The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (16 page)

Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
and

D’Openhertige Juffrouw

Both
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, which describes a guided tour through Amsterdam after dark, and
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
, the fic- tional autobiography of prostitute Cornelia, are prime examples of the misogyny that pervades this type of literature. In
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
the tone is set, as so often, by the frontispiece (Plate
6
), which shows a devil taking a fashionably dressed young woman by the arm and whispering in her ear. Two young men crawl in the dust at the harlot’s feet. One, at the front, is being dragged towards her on a chain by a second devil, while the other is held down by the first devil’s hoof planted firmly in his neck; the woman has her foot on the first man’s neck. In the background a third devil sits at the bedside of a woman dribbling into a pot; she is clearly lying in a ‘grease bed’, undergoing a

mercury cure for the pox. So the devil’s success is threefold: the whore is governed by him, the young men are vanquished and debased by him, and he can add the consequences of whoredom, venereal disease, to his list of achievements.

The message of
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
is further announced by its subtitle, which translates as:
Containing the Schemes and Tricks of which the Whores and Bawds Avail Themselves; as well as their Way of Life, Foolish Superstitions, and in General Everything that is Customary among these Dam- sels
. ‘The life of whores and bawds is full of deceit and falsehood,’ the book begins, and it goes on to illustrate this with countless examples in which they are portrayed as cunning, hypocritical, mercenary, cantan- kerous swindlers, their customers as featherbrained fools. Nothing posi- tive is said about any of the women depicted; even among themselves they fight, cheat, and swear. In a whorehouse all is fraud and delusion. The whores are painted mannequins that men would barely bother to look at but for their borrowed finery, and behind the attractive facade lie poison and putrefaction. Most dangerous of all are the music houses, since they are not self-evidently brothels. Sons of respectable families feel free to enter them, and even if initially they go in only for a few drinks, the sight of alluring women in an
ambiance
of music and alcohol will sooner or later deliver them up to a whore—which costs money:

How many have we not seen who have plundered their masters’ coffers for this reason, casually robbing their parents of anything they could lay hold on, and finally, even though they were children of distinguished people, going off to war as rogues, or being forced to leave for the East Indies.
56

The narrator’s guide and informant is the devil himself—who else could know so much about the abominable trade?—and they witness scandalous deeds and deceptions so appalling that even the devil pro- claims himself horiffied.

D’Openhertige Juffrouw
actually seems at first glance supportive of women. It is high time, the introduction opines, that a book about women was written by a woman, since men always write so negatively about them, usually because they have failed to find lovers and there- fore fling mud out of spite. The book even includes some apparently feminist passages, suggesting for example that women should have the same sexual freedom as men as a matter of principle and complaining that the laws have been made by men to the detriment of women.The anonymous author was almost certainly a man, however, and despite

his avowals of ‘feminism’ the book is imbued with misogyny. It draws attention to the many forms of deceit practised by women. In the in- troduction to volume ii, ‘Cornelia’ writes that she has received many angry reactions from women, but she dismisses them all as hypocrisy. Female chastity is, after all, a sham.The contrast between the scandal- ous deeds performed by women in the book and the ideas about women’s rights promulgated by the female narrator is no doubt in- tended for comic effect. Again the message is conveyed by the subtitle and the frontispiece. The Dutch title translates as ‘The Outspoken Damsel, or Hypocrisy Unmasked’; the English adaptation was pub- lished as
The London Jilt: or, the Politick Whore
. The print used for the frontispiece to the first volume depicts a woman looking into a mirror, applying cosmetics, and in volume ii the same woman sits counting her money, inspired by the devil behind her (see, p. ii). This second frontispiece was reproduced in
The London Jilt
.
‌
‌

Changes in the eighteenth century

Whores, so it was believed in the seventeenth century, had been led astray as a result of innate lewdness, a craving for luxury and beautiful clothes, a fondness for sweets, and above all by laziness. According to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
it is ‘almost exclusively girls of very low birth . . . , being too lazy to work’ and ‘the bedazzled, who, through their own sloth, and in the hope of living a voluptuous and carefree existence, allow themselves to be led so far from the path of virtue’.
57
The Englishman Joseph Shaw described in
1700
the whores in the Spin House as ‘women in whom Nature had overcome Education’ and went on to describe how, even from behind the bars of their jail, they would ‘charm and coax the fond, admiring and deluded gulls who know not the fatal Arts of women’.
58

Jacob Campo Weyerman’s
Den opkomst en val van een koffihuys nichtje
(
1727
) (The
R
ise and Fall of a Coffee-House Niece) tells the story of a foolish country girl whose career takes her in no time at all from much sought-after exclusive prostitute to miserable, diseased street whore. In fact there is no rise to speak of, since her fall begins symbolically as soon as she takes the boat from her village in North Holland (inno-

cence) to the big city of Amsterdam (depravity). Even before arriving she consumes all the food she has been given to take as presents to her

aunt and uncle. She betrays the young man forbidden to marry her to his parents, who then disinherit him. She steals money from her aunt. Her own lustful nature leads to her seduction by a soldier, with whom she conceives a child, and when he pays her off she immediately wastes the money on ribbons and bows. Her laziness, lasciviousness, and os- tentation, her sweet tooth, and her corrupt moral character in general make her a born whore. She is therefore no victim but entirely respon- sible for her own dismal fate, which she thoroughly deserves.
59

In popular literature, girls who embark on prostitution usually come to a bad end. Such a career, one author after another insists, is a miscal- culation, a poor investment. Weyerman’s ‘coffee-house niece’ is pre- sented as a girl who‘hankered after riches and ran into poverty,probably for lack of the required arithmetical skill’.
60
Only Cornelia, the ‘out- spoken damsel’, succeeds as a result of a hard business sense and shrewd calculation in ending up better off. She gets her lovers to buy annuities for her. Her own mother winds up in the gutter, however, after a life of whoredom—poor,‘scruffy and grimy’, and alcoholic.

From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, greater under- standing for prostitutes, sometimes even compassion, emerges in popu- lar literature.Catootje,a character in Franciscus Kersteman’s
De Bredasche heldinne
(
1751
) (The Heroine of Breda), is a foundling who becomes a lady’s maid to a rich but immoral woman. Unprotected by her mistress, she is easy prey. She allows herself to be seduced by an officer who abandons her when she becomes pregnant and, having no family to fall back on, she resorts to prostitution.
61
In
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
(
1775
) a girl is seduced and deserted by an unfaithful lover and then, pregnant, disowned by her family. The first-person narrator meets her in a bawdy-house and marries her. She turns out to be a decent per- son.
62
There is no mention in these texts of congenital wantonness, sloth, or avarice; the girls they feature are victims of bad example, se- duction, and a lack of family support. Almost a century later, in Jacob van Lennep’s five-volume novel
De lotgevallen van Klaasje Zevenster
(
1865
–
6
) (The Adventures of Klaasje Zevenster), we meet a prostitute whose behaviour seems even more excusable. Klaasje too is a foundling, but she is deceived by a procuress rather than seduced by a man. She manages to remain a virgin in the brothel but dies of shame.The nine- teenth century also saw the birth of the ‘whore with a heart of gold’.
63
In more directly factual accounts we again see abhorrence of pros- titutes gradually give way to compassion. A particularly interesting

source in this respect are the notes made by Lodewijck van der Saan while he was secretary to the Dutch embassy in London in
1696
–
9
. He called his notebook
Verscheyde concepten en invallen, aengaende myne ver-

beeteringe te soecken
(Various Concepts and Ideas
R
egarding How I May Mend my Ways). His entries were private, intended not for publication

but as a vehicle for self-examination.Van der Saan was in many ways typical of the Dutch middle class. A proponent of moderation in all things, he disliked both ‘great lords’ and the lower classes. Despite his sincerely held
R
eformed Church faith, he rejected all thought of God’s punishing hand; his outlook was rational, anticipating the Enlighten- ment. He was unmarried.
64

Van der Saan regularly writes about London prostitutes and he often feels sorry for them. Take Betty, for instance, a girl he knew when she worked at a theatre and later encountered as a street whore, ‘in a very poor, desolate state, without even a shirt to her name’. ‘Oh, how a bad upbringing may harm a youth,’ he sighs, but the girl’s fate is in some sense preordained: he has often watched her eating candy out of her pocket and now she ‘has fallen into a greater error’. Betty tells him she came from the countryside and found a job as a maidservant in London,‘where, hav- ing no good foundation, she was led astray by bad company, and learned to dance and so forth’. English harlots,Van der Saan writes, are ‘generally very fond of sweets, for their laziness and sweet tooth are the most com- mon reasons for their lapsing into that state and aberration’.Along with a fondness for candy and dancing, laziness, and seduction, he regards a de- fective upbringing as a major cause of their downfall.
65

Even hostile observers acknowledge that prostitutes are far from enviable creatures.
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
includes a graphic de- scription of the way prostitutes are daily obliged to drink themselves into such a stupor that ‘they have as much feeling for what men do to them as if they were made of wood, so that there are hardly any crea- tures more miserable than these whores’.Women kept in debt by their bawds ‘with this or that frippery’ are even worse off, since they are not allowed out of the house in daytime for fear they will run away. The writer adds a typical piece of seventeenth-century moralizing: ‘Judge then, whether it would not be better if they rolled up their sleeves and went to serve honest people [as maids], rather than casting themselves into such slavery through their execrable slothfulness.’
66

In
Vrolyke reis van een Engelschman door Holland
(
1796
) (Happy Jour- ney by an Englishman through Holland), Gerrit Paape, a revolutionary

and early feminist, holds forth for two full pages on the misery of pros- titutes, asking himself how in heaven’s name a woman could surrender herself to ‘such a life worse than slavery’. His answer runs:

Poverty! Seduction! Folly!—Oh, what terrible enemies you are to the youthful heart!—You sweep it before you; you carry it off; you blind it to the most visible dangers...The following day I had the opportunity to observe in the [Spin House] and later in the Plague House some of those nymphs who have grown decrepit and have fallen into the utmost misery.—Great God! How my heart sank here.
67

In the seventeenth century, judges showed little interest in the reasons why individual women became prostitutes, but in the eighteenth cen- tury they were increasingly likely to ask. Poverty was no excuse for prostitution.As late as
1752
Benedictus Carpzovius states in his
Verhan- deling der lyfstraffelyke misdaaden en haare berechtinge
(Discourse on Crimes Deserving Corporal Punishment) that ‘no whore is absolved from pun- ishment by the threat of starvation’.
68
Increasing attention was paid to poverty as a cause, however. In court more and more women said they had fallen into prostitution through poverty, even hunger. The eight- eenth century certainly brought harder times for the common people than the seventeenth, but such testimony also suggests that eighteenth- century judges were more sensitive to the poverty argument. After all, the stories people tell in court will always tend to emphasize those as- pects for which they think a judge will show understanding.

Empathy and compassion for our fellow man are timeless, and the most direct and sympathetic response I have come upon in the sources is that of Lodewijck van der Saan in
1697
:

Oftentimes in London I have watched with great pity how such beautiful and finely proportioned wenches were counted among those who had no good name, and the life into which they had fallen, mostly through poverty; in winter, when there was a very hard frost, I have watched them walk the streets for lack of fire and at last enter a coffee house or alehouse to warm themselves, to the detriment of their honour and good name. Then I thought, oh God, how much depends on a good upbringing and what shall such parents one day have to answer for, who have embellished the bodies of such sweet crea- tures of God but have not attempted to embellish their souls as well, to the honour of God and for their own benefit.
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