The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (5 page)

ship the original dissertation was written. I also want to thank Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Sjoerd Faber,
R
oelof van Gelder, Donald Haks, Jos Leenes, Eddy de Jongh, Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Theo van der Meer, Pieter Spierenburg, Janneke Stelling, and Cees van Strien.

Many others deserve to be named and those named deserve more thanks than I can give here, but I would like to pick out a few for special mention. Jenny Mateboer has been an invaluable source of information over many years in the field of literary history. The as- sistance, support, and friendship of
R
udolf Dekker have, as always, been of particular significance. Olwen Hufton’s work was a constant

example to me and our many discussions have given direction to my own writing and research. I also want to use this opportunity to re- member with gratitude the friendship and support I received over many years from my dear friend and mentrix Lène Dresen-Coen- ders, who died in
2003
. For this edition I would like to give special thanks to the translator, Liz Waters. Last but by no means least, I want to express my love and gratitude to my husband Ed Elbers and our daughters Clara, who has now embarked on an academic career of her own, and Elisabeth, who as a student of history has provided all kinds of practical assistance.

‘Amsterdam is the Academy of Whoredom’: Prostitutes, Brothels, and Music Houses

A

msterdam, a metropolis, mercantile centre, and port city, was a place of widespread prostitution. Its reputation in this respect was comparable to that of London or Paris, in fact there was some debate about which was the most deserving of infamy. Paris, was the general consensus, an impression the available statistics tend to confirm, but the French, apparently troubled by their capital’s reputation, tried to

instil a sense of perspective. French dramatist Jean-François
R
egnard wrote in
1681
that Amsterdam was perhaps the most debauched city in

the world, second only to Paris.
1
Almost a century later one of his compatriots noted:‘In a city so big and so densely populated, a major trading centre where a large amount of money is in circulation, illicit sex is bound to be rife ... and indeed there are just as many loose women here as in London or Paris.’
2

What was the true extent of the trade in Amsterdam? Even today there is every reason for those involved to operate in secret, making sta- tistics on the subject little more than approximations. How much more so for the early modern era, when bureaucracy and population registers were in their infancy and little distinction was made between prostitutes and ‘whores’, meaning lascivious women in general; moreover, those few contemporary observers who were willing to produce concrete figures, the police for instance, usually had reason to exaggerate.

There are no contemporary estimates for Amsterdam in the period covered by this book, none at least of any more serious a nature than those found in the introduction to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, which claims that it would take two months merely to drink a glass of wine

in each of the music houses and whorehouses.The one official attempt to register Amsterdam prostitutes was in the years
1811
–
13
, when the Netherlands was annexed to France. Initially the names of around
500
women were recorded and before long the total reached
700
.
3
In
1816
,
800
prostitutes were known to the authorities.
4
By then the city’s economy was in a bad way; trade and shipping had entered a long period of stagnation and the population had fallen to
180
,
000
.
‌
‌

The Confession Books provide some hard and fast numbers. In
1696
–
8
, three years in which the police were particularly active in raiding brothels and arresting streetwalkers,
450
women were convicted of pros- titution as a first offence and a further ninety-one appeared in court as recidivists. Assuming that most were active for at least three years (their names tend to disappear from the judicial records after two or three con- victions), we can take
450
as a solid estimate of the minimum number of prostitutes in Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century. An un- known number must have escaped arrest. In this same three-year period,
110
people (ninety-one women and nineteen men) appeared in court charged with organizing prostitution. In twenty-five whorehouses and ten music houses only the prostitutes were arrested, not the brothel- keepers, which suggests a minimum of
150
active organizers.

The number of prostitutes in Amsterdam must have varied over time, but it is probably realistic to assume that in
1650
–
1800
there were
800
to
1
,
000
out of a population of more than
200
,
000
. French histo- rian Erica-Marie Benabou puts the number of professional and part- time prostitutes in Paris in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city had
600
,
000
inhabitants, at somewhere between
10
,
000
and
15
,
000
.When they were first registered, in
1810
, the official figure was
19
,
000
.
5
There were no such registers in London, but in
1758
High Constable Saunders Welch estimated the total number of ‘com- mon prostitutes’ there, in a city of
675
,
000
, at
3
,
000
.
6
This suggests Amsterdam and London had the same number in relation to the size of their populations. Paris put them completely in the shade, reinforc- ing its contemporary reputation.

Prostitutes by type

Boereverhaal van geplukte Gys
(Farmers’ Story of Fleeced Gys), pub- lished around
1750
, distinguishes between four kinds of whore. It is a common system of classification and quite simple: kept women, secret

prostitutes, public prostitutes, and streetwalkers.They are compared to animals, including cats, chickens, and horses of various kinds:

With whores it is just as it is with horses, there

Are jades that pull carts, those are the street whores, friend; Waggoner’s horses are the brothel or music-hall pussies; The little horses hitched to carriages and chaises

Are chamber-cats and chickadees in silent houses;
R
iding horses you can grasp, as I do, almost entirely, Just like little dolls, are maintained in their living, Yet they act as if honest, just like married women.
7

This categorization reflects an accepted hierarchy. A prostitute has a higher status, and can ask for more money, in proportion to her exclu- sivity and the extent to which she stays out of public view. It reflects ideas about status the prostitutes no doubt shared. An arrested woman might protest that she did not allow herself to be used by just anyone but only by a specific private individual, that she was no streetwalker but ‘fetched only now and then as a whore to one of various silent houses’, or that she‘was indeed a whore, but not a streetwalker’.
8
Those who had few clients, or were in a position to refuse clients, were better off than ‘common whores’ or ‘great whores’.

Such hierarchies suggest a world of clearly defined categories, but the reality was far more vague. Like everyone else at the bottom of the heap in a pre-industrial society, a prostitute had to seize every available opportunity to make money. Most arrests were of professional prosti- tutes living in whorehouses or music houses. From the Confession Books it emerges that there were also women who did not live in brothels, who had daytime employment of some kind, but who some- times went out in the evenings to walk the streets or visit music houses, or who waited at home to be fetched.

In the seventeenth century, women arrested in the open air were usually referred to as ‘night-walkers’ (
nachtloopsters
). They had been found walking the streets at an hour when a respectable woman should be indoors. Not all were prostitutes, and in the seventeenth century fewer than a fifth of those arrested were picked up on the street, al- though after
1710
the proportion rose to a third. Streetwalkers were by that stage referred to either as street whores (
straathoeren
) or as cruising whores (
kruishoeren
), of the kind found on one of the cruising lanes (
kruisbanen
). From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century the Kalverstraat, leading off Dam Square, was one such cruising lane.

Having secured a client, a streetwalker would usually take him home. In Amsterdam there was little open air prostitution, certainly less than in The Hague, where the wooded parkland in the city centre (the Haagse Bos) was a natural pick-up spot. In the warren of narrow streets in central Amsterdam, prostitutes plying their trade outdoors had only alleys or doorways into which to withdraw with their clients, although

in the seventeenth century the coffin-makers’ yards along the
R
iver Amstel were frequently used for nocturnal sex and in the late eight-

eenth century a good deal of activity took place in a newly laid out but not yet fully built-up area called the Plantage. Generally speaking, prostitution in Amsterdam seems to have taken place indoors.

There are two types of ‘street whore’ in the judicial records that I shall not include under the heading of prostitutes. First there were women who made advances to men as a veiled form of begging, alco- holics who would do anything for a drink, older women hoping a man would slip them a coin, and mentally deranged vagrants who slept on the street, under bridges, or in the public privies, where it was easy for men to take advantage of them. It is impossible to say, based on the handful of cases in the Confession Books, how many such wretches lived in the city. Most references to them date from the eighteenth century—one of many indications that the weakest groups in society were increasingly impoverished in this later period.The police did not regard them as prostitutes but rather as undesirable elements. If they had no family willing to take them in, the preferred solution was to expel them from the city.

Secondly I have excluded women who, under the pretext of offer- ing their sexual services, led men into dark alleyways or seedy taverns to rob them. Although they sometimes did have sex with their vic- tims, the law regarded these women as thieves rather than prostitutes. They always had accomplices, often men of the most disreputable sort, and they tended to be underworld characters themselves, as indicated by their long criminal records, their liaisons or family relationships with notorious criminals, and their other illegal activities. They are generally distinguished by their nicknames: Femme with the Scar, Susan with the Teeth, Cross-Eyed Dirkje,The Bitch from Den Bosch. These are typical underworld sobriquets, some of which refer to the facial cuts often incurred in this milieu.The narrator of
Het Amsterdam- sch Hoerdom
wonders how on earth ‘such ugly monsters’ found customers, but his guide, the devil, knows the answer: a combination of dark nights,

‘lustful urges’, and drunkenness.
9
Their victims rarely went to the au- thorities and this kind of ‘prostitution’ comes to light mainly through group trials for theft in which one of the accused tried to escape a severe sentence by snitching on the others.
‌
‌

Courtesans and kept women

In the Confession Books the upper end of the market remains largely invisible. It was much easier for ‘riding horses’ and ‘chamber cats’ than for ordinary prostitutes to stay out of the hands of the police, and in Amsterdam courtesans and mistresses did not flaunt themselves in public. This set the city apart from Paris, where such women could openly build a career, indeed it is mainly French travellers who write about their absence, among them Denis Diderot, who stayed in the

R
epublic for several months in
1774
as a guest of the
R
ussian ambas- sador.
10
Frenchman Guillaume le Fébure wrote in
1780
that ‘in all

Amsterdam there are only one or two kept women with carriages and servants, and even they make no show of it. A few others are main- tained in modest circumstances to serve as a merchant’s little diversion, but in secret, such that it can only be guessed at.’
11

In the Dutch
R
epublic only The Hague had a tradition of this ex- clusive type of prostitution.There the elite was of a different composi-

tion.
12
The States General and the States of Holland convened in The Hague, and the Princes of Orange held court there in their role as Stadholder. It was also the location of the embassies and high commis- sions, and foreign delegations would usually consist of aristocrats and their entourages.The sources have little to say about actresses, whereas in England and France the theatre represented a reservoir of mistresses and kept women. The Schouwburg, Amsterdam’s municipal theatre, employed women as performers from
1655
onwards, yet despite the reputation of the stage for immorality, actresses themselves do not seem to have had a bad reputation, in the seventeenth century at least. In the second half of the eighteenth century ‘actresses and strumpets’ and ‘comediennes and whores’ were mentioned in the same breath,
13
yet even in the
1770
s Diderot observed a contrast, real or imagined, be- tween Dutch actresses and their Parisian counterparts.
14