Read The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam Online
Authors: Lotte van de Pol
Street whores seem sometimes to have attracted the attention of passing men by singing.
92
In
1710
two streetwalkers were arrested on the grounds that, in the Kalverstraat at night,‘they sang very filthy songs as they walked past the houses’.
93
In
1739
a constable testified in court against Anna de Gijter, who had been ‘cruising’ in the Kalverstraat. Hendreyne the Mussel, Deputy Schravenwaard’s infamous ‘correspond- ent’, was Anna’s bawd. Hendreyne had trained Anna by going with her to ‘show her the ropes and teach her how she must appear to the men’. On the evening in question the officer watched Anna follow a man in the direction of Dam Square.‘Hey, chubby,’ she called after him, but the man walked on, saying: ‘Be off with you, shit-whore.’ She turned her back on him, retraced her steps along the Kalverstraat, and addressed another man. He strode on without saying a word. Again she turned round, went all the way back down the street to Dam Square and there spoke to a cotton-printer’s apprentice who did stop.They stood talking for a while but as soon as the man saw the constable he walked away. Anna went after him and a little further on they resumed their conver- sation, until the officer came up to them and asked the man whether he knew her.‘Only in honour and virtue,’ answered the apprentice, but the constable had seen enough and he arrested Anna.
94
‘Gentlemen’ were politely addressed as
mijnheer
(sir) and asked for the time of day or for directions, as in the case of Marianne Eliasz, a ‘High German’ Jewish girl who importuned a man in the Jodenbree- straat in the summer of
1741
.
She: ‘What hour is it?’
He: ‘Eleven o’clock, and what are you doing on the street so late?’ She: ‘Times are so hard, I’m looking to earn something.’
He then asked if that meant she was a whore.
She: ‘Not for all men, but certainly for a gentleman such as you.’
She suggested they go to the Plantage together.The man acted as if he was in agreement but led her past a watch-house and handed her over to the watchmen.
95
Tactics were more direct when women were dealing with men of the lower orders, and more familiar too, more on equal terms.A much-used
form of address was
hondje
or ‘doggy’, the diminutive form of the term of abuse most commonly used against men. Cornelia Cnijn leaned out over the lower half of the door of a whorehouse in the Jonkerstraat and spoke to passing men, saying: ‘Doggy, won’t you drink a pint of wine with me?’
96
A constable who lingered at the head of the Kalverstraat, pretend- ing to be drunk, soon saw a woman coming towards him:
She: ‘Doggy, where are you going?’ He: ‘I’m taking a stroll.’
She: ‘Come, go with me to my house, we’ll share a jug of beer.’
97
Whores also tended to address their clients as ‘child’. ‘It’s cold, child,’ was one streetwalker’s opening line in
1709
, and another, at the mo- ment of her arrest, said to the sailor who was lying in bed with her: ‘Just lie still, my child, no need for you to worry.’
98
The gestures, language, and stratagems used by prostitutes to ac- quire clients frequently caused offence. Neighbours of brothel- keeper Marry Gerrits complained in
1693
that she had harassed men in broad daylight and dragged them into her house against their will.
99
In
1740
Elsie Schilsema invited a man inside and when he asked what he would do there she replied ‘using a very filthy expression’. A year later Ariaantje Plankman and Femmetje Hen- dricks enticed a man with the words ‘you can have every pleasure’ and ‘much other foul talk’, and when the man accepted the invita- tion Femmetje went indoors and lifted her skirts to display her naked backside. The scene was reported by neighbours, who were spying on her.
100
Prostitutes could expect to be punished particularly harshly if they had physically harassed a man or used obscene language. This hap- pened to two streetwalkers who stopped a constable late one evening in
1693
and said: ‘Let us go under the bridge and there see who is the prettier of the two of us.’
10
1
Twelve years earlier, in
1681
, Mari Cor-
nelis of
R
otterdam admitted that she had spoken to a man in the street ‘and had also slapped her own backside, saying why not kiss my
R
otterdam arse?’ Both Grietje and Mari had the misfortune to be addressing a deputy bailiff.
102
In January
1724
Grietje Muylman said
to a man on a bridge over the Oudezijds Voorburgwal: ‘My belly is so cold from my head to my toes. Isn’t your belly cold too?’ She then followed him to Dam Square along with her comrade and insisted he must come with her to her house ‘so that he could warm her belly’.
103
All these women were punished with long terms in the Spin House followed by banishment.
Once a man’s interest had been aroused, negotiations began in which the parties attempted to reach an agreement.They took their time in doing so. Jeroen Jeroenszoon writes in
Den berg Parnas
(
1689
) (Mount Parnassus) about the Grote Wijnvat (The Great Wine Cask) near the Haringpakkerstoren, where the whores display themselves ‘as in a pub- lic market, and are each to be had for such a price as you are able to agree on, just as you see there couples that are already busy striking a bargain: and those who have reached an accord go on their way to- gether’. It is a ‘school of whores and a livestock market’.
104
A constable testified that Lena Jans, whom he had caught as she lay with a man in the street, had first spent fifteen minutes negotiating with the client in question.
105
Anna Jans and a colleague importuned two men with the words:‘Shall I not earn four
zesthalven
from you?’They kept following the men until one of them, a barge-hand, accepted the invitation. He offered Anna three stivers rather than the twenty-two she had asked for, and she eventually agreed.
106
A gentleman would be asked for more money than a labourer, as was the usual practice with services of all kinds.This ‘moral economy’, whereby rates were adjusted according to station, is apparent from the ‘Haagse Blauwboekjes’ (Blue Booklets of The Hague), a series of scan- dal sheets published between
1828
and
1853
: street whores would ask for five stivers from a man wearing a hat, three from a man in a cap and clogs, and two should he also be wearing a working man’s smock. Sol- diers paid even less.
107
As a consequence the sums charged even by one and the same woman varied a great deal.The time-consuming nego- tiations and the tailoring of charges to social position represent a typi- cally pre-industrial way of doing business.
On the street prostitutes generally tried to get payment upfront, as illustrated by a conversation overheard in
1740
on the back steps of the Amsterdam Town Hall, in which a prostitute said: ‘I live too far from here; we can do it by the sledges alright, but you’ll have to pay me beforehand.’
108
This was a society in which payment in advance was unusual; it signalled a lack of credit and trust and was therefore
characteristic of dishonourable association. Once again, the whore gave rise to a negative metaphor, as in the saying:‘I’m not a whore, that I have to be paid beforehand.’
109
In
Klucht van den pasquil-maecker voor den duyvel
(
c
.
1674
) (Farce of the Devil’s Lampoonist) professors are compared to whores because of their custom of charging money in advance for private lectures.
110
Those who did not receive payment up front risked receiving noth- ing, or at any rate less than the agreed price; promises made to whores, dishonourable by definition, were worth very little. Difficulties fre- quently arose as a result. Sophia Elisabeth Steenhagen found herself in the watch-house in
1739
after a noisy quarrel in a stable with two sledge-hands whom she accused of not paying the agreed fee. She had hurled ‘filthy and ugly words’ at the men so loudly that people on the street could hear everything.
111
In
De ongelukkige levensbeschryving
(
1775
), street whores recount with relish how they treat their clients: a girl who had been unable to get more than tuppence out of a fashion- ably dressed gentleman shouted out as soon as she had the money, ‘there are people coming’, at which he took fright and walked away without having done what he had paid for.
112
Although rates were negotiable, there was nevertheless a standard fee for street prostitution, or rather a miminum fee. In the second half of the seventeenth century it was a shilling.
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
contains disparaging remarks about a woman who ‘allowed herself to be used by the soldiers ... many times for a shilling’.
113
Aaltje Pieters, who was offered a shilling in
1661
, declared ‘that she had not been will- ing to do it for that amount’, preferring to stand guard for her comrade, who did accept.
114
Lower sums than a shilling are seldom mentioned, higher ones certainly are, although when large amounts are involved there has usually been a theft of some kind. No one believed
36
-year- old streetwalker Geertruijd Cornelisse when she denied in
1698
that she had stolen sixty guilders from a turf-wholesaler, claiming she had been given the money ‘to tempt her into iniquity’.
115
As late as
1715
, a streetwalker gave a shilling (six stivers) as the nor- mal price.
116
In the course of the eighteenth century this fell to one
zesthalf
(
5
.
5
stivers). On a March evening in
1740
, Anna Margriet
Harssens approached a man in the street and asked whether he wanted to drink a glass with her because it was so cold.They went to an inn and as they were leaving the nightwatchmen heard her say: ‘Let’s go between the gravestones, I’ll do it for a reasonable price.’ The reason- able price was a
zesthalf
.
117
Lower sums are mentioned with increasing frequency, such as the tuppence and two
duiten
that Caetje Martens received from a man in the Kalverstraat in
1739
, apparently all the small change he had in his pocket.
118
By the late eighteenth century the price in The Hague and Leiden had fallen below a
zesthalf
and by the early nineteenth century men were paying even less.
119
Given the eco- nomic malaise it seems probable that in Amsterdam too rates contin- ued to fall.
When a man entered a whorehouse, the interior might be shabby or elegant, his stay might be short or long, and his expenditure might be augmented by payments for food and drink (which whores and bawds often shared), for the use of a bed or a separate room, for gifts for the whore, and for tips for the maid. As a general rule, though, the rates for prostitutes in whorehouses were higher than on the street. Some of the more detailed descriptions from the second quarter of the eighteenth century are, once again, attributable to spying by neighbours, con- stables, or nightwatchmen. In
1739
, for instance, neighbours gave evi- dence that they had heard a woman say to two German men who were leaving her house: ‘I can’t do it for six
zesthalven
, since I won’t let myself be used three times in one day.’
120
Clearly they had been unable to reach an agreement; the woman found
1
.
65
guilders too little.
Another example, from
1740
, gives us an opportunity to observe negotiations from very close proximity. The story revolves around
34
-year-old Ariaantje Thomas, who was supposedly a dry nurse but in fact had already been sentenced several times for brothel-keeping, and seamstress Geertrui Cramer, thirteen years her junior, who rented a room in her house. Two constables watched a man enter the alley where the women lived to relieve himself and Ariaantje spoke to him; the officers followed, listening, standing quietly on the steps to the house so they could see and hear as much as possible. In court the man confirmed what they had witnessed.
121
Ariaantje: ‘Good evening, sir. Say, would you not like to come in?’ Man: ‘Are you alone?’
Ariaantje: ‘I have a pretty girl.’
Ariaantje: ‘Then you must pay a ducatoon.’ Man: ‘I find that rather too much.’
Geertrui: ‘We’ll come to an agreement,’ adding: ‘You must not think you have street whores before you, from whom you might catch a sickness, for I am clean; but if it were indeed so, then my mistress knows what to do, since just the other day a man came from The Hague and she cured him of the clap.’
At that the contstables knocked on the door and went in.
A ducatoon (
3
.
15
guilders) seems steep, but it was not the only time this amount was mentioned in court. In
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, where the houses visited are mainly of the ‘better’ kind, men regularly pay a ducatoon. More commonly the price was between two shillings and
1
.
5
guilders. Like wages in general, a prostitute’s earnings were probably higher in Amsterdam than elsewhere.