The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (19 page)

In the eighteenth century prosecution policy changed.Whereas be- tween
1680
and
1700
only one-fifth of arrests for prostitution were of brothel-keepers, female or male, after
1720
this rose to half. Punish- ments became steadily more severe. From
1722
half of all organizers arrested were made to stand on the scaffold, where many were also publicly whipped. Often they would be fined as well.These were the penalties laid down in the
1580
statute. Particularly harsh sentences were imposed on bawds who had lured young girls into prostitution, caused disturbance to the neighbourhood, resisted arrest, or knowingly and willingly accepted married men or Jews as clients.The first brothel- keeper to be put on the scaffold, in
1706
, was a German woman, Lijs- beth Alberts Pol, who had held a Danish girl called Christina Jorse prisoner in her house and forced her to have sex with a Jew.
17

In the eighteenth century, prostitutes too were punished with longer prison sentences, but generally speaking those involved in prostitution in Amsterdam seem to have been let off fairly lightly compared to the rest of the Dutch
R
epublic. They were not displayed in a humiliating manner in a spinning cage, as they were for example in The Hague, and they were less likely to be arrested in the first place, according to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
,‘since in Amsterdam it is impossible simply to drive out all whores, as is done in other cities’.
18
R
otterdam, for example, had a stricter approach, as illustrated by the story of Catha- rina van Loo, who let slip during her interrogation in
1728
that she had moved from
R
otterdam to Amsterdam ‘because investigations into
‌
‌

whoredom are carried out somewhat more strictly in
R
otterdam than

here’.
19

For both prostitutes and bawds, imprisonment in the Spin House, even for a short time, was the most severe punishment, and the most feared.‘Spin House whore’ was a far worse term of abuse than ‘whore’. ‘Spin House cattle’ or ‘prison beasts’ had no hope of ever rejoining honourable society. Amsterdam’s Spin House was an institution of great symbolic importance, not just for prostitutes but for all women.

The Spin House as symbol and reality

The Spin House was founded in
1597
as a workhouse for female paupers and beggars, but it was also used to accommodate those arrested in the now forbidden brothels.
20
Initially it was housed in the former Saint Ursula Convent on the corner of the Oudezijds Achterburgwal and the Spinhuissteeg. After that building burned down (in a fire said to have been started by prisoners as part of an escape attempt), a new Spin House was built on the same spot in
1645
. The purpose of the Spin House was to use forced labour to teach women discipline and a trade, as is clear from the motto by the Amsterdam poet and burgomaster Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft that can still be seen above the entrance:

Schrik niet. Ik wreek geen quaet: maer dwing tot goet
.
Straf is myn hant: maar lieflyk myn gemoet
.

This translates as:

Fear not. I avenge not evil: but compel to good. Severe is my hand: but kindly is my mood.

The Spin House quickly developed into a prison. The ‘New Work- house’, founded in
1654
for men and women caught begging, was also a place of involuntary incarceration, but unlike the Spin House it did not confer dishonour.To contemporaries this made a huge difference. For an entrance fee of two stivers the public could visit the Spin House and watch the prisoners at work on the second floor, peering through wooden bars into what became known as the ‘great cage’.
21
(Plates
8
,
9
,
10
) It was this fact of being on public view that made a stay in the

Spin House and the
R
asp House such a disgrace.

Work in the Spin House initially consisted largely of spinning, but

later the women were mostly engaged in needlework.The name ‘Spin House’ was retained, appropriately, since spinning was archetypal women’s work throughout Western Europe and the spinning wheel was a symbol of feminine virtue and domesticity. A popular eight- eenth-century print showing women spinning in a Spin House has the caption:

Lecherous, lascivious women

Are brought here and set to spinning.

This can be interpreted in two ways, firstly that prostitution is punish- able by imprisonment, secondly that whores will be transformed into virtuous women by being made to adjust to their proper place in life. This was indeed very much the aim of an institution that, in the words of Tobias van Domselaer’s description of Amsterdam, was founded ‘to

tame females who had run wild’.
22
John Evelyn, who visited the
R
epublic in
1642
, referred to the Spin House approvingly as a place where

‘incorrigible and lewd women are kept in Discipline and Labour’.
23
The new Spin House of
1645
, with its classical architecture, its im-

posing, ornate facade, and its entrance laden with symbolism, was a showpiece among the public institutions of Amsterdam (Plate
2
). It was seen as testament to wise governance and good provision by the municipal authorities. Contemporaries often commented on the beau- tiful exterior of the Spin House and pointed out the contrast between the attractive (and clean) exterior of the building and its ugly (and filthy) content. This new building, writes Philipp von Zesen, of Ger- man extraction, in his
Beschreibung der Stadt Amsterdam
(
1664
) (Descrip- tion of the City of Amsterdam) ‘is so splendid that one would rather think it a hostelry for princesses than a home for such contemptible wenches’.
24
In a phrase much repeated in travel guides and travelogues,

the Spin House was described as seeming ‘more like a palace than a prison’.
25

The Spin House was designed to take a maximum of eighty pris- oners. In his
Beschrijvingen der wijdtvermaarde koop-stadt Amstelredam
(
1662
) (Descriptions of the Widely
R
enowned Mercantile City of Amsterdam) Melchior Fokken writes that there were usually between seventy and eighty women, and a century later, in May
1765
, official historian of the city Jan Wagenaar personally counted sixty.
26
Accord-

ing to the prison records, from
1678
to
1725
there were on average forty-five women in the Spin House at any one time.
27
Thousands of people a year came to see the imprisoned women on display; it was a prominent tourist attraction, but a visit to the two houses of correc- tion (the other was the
R
asp House for men) was a popular form of entertainment for Amsterdammers as well, especially during the Sep- tember fair, when the entrance fee was waived.
28
Accounts written in

the
1760
s show that during the fair the women in the Spin House held festivities of their own, drawing enthusiastic crowds by dancing in the courtyard.
29

Most women were there for theft, violence, multiple violation of banishment, or more often a combination of these offences plus recidi- vism.
30
The prostitutes were in a minority; most years fewer than ten prostitutes and a handful of brothel-keepers were sentenced to terms in the Spin House and several of them would have been primarily thieves rather than prostitutes. The prisoners were generally from the poorest strata of the population, even the criminal underworld, and from
1678
to
1725
their average age was over
28
.
31
Tourists, however, regarded the women’s prison simply as ‘the Spin House for whores’.
32
It was the main place in the city where people could observe prosti- tutes, or apparent prostitutes, at close hand and without censure.

Visitors expected to see attractive ‘ladies of pleasure’ but, as will be clear by now, they were often disappointed. In
Het wonderlyk leeven van ’t Boullonnois hondtie
(
1681
) (The Miraculous Life of the Little Dog from Boulogne) we read:

This house [has] the name throughout the Low Countries that there are wonders to be seen in it and that it is full of delightful young misses, and meanwhile one often sees there nothing but a bunch of poxy creatures, who give off such an oppressive smell that one has barely climbed the stairs that lead to the room where they are disciplined before one requires to hold one’s nose.
33

Von Zesen too writes about the ‘awful stink’ the women gave off and Fokkens calls them ‘prison beasts’, saying one would fall in love with them ‘as a dog the cudgel’. Several French travellers complained that only ugly women were to be seen in the Spin House and an Englishman noted that many of their faces bore the marks of syphilis.
34

Only for a short period around
1700
were young prostitutes, ar- rested in the popular music houses, sent to the Spin House on any- thing like a regular basis.There they were put on show in their beautiful clothes and finery. After they had served their sentences their outfits were confiscated. The Spin House as a warehouse for prostitutes was largely a myth, although a significant one since it served above all as a warning to others, demonstrating what happened to women who mis- behaved. Conversely, women who misbehaved were quickly labelled whores.

The expectation of seeing a large number of prostitutes in the Spin House often made a deeper impression than what people actually saw with their own eyes, but visitors were not merely victims of self- delusion. Many people played along, including the guides and ward- ers who would tell the traditional stories for a fee, but first and foremost the women themselves. It was customary for prisoners to hold a dish out to visitors through the bars ‘to collect a bit of pin- money’, which could be spent on extras in prison.
35
The women begged from visitors, the visitors came to see whores, so it was in the prisoners’ interests to pose as prostitutes. This led to some truly the- atrical performances. In
1667
a young Swedish doctor called Urban Hjärne was addressed by a prisoner who started talking loudly about ‘their old love’ and about his child, whom he must not desert, asking him for money. Startled, he gave her a few stivers and left, to laughter all round. A century later little had changed. The German female traveller mentioned above observed that well-dressed visitors were asked for money by the prisoners and, if they refused, were subjected to a barrage of loud reproaches that on previous occasions—in other words in the brothel—they had been more generous.
36
In
Het wonder- lyk leeven van ’t Boullonnois hondtie
a young visitor to Amsterdam from Dordrecht is ‘recognized’ by a ‘whore’ in the Spin House as a former client. She comes out with all sorts of details, to the great amusement of his companions, and the man is so embarrassed that he wishes the ground would swallow him up. It then emerges that one of his ‘friends’

has bought her cooperation for two shillings and instructed her on what to say.
37

All this led to some far from elevating scenes, which were nonethe- less relished by contemporaries. A German, Johann Grimm, wrote in his
1775
travel account:‘I’ve never had . . . so much fun for two stivers in my whole life. Now that’s what I call a menagerie worth seeing!’
38
Men were sometimes greeted with filthy language and obscene ges- tures, and the imprisoned women for their part were exposed, in the words of the English traveller Joseph Shaw,‘to the view and gibes of the scoffing and deriding crowd who spared them not’.
39
In
1692
four young Amsterdam men, among them a notary’s clerk, were heavily fined for violent behaviour, for threatening the ‘father’ of the Spin House, and for using ‘obscene language’—they had pointed at the prisoners and shouted ‘that they had let themselves be used by dogs’. It was the second time in a week that the group had created uproar like this in the Spin House, and apparently it was not only in Amsterdam that they did so, since one of them, the clerk, declared ‘that he had been chased out of the Spin House in The Hague with an ash-shovel, and that he hoped to have the honour of being chased out of here with the tongs’.
40

In the seventeenth century few people felt any pity for Spin House whores.The women were laughed at and verbally abused. German visi- tors, for instance, sometimes subjected them to crude insults, calling them cattle, dung-finches, sows, or bumblebees.
41
In the eighteenth cen- tury many people, especially on the upper rungs of society, began to feel increasingly uneasy about watching the scenes that unfolded during vis- iting hours at the Spin House. If in the seventeenth century members of the elite focused their loathing on the convicted women, in the eight- eenth century they gradually came to feel loathing and shame towards the boorish behaviour of the general public that clamoured to watch the prisoners and the often unedifying responses elicited from the women behind bars. By the second half of the eighteenth century, many regarded punishment on the public scaffold—and the response of the populace to it—with mounting distaste and unease. At the same time the idea that exposing offenders to public humiliation would improve their behaviour and deter others was steadily losing ground.
42

The increasing aversion of the rich and influential to the manners and entertainments of the lower orders is indicative of a growing gulf between elite culture and popular culture in early modern Europe.
43
The feelings of the elite towards the music houses went through a