The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (31 page)

Despite the sometimes glittering facade, those who lived by prosti- tution were essentially poor. They placed all their hopes in that one customer from whom a large amount of money could perhaps be earned, that one major deal they might get a chance to pull off, which they would remember in detail for years to come even though they usually spent the proceeds in no time. Fortuna, or Lady Fortune, was a powerful goddess, as popular literature and especially the picaresque novel emphasized. She decided whether a drunken burgher with money in his pocket would enter a particular whorehouse and whether a rich milksop would fall in love with a particular whore.
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
makes fun of brothel-keepers and prostitutes for their superstition: ‘There are no people in the world who are so superstitious, or can be made to believe stranger and more unnatural things.’ Clients with money (‘good people’ as they were called) could be lured by leaving candles untrimmed or by laying fresh horse dung behind the door.
7

Pre-industrial businesses, and indeed public institutions like orphan- ages and prisons, were usually organized as households: a married cou- ple acted as father and mother (and were even referred to as such) and employees or inmates took the role of their children.This was no less true of the prostitution trade, as indicated by various terms for brothels

such as ‘whore household’ and ‘dishonourable household’.
R
elation- ships within a whorehouse mirrored those of a family. Bawds might
‌

refer to their prostitutes as ‘daughters’ or ‘children’. ‘Mother Colijn’, ‘Mama Lafeber’, ‘Grandma’, and ‘Mama Engelbregt’ were all women who ran brothels in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centur- ies. Oddly it seems to have been the more notorious bawds who were given nicknames like these.
8

There were other ways too in which a brothel resembled a normal household. Any whorehouse with more than one bawd and one pros- titute in a single room would employ a maid to clean, shop, light the fire, and if necessary cook. For needlework a seamstress would come in the daytime or even stay for a short period; for confinements there would be a midwife, and after childbirth or in case of illness a nurse. These women would often be occasional, former, or future prostitutes, but custom gave them plausible excuses for use in court. Marrij Cor- nelis, for example, was arrested in an ‘infamous whorehouse’ but ‘said she had come there because she was the child’s godmother and had stayed to eat’.
9
Hester Cordua admitted that she had lived in a whore- house for several days, but said she had been paid to slice and conserve string beans and hang up the washing.
10
In a brothel in the Servetsteeg, Clara Willems had merely ‘fetched some live coals for the fire’, and Grietje Mijers contended that she had been in a whorehouse only because the woman in charge, a German like herself, had asked her to write a letter.
11
True or not, these stories give an impression of the activities that went on in whore households.

Terms of employment in prostitution

Women who lived in brothels or music houses handed over all or part of their earnings as well as their freedom but were given shelter, food, and protection in return.They placed themselves under the authority of a bawd, with whom they made an agreement known as an accord (
akkoord
). Negotiation was on a case-by-case basis; it was not unknown

for prostitutes in the same whorehouse to have different arrangements, or for the terms of an accord to be altered after a while. Just as in the regular economy, a prostitute might receive cash in hand when the agreement was sealed. The interrogation of brothel-keeper Anna Jans in
1695
provides evidence for this. She admitted having taken on An- netje Elias to work in her brothel while Annetje was still in the Spin House, and to having given her three guilders to seal the accord, the same sum as the usual ‘hiring shilling’ for a maidservant.The negotia- tions took place during visiting hours at the Spin House and the bawd presumably handed Annetje the money through the bars.
12

As regards board and lodging there were two basic arrangements. One required the prostitute to pay three to four guilders a week for living expenses; beyond that she was allowed to keep all her earnings from prostitution. The other arrangement was that in exchange for food and shelter the girl would give half her earnings to her bawd.This was called ‘going halves’ (
op het halfje zitten
), and both the expression and the custom persisted until the late twentieth century.
13
Prostitutes might also have to pay a shilling a week for the maid; according to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
they would otherwise have to help clean the house on Fridays and Saturdays.
14
It was not unusual for a woman to live at an inn or whorehouse as a maid for the normal wage of thirty guilders a year but to serve as a prostitute when the opportunity arose, giving the brothel-keeper half her earnings.This meant she was there, to use the terminology of the time, as
meid en meisje
(maid and wench).

Experienced prostitutes and those who could command a high price preferred to pay a fixed sum for board and lodging so that they could keep the bulk of the profits.This also meant their brothel-keeper would have less incentive to pressure them into picking up men and maximizing the amount of food and drink consumed. Women who ‘went halves’ ran the risk of becoming alcoholics and of being mis- treated if they refused clients.They were also more closely watched, as Margaretha Arents Groenedijk found out in
1678
when she came to blows with her bawd outside the door of the whorehouse over a rix- thaler (a coin worth
2
.
5
guilders) that she had earned and quickly hidden in her stocking. It was this fight that led to her arrest.
15

Prostitutes who were independent and lived alone were able to keep all their earnings, but they bore all the expenses and attendant risks and had to find clients themselves. In some music houses, lone prostitutes

had to pay an entrance fee. It was in fact rare for them to operate com- pletely on their own; the more upmarket among them usually had maids, while a streetwalker would often have a female comrade to stand lookout and a few were accompanied by men, who kept tabs on the situation from a distance. Naturally, all such persons had to be paid.

The system of fetching whores involved its own set of financial arrangements. Prostitutes do not seem to have paid the women in charge of the whorehouses they visited, who must presumably have been satisfied with the profits on food and drink sold to men who might otherwise have gone to other brothels. They did however pay their own bawds for the ‘freedom’ to go elsewhere, and from the infor- mation we have, the cut seems to have been
10
per cent. A prostitute would also give a tip of
10
per cent to the person who fetched her, usually a maid but sometimes the brothel-keeper’s daughter or a girl from the neighbourhood. This was called ‘tuppence in the guilder’. A fetched whore who testified in
1741
that the fixed rate for this serv- ice was tuppence ‘and that they do not give more if they are fetched from another house’ thereby also provides evidence that in her day the usual payment for sex in such circumstances was a guilder.
16
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That
10
per cent was a fixed rate is also confirmed by
Het Amster- damsch Hoerdom
, which states that this percentage was adhered to ‘as if it were an imperial decree’.
17
This would mean that a prostitute was allowed to keep
80
per cent of her earnings from being fetched, mak- ing such an outing quite lucrative. No wonder, then, that bawds used the possibility as an incentive. Geertruy Thomas, for example, prom- ised a girl ‘that she would recommend her, and that she would be fetched to other houses’.
18
In
1700
Lijsbeth Pieters gave her brothel- keeper’s daughter gifts, so that ‘she would come to her when a fetched whore was called for’.
19

Debt

Debt is a constant theme in the history of prostitution. Perhaps even more than hunger and poverty, it emerges over the centuries as one of the main reasons why women become prostitutes and find it hard to stop.
20
Early modern Amsterdam is no exception. A brothel-keeper had connections that enabled her to acquire clients and make sure they

actually paid, but her most important assets were financial. An impor- tant distinction between a bawd and a whore was that the former had money or credit, and the bond between the two was often that of debtor and creditor. A bawd could rent a house, provide food and clothing, lend money, or take over existing debts. She was also in a position to offer help: a pregnant woman could give birth in her house, a sick woman could be nursed there, an unemployed woman could bridge the gap until she found work—but sooner or later they would each have to pay by means of prostitution.

Life as a prostitute often began with the running up of debts for clothing and finery. Beautiful clothes were a requirement of the job, but they were extremely expensive—even a second-hand satin skirt might cost ten guilders or more—so debts incurred in this way took a great deal of effort to pay off. Many prostitutes were forced to part with most of their earnings; young and inexperienced girls often kept almost nothing. In
1746
Antonia Slingeland, for example, was ‘going halves’ with her bawd, but in reality she handed over everything she earned to pay off instalments of her debt plus the weekly shilling for the maid.
21
Her bawd was Alida Brakel, who, seven years earlier when she was still working as a prostitute, had tricked men into falling into the hands of the corrupt deputy bailiff (Chapter
5
); she ran a tobacco shop as a cover for her bawdy-house.

We may wonder how bawds kept track of these debts, given that many, perhaps most, could not write. Literacy among Dutch women in the province of Holland was relatively high, but prostitutes and broth- el-keepers were often immigrants.
22
They may have used a simple sys- tem of marks to keep tally, as shown in sixteenth-century brothel paintings.
23
Some information about their basic administration is found in the Confession Books. Brothel-keeper Lena Gerrits, interrogated in
1737
about a girl who gave birth in her house, said she had ‘recorded on the slate the money [the girl] had earned, and had then subtracted from it the amount advanced to [her] against the expenses of her con- finement, and that the rest had been spent on clothes for the girl’s back’.
24
Men tended to have more advanced writing skills, and the few pieces of written evidence in court are usually in a man’s hand. In
1742

a small ledger was found in the possession of Pieter
R
ibbens, paramour of brothel-keeper Anna
R
oos, containing the names of the women who had lived in that house, with ‘all the sums each of the whores has

against her name’ and ‘lists of garments bought,. . . paid for from wages

earned by whoredom’. Pieter was a ‘sheet-writer’ by profession, mean- ing he would write letters or other documents for a fee per page, as advertised by a sign hanging outside his house and another at the Amsterdam stock exchange.
25

The debts mentioned in the Confession Books range from around six to a hundred guilders. In the years
1692
–
4
, for instance, debts of nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twenty, thirty, forty, forty to fifty-seven, fifty, and eighty-seven guilders were recorded. In
1658
Elsje Schreuders owed eighteen guilders for her confinement and maternity care; sums of thirty-seven and forty guilders are specified as debts for mercury treatments for venereal disease that women had undergone.
26

Debts of this magnitude meant that bawds had power over their prostitutes and could transfer them to other bawds or brothel-keepers if they so wished, debts and all, a practice known as redeeming (
lossen
). In
1714
Aaltje van Arnhem, a prostitute arrested in a basement whore- house run by AnnaVlam in an alley off the
R
okin, stated that ‘her col- league was redeemed last Sunday and had gone to Magteld at the whorehouse on the Zeedijk’.When asked ‘what it means to say some- one has been redeemed’, Aaltje answered ‘that Magteld has paid the

brothel-keeper for her debts’. More often the words ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ were used for such transactions: a woman who was ‘redeemed’ for sixty guilders had been ‘bought’ by Magteld the previous month for eighty guilders.
27
A transfer deal like this would often be made by a procuress, who received a commission that was added to the girl’s debt. They included ‘Marie from the Slijkstraat’, a name frequently mentioned in court hearings in the early decades of the eighteenth century. In
1721
, for example, she had earned fifteen guilders by placing an
18
-year-old girl in a brothel in The Hague.
28
She never came to trial. Such women usually succeeded in staying out of the hands of the law, and as a result we have little information about them.

Details of specific transactions, prices, and debts emerge from the story of Margriet Scoonenbou, an adolescent girl from Enkhuizen, a port in the province of North Holland. She had run away from home and ended up living as a prostitute in Amsterdam. By the autumn of
1693
she had sunk heavily into debt. She was bought from a bawd in the Elleboogsteeg (an alley off the Zeedijk) for fifty-seven guilders by Johanna Clijn, proprietress of the large music house Het Pakhuis (The Warehouse), and three months later she was sold on again, this time for fifty-three guilders, to Willemijn Pelt, a bawd who lived in a front