The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (17 page)

Here van der Saan points to poverty as a cause of prostitution, but more often he blames the lack of a good upbringing, another factor that was given increasing emphasis in the eighteenth century.

In the second half of the eighteenth century we find not only compassion for prostitutes but outrage at their fate, and for the first time since the Middle Ages there are calls for them to be helped.
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This did not lead as yet to the founding of asylums for ‘fallen women’ or any other kind of public assistance, but it may have encouraged private and discreet aid. Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken’s fictional char- acter Abraham Blankaart saves a girl from a brothel and finds her an honest job. In the real world, occasional examples of such acts of kindness come to light, one being the story of Angenietje Luit, a Catholic girl born in Amsterdam, who was arrested in The Hague as a streetwalker in
1795
at the age of
17
. The court did not pass sen- tence but sent her back to Amsterdam after providing her with clothes and a letter of recommendation for a priest and the Catholic orphanage. The priest gave her some money and helped to find a place for her in domestic service.Two years later she was arrested on the streets of The Hague for a second time. She was asked ‘whether she did not admit to having scandalously frustrated, by her licentious behaviour and wantonness, the charitable efforts employed in an at- tempt to improve her?’What could she possibly offer ‘by way of ex- tenuation’? Angenietje excused herself with stories of mistreatment by her employer, illness, and poverty.
71

Ambivalence towards prostitution remained.Although abuses were denounced, sensationalist stories were still popular. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, many of the older books were reprinted, including
The Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, and although in new popular literature there was greater understanding, more personal concern, more sympathy than before, it was always mixed with horror and condemnation. The author of
De Hollandsche Faam, vliegende over de Amsterdamsche kermis
(
c
.
1785
) (Dutch Fama, Flying over the Amster- dam Fairground) pities the prostitutes yet scoffs at them too, con- fronting them with their own miscalculation. Ultimately, whoredom does not pay:

And you, miserable creatures, how can I regard you, being of the weaker sex, if not with compassion? How you shall be despised, after the short-lived enjoyment of your whorish love, by he who so recently loved you! Pitiable is your state! Contemptible are your deeds! And misbegotten the means by which you live! For once grey and decrepit a strumpet is generally no more rich than she is virtuous! That is to say often completely denuded of both virtue and resource!
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Thirty years later the physician C. J. Nieuwenhuis would write about women in a music house that ‘the impartial observer does not know whether to pity the unfortunate creatures or despise them’.
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The female perspective

The vast majority of authors and all clergymen, doctors, policemen, and judges were men, and among them condemnation of prostitution and compassion for whores were sometimes clouded by feelings of attrac- tion. In the few surviving comments by women this element is entirely lacking, but some do express an uneasy sense of identification and em- pathy.A woman’s point of view is found in the painting
The Proposition
(
1631
) by Judith Leyster (Mauritshuis, The Hague, where it is cata- logued as ‘Man offering money to a young woman’) (Plate
7
). She was the only female painter to contribute to the popular Dutch genre of ‘brothels’, ‘proposals’, and ‘procuresses’ and one of the very few not to present the women as richly clad harlots in low-cut dresses making eyes at men with such obvious relish as to undermine the admonitory sym- bolism. Leyster portrays a serious-looking, modestly dressed girl bent over her needlework while a man leans towards her proffering money. The interior is sober, the woman’s clothing is simple, and the man is depicted—again unusually for the genre—as in all likelihood a sailor. This brings the scene much closer to reality than the pictures of willing women in luxurious interiors painted by male artists. There is also a reversal of roles; in this exchange of money for sex, the woman is not the initiator, neither is the man her deluded victim.
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Few women wrote about prostitution, but not because it was forbid- den territory to ladies of the period.Women were among the tourists who visited the music houses and the Spin House. A German middle- class woman who travelled to the Dutch
R
epublic on her own in
1765
, for business and pleasure, had no qualms about visiting the Spin House to look at the prisoners and chatting with one of them, and afterwards walking through the district where whores plied their trade,
damit sie davon reden könnte
(so she would be able to speak of it). The man ac- companying her even used her as a shield against prostitutes who at-

tempted to fondle him.
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A report of such an outing written by a woman is a rare find. Another example is the diary of
21
-year-old Aafje Gijsen, a girl from a wealthy middle-class family in the Zaan district north of

Amsterdam. In October
1774
Aafje went to Amsterdam for the weekend, along with her brother and a group of friends of both sexes. On the Saturday night they visited six music houses in the space of four hours. Their motive was the same as that of many other tourists: curiosity.

At
11
o’clock the carriage came back, since we were to go to the music houses, where I had never been before, though I had sometimes desired to see that life, which, now that I have seen it, appears to me very horrible and dis- tressing.We arrived back at our lodgings at three in the morning, having been to six music houses.

Like the first person narrator of the
Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, Aafje has been cured of her curiosity, but her reaction betrays more empathy with the women in the music houses than is usual in such accounts.
76

Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken wrote several epistolary novels featur- ing seductions, rakes, and music houses. In their
Historie van den heer Willem Leevend
(
1784
–
5
) (The Story of Mr William Leevend), for ex- ample, one of the characters says after a visit to a music house:‘My soul is utterly filled with horror, with disgust; my heart is like ice if it does not thump with outrage at the hateful sight of these stains upon wom- ankind—upon mankind, I should say.’
77
In
Brieven van Abraham Blankaart
(
1787
–
9
) the protagonist Blankaart (his name means ‘decent character’) is out for a walk when he hears a group of people talking in indignant tones about a
16
-year-old girl who has just arrived in Amsterdam by barge to look for a job as a maid, but has been taken to a music house by someone on the lookout for such girls. One of them says,‘It’s an of- fence to God! The authorities should take better care; these dens should be rooted out and burned down! . . . I could tear those cattle to pieces with my teeth; I too have a daughter’. Much affected by this, Blankaart goes in search of the girl and finds her that same evening, just in time. She is still in the office with the ‘mama’,‘a thoroughly rotten creature’, but men are already flocking around the newcomer.‘I stamped my feet in fury,’ says Blankaart, ‘to see such a defenceless, naïve child on the point of being offered up to beastly lust and utter depravity.’ He man- ages to take the girl away with him, after threatening to alert the bailiff. The excuse offered by the woman in charge—‘Sir knows well enough that such houses must exist’—provokes a further outburst of rage. He goes on to find the girl a job as a children’s nurse.
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Blankaart’s opinions were undoubtedly shared by his creators, Wolff and Deken, who demanded chastity from women and men alike and

were opposed to the toleration of prostitution. Their compassion for prostitutes was confined to an understanding of the causes of their down- fall: seduction by unscrupulous libertines, the girls’ upbringing, and the general circumstances of their lives.The women themselves, in one book described as ‘the many debauched creatures who spread their depravity daily through all districts of the city’, evoked a powerful aversion in the authorial duo.
7
9
Given her own personal history Betje Wolff may have responded with conflicting emotions. As a teenager from a good family she had eloped with a soldier, but they did not marry. An offer of mar- riage from an elderly clergyman saved her reputation, and her husband gave his witty and articulate wife the freedom to become a writer. Some of the novels she wrote with Aagje Deken are still read to this day.
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The male perspective

In theory fornication by men was as much to be condemned and pun- ished as fornication by women, but in practice men were given a good deal more latitude. Unmarried men who visited prostitutes had little to fear from the police. There were occasional appeals for the same demands of chastity to be made of men as of women, but such attacks on double standards were not the fashion.
80
Steven Blankaart, for ex- ample, a physician and the author of a book on venereal diseases called

Venus belegert en ontset
(
c
.
1685
) (Venus Beleaguered and
R
elieved), com- plains that ‘he who acts honourably is a Joseph, a green lad, a fellow

incapable of holding his own in the world’.

This is not to say that men had free rein or that visiting prostitutes was widely regarded as acceptable. First and foremost, it tarnished a man’s reputation.‘Whore-walker’ (
hoerenloper
) was a term of abuse; one woman who attacked a man in a neighbourhood quarrel by calling him ‘the most defamatory names, such as scoundrel, villain, damned whore-walker’ received a beating at his hands.
81
Just as a whore was not simply a prostitute, a ‘whore-walker’ was not simply a client. A man’s moral and economic ruin—the rake’s progress—began with disobedience to his parents, followed by association with whores, thievery, and finally the gutter.
82
In the popular penny print
Urbanus en Isabel
a man quarrels with his wife, steals money and property from her cupboard, and gives away her pearl necklace to ‘an infamous whore’. Isabel divorces him, at which point Urbanus

Tormented by passionate cravings Spends on whores all his last savings

He goes to rack and ruin, but eventually his wife forgives him and he mends his ways.
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Whereas the medieval church had preached that a man who mar- ried a whore restored her honour, people were now taught precisely the opposite.‘He who takes to himself a whore becomes a blackguard, or was already one,’ say the parents of the first-person narrator of
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
when he asks for their permission to marry his pregnant girlfriend, a former prostitute.‘They would much prefer to see me leave for the East Indies than enter into such a marriage, for by so doing I would shame the entire family which, despite some rather lowly members, has always been composed of honest folk.’
84
Often a family did all it could to prevent a son marrying a whore or a bawd, in order to preserve its honour and good name, and it might successfully appeal to the authorities.

One of the many warnings to be found in sea shanties goes:

Whether here or in monkey land Keep the whores far from your hand.
85

Some men took this literally and prostitutes were frequently sworn at, shoved, or slapped by the men they approached. A girl from Danzig called Margriet Jansen, for instance, described in
1743
how, on the single occasion (or so she claimed) that she stood at the door of a whorehouse to attract customers, a man gave her a clip round the ear.
86
That same year Jacoba Beems, a streetwalker of
46
, grabbed a man by the coat-tails as he stood urinating against the wall of the Town Hall and said:‘Sweet little dog, are you there, I shall earn some coffee money from you.’ He responded by cursing her (‘damned whore’) and hitting her with his stick.
87

The attitudes of other men, or perhaps the same men on other occasions, were more equivocal, as demonstrated by Lodewijck van der Saan’s notes. He condemns sex outside marriage on principle. A whore’s love is mere illusion, and a decent and sensible man will stay away from prostitutes altogether:

If carnal intercourse between the two sexes does not take place according to the laws and for a good purpose, and with intelligence, then there is no differ- ence between their doings and those of the animals. The love of whores is

quite the reverse, being nothing but false, illusory love and based on mere greed. . . . A pure and discerning person will not easily allow himself to be won over by whores, especially if he earnestly reflects upon the foul nature of the object and upon the deed, and considers that it is a stinking pit covered with flowers (pretty garments). . . . If men thought about these things aright, they would surely not so lightly resolve to pursue them.

He speaks with obvious distaste of the ‘very salacious and lustful men’ he frequently sees in England, ‘who pursue wenches like fat bulls or steers’, harassing women as they walk alone in the street and addressing them in the manner of ‘whore-hunters’.
88

This combination of moral censure, deep distaste, and compassion for women, even if they are prostitutes, involves that other complicating factor: attraction. Van der Saan has had experiences of his own with prostitutes. As with an acquaintance of his—who compares whores to ‘stinking cheese and rotten cheese’ and yet has eaten of that cheese— van der Saan’s own fascination sometimes outweighs his aversion. He describes how in
1694
he almost allowed himself to be tempted by a woman who came to sit next to him at an inn in Altona near Hamburg. She drank wine with him and started to caress him. After the fourth rummer of wine he took his leave and paid the exorbitant drinks bill.‘I thought it better to pay
36
stivers than
3
guilders, and in addition to commit a sin and take the risk of acquiring a . . . into the bargain.’