The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (21 page)

Government and parental authority

Parents bore the primary responsibility for disciplining their children, and the municipal authorities underpinned parental authority. Young prostitutes from outside Amsterdam were often sent back to their fami- lies by the bailiff without being punished; sometimes a promise to ‘sail with the ferryman to Groningen this evening’ or ‘that she would go to her father’ would be sufficient.
5
8
Very young girls of
14
to
16
years old might be accompanied to their home addresses and handed over to their parents by one of the bailiff ’s men in person, or lodged somewhere in Amsterdam until a relative came to fetch them.There was greater con- cern yet for Amsterdam girls and more care taken in dealing with them. The bailiff did all he could to see them returned to their families. Before
18
-year-old Hendrickje Dirx was released from the holding cells she was made to promise to ‘go down on her knees before her family’ and beg forgiveness.
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All these examples are drawn from seventeenth-century records. In later years such arrangements were probably made in out-of- court settlements and we hear of them only indirectly.

Stories told in court demonstrate that families might not always forgive such girls but also that many parents did make great efforts to take their daughters out of prostitution, preferably without, but if nec- essary with, the help of the authorities.To keep a close relative on the right path, and to prevent him or her from dishonouring the family, anyone could put in a request to the court to have a child, husband, or wife imprisoned for a period in a private
beterhuis
(‘house of improve- ment’) or in the non-public wing of a prison, such as existed in the Amsterdam Spin House.
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The costs of such ‘detention on request’ were as a rule covered by the family, but the government might also be

be willing to contribute, especially for a stay in the Workhouse, which functioned as the
beterhuis
for the poor. This kind of detention was meant to be preventive, so it was not used for girls already arrested and convicted as prostitutes, although occasionally the bailiff was prepared to assist Amsterdam parents in limiting the shame brought upon the family by sending a girl to serve out her sentence in the Workhouse rather than the Spin House.

A request for intervention by the bailiff was a means of last resort for those trying to reassert control over daughters who had run away from home and were living as prostitutes. Initially parents would themselves try to regain the upper hand. In
1704
Hermijntje Caspers, a
23
-year- old Amsterdam seamstress, ended up living in a whorehouse. Her- mijntje’s parents warned her bawd Marie Pieters several times to cease giving lodgings to their daughter; they then went to her house and dragged Hermijntje out. When she ran away from home again and returned to Marie’s whorehouse, they called in the bailiff, who had everyone in the house arrested and handed Hermijntje over to her parents once more.
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Even after an arrest, parents might still be able to negotiate with the bailiff. Jannetje Claes was arrested as a prostitute in
1674
and
1677
, and on both occasions she was released at the request of her mother, the second time on the basis that the girl was about to marry a violinist who would ‘restore her honour’. After her third ar- rest, a year later, there was no longer any room for clemency.
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In almost every case it was the mother who came to the door of a bawdy-house to look for her daughter, or who negotiated with the bail- iff.This may have been due to the abundance of widows and sailors’ wives in the city, who would ask the bailiff to represent the male authority lack- ing at home, but there is no evidence for this in the sources, and it is never put forward as an argument.A more likely explanation lies in the special responsibility mothers had for the upbringing of daughters. In
1753
Ari- aantje Verboom, whose father was a turf-carrier, blamed her mother for her life as a prostitute: she had neglected to have her learn a trade.
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In the popular sea shanty ‘Te Hellevoetsluys daer staet een huys’ (At Hellevoets- luysThere Stands a House) a mother encourages her daughter to lure and seduce sailors in that harbourside town, and the father has no authority to do anything about it, although he scolds his wife:

The father then said to the mother You are no woman of honour

If you are willing to teach

Such things to your youngest daughter.
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In
1693
Elsie Pieters was quickly transferred to a different whorehouse when her (male) brothel-keeper found out that ‘she had a mother’. It made her seem a risky prospect and sure enough, the bawd who took her on was punished for it with a public whipping.
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Families sometimes had little faith that a recalcitrant daughter would change her ways if she was simply sent home, so they might actually press for a harsher punishment. ‘That she might be disciplined for a certain time’ was the family’s request in
1662
in the case of
15
-year-old Marritje Jurriaens, who crept out of the house at night ‘to play the whore’. Her banishment was later transmuted to a prison term of three years.
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A girl in a similar case at around the same time, but one in which the family showed no interest, was simply let off with a warn- ing.
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In
1725
the mother of
22
-year-old prostitute Caatje van den Bosch requested first the arrest and then the imprisonment of her daughter. Caatje was sentenced to two years in the Workhouse.
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Naturally the daughters involved were far from happy with interfer- ence of this kind. Kniertje Martens,
28
years old, caused her mother ‘much sorrow by staying out at night’ and had a child to show for her escapades. Her mother had already arranged to have her sent to the Workhouse once, and now she had again been arrested at her mother’s request.When they confronted each other in the holding cells, Kniertje hit her mother in the face, a blow that would cost her an additional two years’ incarceration.
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The bailiff was also prepared to help established Amsterdam families remove their sons from the clutches of whores. This was achieved mainly by putting pressure on the women concerned. Catrijn Pieters van de Put, for example, was taken by the constables to appear before the bailiff in
1693
, along with a baker’s son who had promised to marry her. She was forbidden to see the young man any longer. In the same year, probably to increase the pressure on her, she was arrested and convicted as a prostitute.
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R
elatives might sometimes go to extremes. A young man from a well-to-do Amsterdam family, whose name, naturally enough, does not

appear in the Confession Books, had been cohabiting with
21
-year- old lacemaker and former prostitute Christina van den Briest whom he had met in an ‘oyster house and brothel’. His parents did all they

could to end the relationship, luring their son into the parental home and locking him in. As soon as he was allowed out of the house the couple fled the city and found an English army chaplain willing to marry them.The young man was lured home once more, this time by letters his mother had forged to look as if they came from the bailiff. Again he was locked up and the family made sure Christina was arrested, but to little avail.The marriage was deemed valid.
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The authorities supported parental authority, but parents might sometimes be punished for abuse of power. Parents and guardians who introduce their children or wards into prostitution are universally con- demned and punished, and early modern Holland was no exception.
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Catharina Holthuys, for instance, who sent her
15
-year-old daughter Aryaantje to the cruising lane in
1731
and put her into bed with a VOC sailor, was sentenced to stand on the scaffold for a public whip- ping and afterwards to serve a twelve-year term in the Spin House followed by eight years’ banishment from the city.
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The number of such cases is very small, however, and this type of accusation was dif- ficult to prove. Most of the mothers accused of such offences were bawds and they would commonly swear that their daughters were liv- ing with them simply as children and not as prostitutes. There were said to be parents who ‘sold’ their daughters, but no evidence of this has come to light beyond the occasional rumour.
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Girls without families to support them were not simply abandoned to their fate.The burgomasters had ‘ultimate guardianship of widows and orphans’ and when a new burgomaster took office he would swear an oath promising to give special protection to both groups.
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This was particularly important for children from the Almshouse Orphanage (
Aalmoezeniersweeshuis
), where foundlings and orphans from pauper and immigrant families in Amsterdam were brought. It seems ‘Almshouse girls’ rarely ended up as prostitutes, despite their unfortunate start in life. The
hoofdprovoost
, the deputy bailiff respon- sible for the Almshouse, sometimes ordered raids on brothels said to be housing orphan girls. There could be no excuse: orphanage chil- dren were easy to recognize by their clothing. Wards of the Alms- house, for example, wore black outer garments and blue underwear trimmed with ribbons in the colours of Amsterdam: black, red, and white. Brothel-keepers knew that those who led girls from the city’s orphanages astray would be severely punished and preferred not to risk taking them on.

Some prosecution trends
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The long-term trend in prostitution policy led from regular prosecution in the seventeenth century to a tendency to turn a blind eye at the end of the eighteenth. This broadly parallels the shift from the conviction that prostitution was a crime that must be punished to a notion that it was a social problem requiring a rational solution. Within this general trend it is possible to point to periods when moral norms—and the sex trade—caused the government, the church, and the city’s burghers par- ticular concern.The early eighteenth century was one such period, as it was in England, where in the absence of a centralized and professional

police force, the Society for the
R
eformation of Manners and other as- sociations of a similar kind took the lead in prosecuting vice.
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In no period was prostitution simply ignored. From
1650
to
1800
different policies were followed and some proved more effective than others. The frequent arrests of prostitutes in the final quarter of the seventeenth century had little effect, especially since the women were only lightly punished and soon able to return to the trade. It is always more effective to target the organizers and in the eighteenth century one important tool was the confiscation of capital, but bawds and the keepers of music houses were quick to find means of avoiding prose- cution and of transferring the risk to the prostitutes.

Changes in policy had a powerful impact on women’s personal fates. In the seventeenth century many prostitutes who had been arrested sev- eral times within a few years but received lenient sentences subsequently disappear from the judicial archives.The prospect of being sentenced to a term in the Spin House the next time they were caught may have scared many out of prostitution altogether—or perhaps merely out of Amster- dam.There is no way of knowing what became of them, but since most were not born in the city they may well have moved elsewhere or re- turned to their native regions. Long prison terms, which recidivists could expect after
1720
, often with banishment to follow, must have made it far more difficult to start afresh.An increase in the average age of convicted prostitutes supports this assumption. On leaving the Spin House a woman would be given a few guilders, but she was otherwise destitute, and after several years in prison she would lack social ties, employment, and a roof over her head.These difficulties were compounded by the fact that she was obliged to leave the city. Many stayed in Amsterdam and were quickly

picked up again walking the streets and sentenced to further long terms of incarceration. It had been unknown in the seventeenth century for older prostitutes to find themselves in this kind of vicious circle.

In the late eighteenth century the authorities more or less tolerated prostitution, but they often intervened harshly to tackle undesirable side-effects, which prompted a considerable amount of self-regulation within the trade. Brothel-keepers were well aware that those who caused no disturbance in the neighbourhood, who treated girls well, and who took care that their customers were not pickpocketed or robbed stood a far better chance of being left alone by the police than those who disregarded such norms. As a result the municipal authori- ties in Amsterdam gained a firmer grip on the trade than is apparent from the prosecution statistics alone.
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The reasoning behind the policy

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Amsterdam pursued a var- ying, moderate, yet undeniably active prosecution policy. Even in peri- ods of relative tolerance it had a tighter hold on prostitution than observers might realize. But the trade remained highly visible, damaging the city’s reputation. Caught between official prohibition and their own rather measured policies on implementation, the authorities kept quiet about what was surely a delicate matter. Behind the scenes, however, policy must have been discussed.

Traces of the arguments possibly used by those in power can some- times be found.There were reproaches by the church, for instance, as well as remarks by foreign travellers, and some of the authors claim to have spoken to members of the ruling elite.The brothels, says church minister Otto Belcampius in
1661
, are ‘regarded by many regents in our city . . . as a necessary evil’. His response to this is an indignant one: ‘Has anybody ever heard more brainless things and words?’
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Keepers of music houses are left alone if they pay a fee, writes Englishman John Northleigh in
1686
, ‘And if you ask a statesman the reason of this, he will tell you that people that incline to be so vicious will be privately so, and that the state had as good get money by it as not’.
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Another English traveller, William Carr, writes in about
1680
: ‘I confess the ministers preach and exclaim from the pulpit against this horrible abuse, but who they be that protect them I know not.’
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