The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (6 page)

There are references in the judicial archives to Amsterdam’s kept women, known as ‘chambered whores’. These ‘young damsels who

were maintained’ sometimes lived in whorehouses, where men paid for exclusive access to them, but it was not uncommon for a prostitute to move out and take a rented room because a man had offered to pay for her upkeep.
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He was usually required to ‘redeem’ her, that is to pay off her debts. He could then‘chamber’ her wherever he pleased. Giertje Gijers’s paramour, for example, rented a room for her for six guilders a week in
1749
. He also sent her to a tutor, who was to give her lessons in manners as well as writing and arithmetic.
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Nineteen-year-old Maria de Somere was also a ‘chambered whore’. In
1658
, when the police came to arrest her landlady Lijsbeth Pieters, Maria was found in bed with a young man, so she too was held and charged with prostitution. (There is no trace of her client in the Con- fession Books.) She told the court that her father was an apothecary in Ghent and that six months earlier, in Antwerp, she had been ‘de- bauched’ and subsequently ‘chambered’ by a merchant’s son. She had arrived in Amsterdam by way of The Hague, in the company of the man with whom she was found. He had given her ‘no promise of mar- riage of any kind’ and she believed he planned to ‘chamber her here in the city’.
17
This is not untypical of the stories told by prostitutes from the Southern Netherlands. A few years before, a girl from Brussels had testified that in her home city she was ‘misused and maintained by a nobleman, he being a Spaniard’.
18
Now she was living in an Amster- dam music house. In these stories the man who initially led a girl astray was often described by her in court as a nobleman or other high- ranking figure.

‘Chamber pussies and chickadees in silent houses’, who dis- creetly received a limited number of men in their own homes, probably fall into the same category as the sixty-six women listed in a handwritten document compiled around
1675
, now in the Amsterdam City Archives, which bears the title ‘List of Chamber- Nymphs and Music Houses in Amsterdam’. The origin of this document is obscure; it may have been a list compiled by the po-

lice, or possibly as a service to potential clients.
19
‘Antje the mid- wife’s daughter in the
R
eestraat’ and ‘Miss Groenhoven at the head of the Leidsegracht’ were perhaps the real-life equivalents of the eponymous outspoken damsel of
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
, written roughly around the same time.

There are few traces of these ‘chamber-nymphs’ in the Confession Books, since the court records feature mainly those who somehow

created a public nuisance, as Celitje Andries did in
1707
. She lived in a room above a tailor’s shop where she received regular visits from her lover, a married man. One night he unexpectedly ran into another of her clients, whereupon he became violent and threw Celitje’s belong- ings downstairs. She called the nightwatchmen for protection but was arrested herself.
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Women and men as organizers

The organization of prostitution was largely in the hands of women. Only
18
per cent of those prosecuted for brothel-keeping were men. More than half the women who ran bawdy-houses lived singly, whereas their male counterparts, generally the bosses of music houses, almost always had wives or partners who dealt directly with the prostitutes and controlled the money earned. In cases where both were arrested for brothel-keeping, the man generally received the lighter sentence, especially in the seventeenth century when it was not unusual for him to declare in court that he had nothing to do with the whorehouse, perhaps even did not know of its existence,‘since he left the running of the household to his wife’.
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Pimps in the modern sense are seldom encountered in the Confes- sion Books; it is telling that there was not even an unambiguous name for them. Occasionally a ‘protector of whores’ was put on trial, a man paid by cruising whores to come to their aid should they require it, and in the eighteenth century a few Amsterdam prostitutes admitted they had ‘sweethearts’ with whom they lived and shared their earnings. In The Hague in the late eighteenth century, there were rather more women who had a ‘pimp’, usually a soldier with the Swiss Guards.

Both within households and in businesses, men and women had separate tasks and responsibilities.Women were in charge of domestic chores, such as cleaning, cooking, and mending clothes, and the super- vision of female servants.
22
The financial side of the household and by extension all retail trading also came under the heading of women’s work. Men supervised male servants and were regarded as the head of the family.They represented the household in the outside world, even if within the home authority was shared. Keeping a brothel involved supervising women and selling food and drink, which made it in es- sence a female occupation. Although it was useful for a bawd to have

a man about the house—it was easier for a man to rent premises, for example—women were perfectly capable of running brothels on their own. A sturdy maid or a neighbour within earshot willing to inter- vene for a fee could eject troublesome customers. Music houses, on the other hand, were usually run by couples.These were larger enter- prises and more public than whorehouses; they required significant financial investment and tended to have male as well as female person- nel. The musicians, for example, were always hired by the landlord. During periods when prostitution was to a great extent tolerated, the music houses grew in size and men were more active as organizers. The larger the profits the less hesitation men had about becoming in- volved in prostitution, women’s business though it was.

Men’s work had a higher status than women’s work. A woman would sometimes do a man’s job, but it was beneath a man’s dignity to perform female tasks, brothel-keeping included. It seems male brothel-keepers compensated for this by augmenting the ‘masculine’ element: violence. A regular outcome of cases against married couples was for the wife to be convicted of brothel-keeping and her husband of a crime of vio- lence, such as assaulting non-paying clients, threatening the neighbours to dissuade them from putting in official complaints, or taking revenge on people living nearby who had reported what was going on. Some- times, however, a man was charged with assaulting one of his own womenfolk, whether a wife or mistress, a prostitute, or a maid.

Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
tells the story of a male brothel-keeper who is in exclusive charge of the business, but the place is badly run because ‘the whores play the boss a little too much’. He fails to control them, since he is too sensitive to their charms and allows them to ma- nipulate him—apparently this was seen as an important reason why it was easier for a woman to exert authority over other members of the same sex. His sales technique, though, is as good as any woman’s:

As far as trade is concerned, he displays such wit at dealing with it as if he were a woman, and he can so well talk the wine into the customers that it is a pleasure to hear him.

Furthermore:

This brothel-keeper is as good at praising his wares as if he were a woman, and I would even have doubted a little that he were a man had I not seen his beard, since as far as his voice and manners are concerned, they are more than a little feminine.
23

Here a ‘male bawd’ is equated with a woman, and a less than totally successful one at that.

In the hundred years concentrated upon in this study, the role of men in prostitution changed. In numerical terms their participation remained unaltered, but their day-to-day involvement increased. In the mid-seventeenth century, male partners of brothel-keepers tended to be labourers who left the management of the whorehouse largely to their wives. Later in the century they included an increasing number of sailors, who were now more actively involved in the business even if, as was often the case, they had simply moved in with their mostly older brothel-keeping partners and would leave for the high seas again before long. In the eighteenth century they were joined by musicians of various sorts and by ‘pockmasters’ (quacks who specialized in treat- ing venereal diseases). More and more men were now truly in charge, especially in the music houses, with their high financial turnover. Ex- cuses such as ‘having nothing to do with his wife’s running of a whore- house’ became rare and were no longer believed. Punishments for male brothel-keepers were increasingly harsh.

The organizers of prostitution included bawds and procuresses who did not run brothels but acted as intermediaries. These
koppelaarsters
, operating behind the scenes, were a particular focus of attention, indeed animosity, both in legal texts and in the popular imagination. They featured prominently in genre paintings, indeed there was a type of brothel painting named after them, a
koppelaarster
(procuress). They were rumoured to approach girls and married women to persuade them to respond to the advances of specific men; they were also said to place honest girls in brothels after tricking them by promising to find jobs for them as maids in respectable households.

The Confession Books feature only a small number of procuresses, and they do not exactly live up to their sinister reputation. In court they claim to be poor women for whom a reward of a few tuppences for matchmaking represented merely one of many ways they managed to scrape a living. A
35
-year-old cleaner called Bartha Pieters, for ex- ample, testified in
1737
that she did ‘all kinds of work, if only I can get it’ and that she occasionally took girls into her home for whom she then sought employment. Bartha was accused of ‘recommending’ them to places where ‘they were led astray’, but she denied that she knew they had ended up in whorehouses.The court secured a convic- tion in her case because the mother of a girl she had placed in a brothel took

action against her and another prostitute procured by Bartha was pre- pared to give evidence. She was banished from the city for six years.
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Whorehouses

Amsterdam’s reputation as a city of prostitution is largely attributable to the music houses, but the core business unit was the whorehouse. This was the general term for any premises, big or small, that were used for extramarital sex. The whorehouse was generally a place where a bawd would live with two or three prostitutes, although in the bigger houses a man might reside with them, plus a maid and perhaps a rather larger number of girls.There were smaller whorehouses too, no more than a room or a basement apartment, sometimes with just one resi- dent prostitute. A whorehouse was a brothel, but it was also a base of operations and the place to which a woman would take her clients. Most prostitutes who came to court had been arrested in a whore- house and most prostitutes had lived in one at some stage.

Although whorehouses differed from each other and across time, they conformed to a standard pattern throughout the period. First, they were usually small. If more customers arrived than could be served by the women available, a maid would be sent to fetch additional pros- titutes, sometimes from ‘silent houses’ or private addresses, but usually from other public brothels. At least a fifth of the prostitutes arrested in whorehouses were ‘fetched whores’, in other words they lived else- where.This was no different from the way legitimate businesses oper- ated. Enterprises in this period generally had few employees. Servants and apprentices often lodged with their masters, and bed and board made up a large part of their earnings. Food and heating were expen- sive, so an employer could afford only a small permanent staff; he would hire temporary workers whenever the need arose.
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Capital, credit, and living space were harder to come by for women than for men, so it was difficult for a female brothel-keeper to grow her business beyond a fairly modest size.The threat of prosecution was another limiting factor. Police raids often meant forced relocation as well as fines and confiscations; banishment and prison terms made it less likely that a prostitute would pay off her debts. To spread the risk, a successful brothel-keeper might choose to run several small

whorehouses rather than to expand the initial business. A maid would deputize for her. Around
1693
, for instance, when the bailiff and his men were particularly active in their efforts to close brothels, the Ger- man brothel-keeper Grietje Gerrits was found to be in charge of no fewer than three establishments. Catryn van
R
eesenbergh ran one whorehouse within the city and one just outside.
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In periods when a blind eye was turned, there was scope for large and luxurious brothels like that of Mistress Helena Havelaar around
1760
, which had between

four and nine live-in prostitutes.
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Another characteristic of whorehouses was that the women were not in residence for long. In the first half of the eighteenth century the average stay was three to four months at any one house. A whore would then move, whether on her own initiative or not: some were arrested, others found a man willing to maintain them, were trans- ferred to a different house after a deal had been struck by a procuress, or simply absconded. A rapid turnover of women was typical of the trade; customers preferred new girls (a consistent theme in
Het Am- sterdamsch Hoerdom
), although in fact prostitutes often returned to former addresses. They moved not only from one whorehouse to another but from city to city, developing networks right across the United Provinces, the Southern Netherlands, and northern and

western Germany.
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otterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Hamburg, and Antwerp were important centres, but Amsterdam was always the