand over three guilders a week or more, then she must have earned at least dou- ble that amount.The obvious assumption is that in the average whore- house a prostitute would generally have had a weekly income of six to eight guilders: less than six guilders would have meant the brothel- keeper was losing money; if she was earning more, the woman herself would not want to ‘go halves’ for long.These calculations are compli- cated by the fact that prostitutes might help their bosses to earn money by stimulating the demand for drinks, but the general conclusion is reinforced by a statement in court in
1728
by brothel-keeper Jacobus Klink, who said he had dismissed a prostitute because she was unable to earn him three guilders a week.
127
This would make a prostitute’s average weekly income roughly equal to that of a skilled worker in

Amsterdam and two to three times the amount a woman could earn by honest work. Out of that she had to pay the brothel-keeper, her debts, and other expenses.
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Prostitutes earned more in the seventeenth century than in the eighteenth. Sums mentioned in passing like those in a
1658
confession by Maddaleentje Tobias,‘to have slept with one man or another, some- times earning a ducat and sometimes less by carnal intercourse’ are hardly ever found in the century that followed.
128
Cornelia van Wijk, for example, caught with a man in the street in
1731
, said she ‘had done it from hunger and had been given only two tuppences for it’.
129

Sex for money

‘God’s word tells us that any act of copulation not intended for the begetting of children is a sin,’ wrote Lodewijck van der Saan. Every- thing else was lechery and ‘a fire from hell’.
130
Not everyone sub- scribed to such a strict interpretation of Scripture and even the
R
eformed Church taught that sex, within marriage at least, also served ‘to provide some moderate pleasure’, but the aim was to quell the flames of lust, not to fan them. The indulgence of fiery passions and any variation on standard sexual practices even within marriage were

considered ‘whoring’.
131
Both the church and the medical profession regarded coitus between a husband and wife, with the man lying on top, as the only natural and permissible form of sexual intercourse.
132

This tells us about sexual norms, but what actually happened is a dif- ferent matter. We know little about people’s sexual practices; in the sources, much that went on behind the bed-curtains remains hidden. Judicial archives tell us mainly about deviant behaviour that was subject to punishment, and within prostitution sexual acts may have departed from the norm. Still, this in itself can be informative: activities whores found unacceptable—or for which they charged a great deal of mon- ey—were no doubt regarded by everyone as beyond the pale.

From incidental remarks we can deduce that the sex engaged in by prostitutes usually took the form of coitus, lying or standing, with two people facing each other and still wearing most of their clothes. Contraceptive devices were not used; after about the middle of the eighteenth century men occasionally brought condoms with them, but these were intended to protect them against sexually transmitted

infections. The women accepted the risk of becoming pregnant and their clients the risk of impregnating them. A customer in fact had nothing to fear, because a whore could never win a paternity suit against him. Sex and pregnancy went hand in hand.The Italian prosti- tute described by van der Saan in his diary cries out during sex ‘
fasciate mi grande
’ (make me pregnant). Despite diminished fertility as a result of venereal disease, the Confession Books regularly mention pregnant prostitutes. It seems clients had no objection.

For the prostitutes the most important criterion seems to have been whether or not an act was felt to be natural. Masturbation was not. There is no mention of it until the mid-eighteenth century and it then seems to have been asked for, by ‘gentlemen’ especially, out of a fear of infection.
133
In
1771
Maria
R
eijts stated in court in The Hague that she had been approached by a gentleman in the Haagse Bos who did not wish to ‘know’ her:

But had tried with many arguments to persuade her to shake the seed out of him; that she had at first had much against this, since it seemed unnatural to her, yet she let herself be moved by the persuasions of that gentleman to put her hand to his manhood; that this proposition, to shake out the seed, has been put to her several times by others, yet she had never before wished to oblige them, because it appeared to her to be against nature.
134

Other prostitutes likewise emphasized that a client had been able only with difficulty to prevail upon them to perform such an act, for instance by arguing ‘that such a thing was not a sin, and that it was better than dying of hunger’.
135
Such justifications might be taken merely as pious words before the bench, were it not that the sincerity of the aversion to masturbation is reflected in the rates charged for it. For ‘shaking out the seed’, or ‘milking out’ or ‘hand catechism’ at least as much was paid as for coitus, sometimes twice the amount. Fellatio was considered far worse even than masturbation. It seems to have been extremely un- common. In
1784
a
40
-year-old man dressed in black turned up in the Haagse Bos, asking for ‘extremely filthy acts’. Arendje Storm, an older prostitute, went along with his proposal to ‘suck out his manhood in her mouth’, but she soon stopped: it made her violently sick.The man then ‘attended to himself ’ and gave her two shillings.
136
This is the only in- stance I have come upon and the woman’s reaction speaks for itself.

I have found no references in my sources to sodomy, the term used for anal intercourse. Neither do the Confession Books include any cases

of abuse of very young girls, although a number of stories, rumours, and accusations suggest there were occasional instances. In
1651
Marie- tje Beuckelaer,
11
years and
8
months old, claimed her mother had forced her to go to bed with a Scottish sailor, so she was now pregnant, and that she had been told her mother had received twenty-one guil- ders for it. In court, however,‘threatened with harsh words’, Marietje admitted this was all pure invention and that her aunt, with whom she lived and ‘who forced her to beg’, had instructed her to tell the story when asking for money ‘to move good people to pity’.
137
Those to whom she served up her tale were so shocked that they alerted the bailiff.

Within prostitution there was certainly a demand for young virgins. Dorothé Jans, sister of the bawd
R
ijkje Jans, was
14
years old in
1664
when a helmsman deflowered her. The girl said she had ‘screamed because the helmsman hurt her’; her sister brought her a saucer of wine, saying ‘be still, it will soon pass’. They bought clothes with the proceeds. A procuress subsequently offered
R
ijkje three ducatoons for permission to take Dorothé to The Hague for the benefit of a ‘very highly placed person’. Later his name is mentioned: Mijnheer van Sommeldijck. This suggests he was a member of the aristocratic van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family, one of the highest-ranking in the
R
epublic and close to the Oranges themselves.
138
Possibly she was again offered as a virgin, since according to an old literary tradition about prostitution, there were ways of losing your virginity more than once and thereby selling it more dearly.

The few such cases that came to court mostly involved girls who were fetched from other towns or taken from Amsterdam to liaisons elsewhere. In one case a client came from Utrecht to Amsterdam for the purpose.This suggests great caution and fear of discovery.The vic- tims were often girls who had run away from home, like Catharina Davits, or, like Dorothé Jans, belonged to families that engaged in pros-

titution. The organizers of these transactions were often notorious bawds like
R
ijkje Jans,‘Mother Colijn’, and Susanna Jans.

In
1722
Susanna Jans was accused of providing another forbidden

sexual service, namely flagellation.
139
The law did not expressly state that sadomasochistic practices were punishable offences, but prostitutes knew they were, as is clear from the tenacious manner in which broth- el-keeper Cornelia Posthoorn, alias Cee van Hoorn, insisted that the rods found under her bed were used merely for sweeping the

chimney.
140
The only court cases involving flagellation date from the
1720
s. It was in this period, as recounted during a trial in Leiden, that in the public barge bound for Amsterdam people talked openly of a ‘whipping house’ run by Dirk Pret and Ariaantje Loots in the Jan Vriessensteeg, where men, completely naked, their hands bound with red ribbons, had themselves lashed ‘on the buttocks by the whores with rods’. Dirk Pret and Ariaantje Loots had initially run a stylish brothel in Leiden, but after major campaigns against prostitution in that town in
1720
and
1721
they moved to Amsterdam.
141
There is no mention of them in the Amsterdam Confession Books.

In July
1725
one Guilliam Sweers was arrested at the very moment when, tied to a wall with garters, he was being flogged by two prosti- tutes. The house in which he was arrested was also in the Jan Vries- sensteeg.The preparations for this bout of flagellation had been going on for months. According to procuress Geertruij Jussan, an elderly candlemaker, Guilliam came every day, sometimes several times a day, to ask whether she had found any women for him yet. Geertruij had organized a flagellation session for him a year and a half earlier, and this time he wanted a blonde and a brunette and the blonde was to lash him ‘such that the blood ran down his body and it was far more biting than the previous time’. A room had to be rented and prepared; metal clamps were driven into the walls.

Sweers, apparently a ‘gentleman’ to judge by his ‘Japanese coat’ (a fashionable kimono-style housecoat), wig, dagger, and money, had promised the girls and the procuress two ducats each and twice as much if they acquitted themselves to his satisfaction.The sum, thirty or potentially sixty guilders, being ten or twenty guilders per prosti- tute, is so great and the organization so time-consuming that to- gether they prove that such an arrangement was regarded as highly exceptional. The prostitutes’ reactions suggest they regarded the whole business as ‘filthy’. Guilliam Sweers had produced written in- structions beforehand on how to flog him, in the form of a letter purportedly written by his family. The prostitute quickly gave the letter back, saying she did not want to read any further ‘because there was much godlessness in it’.
142
When Susanna Jans asked prostitute Maria Wessels to flog a Jewish client—Susanna had her put a ring on her finger because the man had specifically asked for a married woman—Maria refused the assignment, saying flogging was a job for the executioner.