The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (27 page)

6
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‘Birds of a Feather Flock Together’: Prostitutes, Clients, and Seafaring

B

etween
1650
and
1750
,
5
,
784
people involved in prostitution ap- peared in court in
8
,
099
separate trials:
4
,
633
women as prostitutes,

898
women as bawds, and
253
men as brothelkeepers or whoremasters. In court they were asked to state their names, ages, birthplaces, marital status, and their trades or professions. During interrogation other details would often come to light about their lives, their pasts, and their back- grounds. Sometimes they spoke before the bench about their marriages and children, why they had moved to Amsterdam, or how they had ended up in prostitution.Around the turn of the eighteenth century, as court cases steadily became longer, more and more questions were asked, and more and more stories told. Many people were arrested more than once, so occasionally we can glimpse something of the course their lives had taken. Sometimes their exact words were written down and we can almost hear them speaking.

The life stories in the Confession Books are mostly fragmentary and when the accused cease to appear in judicial records they drop out of sight altogether. In this large city full of immigrants it is seldom pos- sible to identify them in those few sources that exist for ordinary peo- ple, such as registers of births, marriages, and deaths. Few surnames were in use among the common people; in the seventeenth century especially, a Christian name and patronymic often sufficed.Two out of every three women were baptized Maria, Anna, Johanna, Catharina, Elisabeth, or Margaretha (or went by the Dutch diminutives of these names: Marretje, Naatje, Jannetje, Trijntje, Lijsbeth, and Grietje), and

coupled with a similar paucity of male names, this produces so many women called Marretje Jans, Jannetje Dirks, or Trijntje Pieters that they are untraceable elsewhere.Within their own milieus they were no doubt identifiable as individuals by their aliases and nicknames, but to us they are largely anonymous. Nevertheless it is possible to paint a collective portrait of them, simply because so many were arrested, and to supplement the statistics with information from the stories told.
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Profile of prostitutes

The average age of women arrested as prostitutes was
23
in the second half of the seventeenth century and
24
years and
6
months in the first half of the eighteenth.The difference is attributable to a significant rise in the age of streetwalkers: in the decade
1670
–
9
they were on average
23
years old; fifty years later the average was
30
. Prostitutes in music houses and brothels were mostly aged between
19
and
24
throughout the period, they were on average
21
years old when they became prostitutes.
1

In the large music houses on the Zeedijk, such as De Fontein, De Pasthoorn, and Het Hof van Holland, the women tended to be even younger, but fewer than
10
per cent of all prostitutes brought to trial were under
19
and only a handful under
16
. The youngest girls were generally found in whorehouses run by their mothers or aunts. Four- teen-year-old Lijsbeth van Dijck, for example, was arrested in her mother’s brothel along with two older sisters who were also said to be living there as whores.
2
Among the youngest were girls who had run away from home; they must have been easy prey to procuresses. Catha- rina Davits, for example, was an Amsterdam orphan who had fled the house of her uncle and aunt when she was
13
, because, she claimed, they treated her badly. With a maid as her accomplice, she regularly returned (on one occasion through the skylight) to steal things, mainly food and sweets. She tried to find work and a place to live but with little success, and before long she fell into the hands of a bawd who had already ‘debauched’ several other girls. She was
15
years old when the older woman was arrested.
3

Fewer than
3
per cent of prostitutes admitted in court to being mar- ried; in the stories they tell, the husband was always absent, generally having run off, gone to sea, or died. We need to bear in mind the

severity of punishments for adultery and how easy it was to conceal marriages performed outside Amsterdam—more prostitutes would have been married than were willing to admit as much. A woman would frequently claim, on the other hand, that the man with whom she had been found was her fiancé.This was no doubt usually untrue, a lie inspired by the fact that sex ‘under promise of marriage’ virtually qualified as matrimonial intercourse, or at any rate would be punished as fornication rather than public whoredom.The man as a rule denied this. For example, the client who was pulled naked out of Johanna Christina Oxhuyse’s bed in
1737
and was described by her as the sweetheart she intended to marry said that on the contrary, he ‘had nothing to do with such a damned whore’.
4
One thing is clear: practi- cally all prostitutes lived as single women.

One in twenty prostitutes was recorded as being pregnant. They were not routinely asked about this but either it may have been obvi- ous or they may have volunteered the information in the hope of escaping a term in the Spin House.We have little information about their children.Those named are usually the illegitimate offspring that caused their mothers to become prostitutes in the first place. Often they had already died; sometimes they had been entrusted to the care of others, like the baby born to Lena Wilhelms of Herford in Ger- many, who was ‘deceived as a maid by a fellow servant’ when she was

1. She left her baby with her parents in her home town and moved to Amsterdam where she initially worked as a wet nurse. In
   1741
   she was arrested as a streetwalker on the cruising lane.
   5
   There is no evi- dence of contraception, and only rarely is any mention made of a mother with more than one child. The scant information available allows us to draw hardly any firm conclusions, but it is likely that the number of live children mothered by prostitutes was held in check by reduced fertility as a result of venereal disease. Contemporaries re- marked that prostitutes had little chance of getting pregnant, because ‘grass grows not upon the highway’, a saying that has equivalents in many languages.
   

   We are well informed about prostitutes’ places of birth, not only because this was a question always asked in court but because suspects generally had no reason to tell anything but the truth. Fewer than a quarter were born in Amsterdam and about half came from the Dutch
   R
   epublic, mainly from other cities in the provinces of Holland and Utrecht. Just over a quarter were from beyond the Dutch border,
   

   often from the coastal regions of northern Germany. A fair number were from Scandinavia or the Southern Netherlands, but only fifteen in total said they were English, seven from London. In the course of the eighteenth century the proportion of native-born Amsterdammers rose, yet even then most prostitutes had been born elsewhere (see Table
   6
   .
   1
   ).
   

   From
   1680
   onwards prisoners were routinely asked to state their livelihoods—or rather the trades they had learned, since most of those arrested were living by prostitution. Until
   1720
   more than a third said they were seamstresses (often
   linnennaaisters
   , specializing in linen un- dergarments) and a little under a third said they had been employed in textile manufacture, in most cases silk-winding, lacemaking, spinning, or knitting. Fifteen per cent were maidservants and the rest had worked in low paid jobs, often as cleaners, street vendors, tobacco-rollers, but- ton-makers, or turning the wheels that drove the grindstones in dia- mond workshops. After
   1720
   the number of textile workers among them fell and the number of servant girls rose.
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   Work, origins, and migration in context
   

   Were those arrested as prostitutes a separate group of dishonourable young women or a group of ordinary young women engaged in a deviant profession, temporarily or otherwise? There is no simple answer to this multifaceted question, but the collective biography of Amsterdam prostitutes offers a starting point. The list of trades (for- merly) engaged in by prostitutes roughly reflects the work opportu- nities in Amsterdam available to poor single females.The commonest means for a young unmarried woman to support herself was to be taken on as a live-in maid. In
   1742
   more than
   12
   ,
   000
   household servants were registered in Amsterdam, in
   1808
   more than
   13
   ,
   000
   , most of them female and single.
   6
   The statistics do not allow us to calculate the proportion of Amsterdam’s adult women who were maids, but in the city of Leiden in the mid-eighteenth century the proportion was
   18
   per cent, or more than a third of all single wom- en.
   7
   After maidservants, seamstresses were the second largest group, although we know even less about their exact numbers. Next came textile manufacture, which, like seamstressing, usually involved skilled or semi-skilled work.
   

   Those who ended up as prostitutes tended to be seamstresses and textile workers rather than maids. Maidservants lived in their employ- ers’ houses, were guaranteed bed and board, and were usually given a contract for a year.They were absorbed into the family or household and in theory enjoyed its protection. Those who worked outside the home had to put bread on the table and a roof over their own heads on a daily basis and were utterly dependent on the market.Their low wages made them vulnerable to economic setbacks. Still, dismissal put servants at particular risk, since they would be deprived of food and shelter from one day to the next and had often failed to put down roots in the neighbourhood or build up social networks.
   

   From the late seventeenth century onwards, the manufacture of linen and woollen fabrics moved to the countryside or to regions where wages were lower. Lacemakers, and those who sewed lace, saw demand for their work fall in the same period because of changes in fashion and after
   1720
   the silk industry in Amsterdam went downhill as well, which meant silk-winders were less in demand.
   8
   All this ex- plains to some extent the relative rise in the number of prostitutes who had been maids, as more women tried to secure jobs in service and the increased supply led to a rise in unemployment among them. Never- theless, maidservants remained far less likely to end up as prostitutes than other female workers.Those who said they were maids had usu- ally been in service at inns, or indeed brothels.
   

   In Amsterdam we have a unique opportunity to compare the geo- graphical origins of prostitutes to those of single women of about the same age in the form of prospective brides. A legally recognized wed- ding could take place either at the Town Hall or in one of the churches of various denominations, but all couples first had to register their forthcoming marriage centrally. Between
   1601
   and
   1800
   ,
   650
   ,
   000
   men and women signed the papers for a first marriage ‘at the red door’ as it was popularly known (red being the colour of the door to the registry office where this took place prior to
   1660
   ).The brides were asked to give their ages and places of birth, the bridegrooms (at least until
   1720
   ) their livelihoods as well.The personal details of the witnesses were also written down. These
   ondertrouwregisters
   are a unique source, one that has been used extensively in the study of migration and labour in Dutch social and economic history.
   

   Comparing brides and prostitutes means, roughly speaking, com- paring an honourable with a dishonourable group of young women.
   

   Those who married had succeeded in life; those whose names were recorded in the Confession Books as whores had failed. Some of the prostitutes, admittedly, will have been married and others might eventually marry—after all, the average bride was almost
   27
   , several years older than the average prostitute—but to contemporaries the distinction was clear and unambiguous.
   

   In the second half of the seventeenth century,
   85
   ,
   445
   brides ap- peared ‘at the red door’ and
   3
   ,
   149
   prostitutes before the bench (a ratio of
   27
   to
   1
   ), and in the first half of the eighteenth century there were
   93
   ,
   653
   as against
   1
   ,
   484
   (a ratio of
   63
   to
   1
   ).To avoid duplication, I com- pare the brides entering into marriage for the first time to prostitutes convicted of their first offence. The information available as to their origins renders up the percentages shown in Table
   6
   .
   1
   .
   

   The statistics suggest the prostitutes were mostly newcomers to the city, while the majority of the brides were Amsterdam-born.The ma- jority of the foreign-born prostitutes were from Germany:
   17
   per cent of the total in
   1650
   –
   99
   and
   20
   per cent in
   1700
   –
   49
   . In both periods,
   12
   per cent of all brides were German. A closer look at all immigrants shows that of immigrant brides, a relatively high proportion came from the countryside, whereas immigrant prostitutes tended to come from cities. There were, however, cities that produced relatively few brides but many prostitutes and others where the reverse was the case. In the second half of the seventeenth century,
   48
   ,
   516
   brides as against
   630
   prostitutes were born in Amsterdam, a ratio of
   77
   to
   1
   . At the other extreme, in Hamburg
   530
   brides and
   151
   prostitutes were born in the
   

   city, a ratio of
   3
   .
   5
   to
   1
   . Patterns emerge. Ports tended to have low bride–prostitute ratios: for example
   R
   otterdam (
   3
   .
   4
   to
   1
   ), Hamburg (
   3
   .
   5
   

   

   Table
   6.1
   

   1650–99 1700–49
   

   place of birth	brides	prostitutes	brides	prostitutes
   Amsterdam	57 %	21 %	62 %	28 %
   Dutch Republic outside Amsterdam	22 %	50 %	20 %	43 %
   Abroad	21 %	29 %	18 %	30 %

   to
   1
   ), Antwerp (
   6
   to
   1
   ) and Stockholm (
   8
   .
   8
   to
   1
   ). Even lower ratios are to be found in administrative (and court) capitals like The Hague (
   2
   .
   2
   to
   1
   ) and Brussels (
   1
   .
   8
   to
   1
   ).
   R
   iverside towns like Nijmegen (
   10
   .
   5
   to
   1
   ), and garrison cities such as Breda (
   4
   .
   4
   to
   1
   ) also supplied a rela- tively large number of prostitutes in proportion to brides.The highest ratios occurred in the countryside. For example the Frisian islands sent
   332
   brides to Amsterdam and
   4
   prostitutes, a ratio of
   84
   to
   1
   , and small
   ‌
   ‌
   

   inland towns had high ratios too, such as Amersfoort (
   32
   .
   5
   to
   1
   ) and Bentheim in Germany (
   32
   to
   1
   ). Based on these figures it is possible to speak of bride migration routes and prostitute migration routes, the more so because many of the immigrant women arrested for whoring had been prostitutes even before they arrived in the city. In the case of prostitutes, routes and birthplaces correspond with those of the sailors and soldiers in the marriage registers; the brides tended to have been
   

   born in regions from which families traditionally recruited maidserv- ants.
   R
   oughly speaking, therefore, brides and prostitutes did indeed represent distinctly different groups of young women.
   9
   

   A harlot’s progress
   

   Contemporaries thought of prostitutes as women from the lowest ranks of society, too lazy to work and badly brought up.Then there were way- ward girls from good families, the ‘born whores’, who were lustful and mendacious, lazy and excessively fond of sweets and finery.
   R
   egarding the numerical data as a collective biography, we can identify a number of risk factors, including being an immigrant, growing up in a city, espe-
   

   cially a port or a garrison town, and the absence of the financial and social protection that a husband or a family (including one that em- ployed them as a maid) could offer. From the stories told in court it appears unmarried motherhood or the loss of one or both parents could lead to prostitution, and that it was difficult for a girl who had a sister, mother, or aunt in the business to avoid becoming a prostitute herself.
   

   When asked in court about the causes of their whorish existence, women in the latter half of the seventeenth century usually said they had been seduced and subsequently betrayed by a man. He had slept with them under promise of marriage, the story often goes, then aban- doned them when they fell pregnant. They had been forced to leave their native districts to earn enough to support the child, entrusting it to
   

   the care of others. Some women said their fiancés had taken them to Amsterdam and settled them there on their own for the time being, sometimes even placing them in brothels, as was the case with
   19
   -year- old Lijsbeth de Groot from Maastricht in the south of the country, who ‘says she is engaged to be married and that her sweetheart is at sea and has delivered her to the house of Trijntje Jans on Kattenburg, it being a whorehouse’.
   10
   Catharina Driessen, a woman of the same age born in a village near Koblenz in Germany, described how she had been taken to Holland by her lover. He abandoned her in Amsterdam and sailed for the East Indies. She was arrested on the cruising lane in The Hague and sorrowfully explained that she ‘had fallen into that life through poverty, in a strange land without work’.
   11