The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (32 page)

room above De Spaanse Zee (The Spanish Main), another well-known music house. A further guilder was paid to the procuress and a tip of two shillings to the maid. Margriet had meanwhile contracted the pox, so forty guilders for medical treatment was added to her debt, an amount that she said was double the actual bill. After four months Johanna Clijn bought Margriet back again, this time for forty guilders in total. Margriet was forced to hand over everything she earned and was never allowed out of the house alone. She escaped because her parents tracked her down and alerted the police.
29

Such practices were well known, and they are described in the lit- erature. Both
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
(
1681
) and
Boereverhaal van geplukte Gys
(
c
.
1750
) feature scenes in which bawds offer to sell prosti- tutes to colleagues. In
Boereverhaal
the girl has to ‘unlace’ herself on the spot and is examined by a bawd from top to toe but then rejected as scrawny and unhealthy, not worth the thirty-guilder asking price.
30
Such transactions shocked contemporaries.‘Slavery’ is a word repeat- edly used. In
D’Openhertige Juffrouw / The London Jilt
we read that while the whores themselves remain poor, their bawds rake in the cash ‘and live with these poor innocent [= gullible] Females, just as the
Turks
do with their Slaves . . . They truck, sell, and pawn ’em too, for any Price they pretend.’
31

Heavily indebted prostitutes would be locked in and guarded con- stantly, especially if they were wearing clothes that belonged to their bawds.‘I’d rather be a black maidservant or slave in Batavia, than a trol- lop in a music house,’ declares one woman in
De Amsteldamsche speel- huizen
(
1793
), ‘for that is a life in prison’.
32
Most stories of debt and slavery date from the two periods in which the music houses flour- ished and the organizers were generally left alone—the final quarter of the seventeenth century and the second half of the eighteenth—when brothel-keepers could best afford and risk investments.

The narrator in
De Amsteldamsche speelhuizen
exclaims that ‘it truly cannot be tolerated in a free country that human flesh should be brought to market, and with the purpose of making people commit fornication’. The instrument used to coerce a woman was very often the debt she owed to her bawd. If she was unable to pay and fled the bawd’s house, she would do well to leave Amsterdam straight away for her own safety, since Amsterdam brothel-keepers helped each other enforce debts. Maria de Vries, whose story can be found in Chapter
6
, declared that because of her debts she had not dared to return to

Amsterdam, not even when she was given money to have her venereal disease cured in the Gasthuis.
33
Another possibility was to find a man willing to buy her freedom or, as the crude terminology of
Het Amster- damsch Hoerdom
would have it,‘that she get a fool by the leg, who will settle the debt, and further supply her with all necessities, for the privi- lege of having a stinking piss-hole for himself ’.
34
Twenty-year-old Jacoba Pluym, for example, was redeemed from the music house De

R
ijzende Zon for eighty-seven guilders in
1692
by a young man she had met there; he sent her to board with a French schoolmaster for

five guilders a week.
35
Even parents who wanted to take a daughter out of a brothel first had to settle her debts. In
1739
brothel-keeper Jacoba van Dort refused to give a girl back to her mother because the mother refused to pay. Jacoba had given the girl’s previous bawd a lot of money for her clothing. Another girl in her house had just been redeemed for twenty guilders by a man who wanted to keep her as his mistress.
36

Of course forcing someone to perform an illicit sexual act was a punishable offence, but there was nothing unlawful about obliging people to pay their debts.The bailiff nevertheless seems occasionally to have assisted prostitutes in escaping their financial obligations. Sophia Laurens, for example, let it be known during her stay in the Spin House in
1694
that after serving her sentence she wanted to live an

honest life, but she still owed fifty guilders to
R
ebecca Stam, her former bawd. The bailiff helped her by having
R
ebecca arrested and calling on Sophia to testify against her in court. Sophia then asked
R
ebecca to relieve her of her debt ‘in order that she be able to lead a better life on leaving the house of correction’. Under the circumstances,
R
ebecca had little choice but to declare the debt annulled and accept that the

five weeks Sophia had spent as a whore in her house were sufficient recompense. Considering the size of the sum owed, she must have gritted her teeth as she gave her assent.
37

In
1733
, male brothel-keeper JanVijand was asked in court ‘whether he did not, in November of the year in question, request Stijntje Jans to send over to him a pretty miss, one capable of entertaining respect- able gentlemen, saying that he would pay to whoever delivered such a pretty miss to his house all the debts that needed paying for her’. Stijntje, a procuress from Gouda, had brought him a ‘pretty miss’ for the sum of twenty guilders. Jan Vijand could not deny this, since the letter he had sent to Gouda was among the evidence.
38
In
1731
Anna Brassart,

a
19
-year-old who had lived as a kept woman in The Hague, asked a procuress to find her a place in a whorehouse so that she could pay what she owed.The procuress wrote a letter of recommendation to a bawd in Amsterdam; the bawd then invited Anna to come to Amster- dam and took over her debt.
39
These stories offer a glimpse of prosti- tution circuits as labour migration routes that could stretch as far as Brussels and Hamburg.
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Clothes

Clothing was of great significance in the world of prostitution. Beauti- ful garments were part of the equipment, the working capital of the prostitute, and they also posed a powerful temptation that might lure women into the trade. Girls from the poorest strata of society had a limited wardrobe, consisting mostly of coarse fabrics and drab hues. Their wages would never permit them to acquire the gowns, the silks and satins, the gay colours and floral patterns they saw all around them in the rich city of Amsterdam, worn by women of the higher classes.
40

It is a literary cliché, centuries old, that beautiful garments tempted women into prostitution and that the acquisition of fine clothes and other adornments then plunged them into debt.
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
speaks with contempt of whores as poor gullible creatures, ‘who’, in the translation published as
The London Jilt
, ‘for a Gown, or a Mantua of flowered Cotton, or some such like thing, abandon thus their Hon- our and Liberty after a most pitious manner; and must expect all that can arise from
Venus’s
Occupation, in regard of Diseases andVillany’.
41
There was another sense too in which clothing could be responsible for a descent into prostitution: a woman who was not respectably dressed might find it hard to come by an honest job or decent lodg- ings. Grietje Visser, for instance, who had arrived in the city only re- cently, claimed she had ended up in the whorehouse where she was arrested ‘because she lacked sufficient changes of linen to reside with honest people’.
42

Garments of any sort were expensive but of such quality that they would last. They were an important constituent of legacies, including those of the wealthy.
43
Clothing could always be sold or pawned, and to the poor it might even be a form of currency, used in some cases to

pay for sex. In
1664
a lace-worker and whore accepted two jackets and an apron from a man as payment for her services, and in
1712
a regular customer promised a prostitute ‘a jacket of flowered chintz, printed in a pattern of her own choosing’.
44
A maid appropriated a skirt, an apron, and linen in lieu of overdue wages, while others spoke of having ‘nei- ther money nor clothes’, suggesting total penury.
45

Not only was clothing of far greater value than it is now, it per- formed a different function.A person’s social standing, profession, mar- ital status, place of origin, and of course gender were indicated to a far greater degree by what he or she was wearing.
46
In
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
practically all the characters are distinguished by their apparel and the route from honest woman to whore runs ‘from a duffel skirt to a flowered cotton gown’. In
De Ongelukkige Levensbeschryving
a Ger- man, a recent immigrant, is taught how to judge Amsterdam people by their clothing and how to distinguish children from the various orphanages by their costumes.
47
The conviction that people should dress according to their rank and station in life was deeply rooted, and the rules were sometimes laid down in sumptuary laws, primarily aimed at maidservants who, like prostitutes, were mostly ordinary girls tempted to follow the fashions of women of a higher rank, occasion- ally finding the means to dress like them. Statutes dating from
1663
,
1682
, and
1734
forbad Amsterdam maids from wearing costly fabrics, fashionable garments, lace, or gold—items they were considered un- able to afford. A craving for such finery was a sign of pride, and it would lead to ‘disloyalty, theft, whoring, and other foul acts’. In any case it was fundamentally wrong ‘that little or no distinction can be seen between the clothing of a mistress and that of her maidservant’.
48
The literature of the period abounds with complaints of this kind.
49

Prostitutes who wore showy and expensive clothing, posing as ladies when they were not, were violating an important social rule.This was enough in itself to cause great annoyance. Again and again, authors stressed that the apparent improvement in their standing was confined to the outer shell. Beautiful though their clothes were, their behaviour and morals remained those of a ‘daughter of a sordid vegetables- or apple-hawker or of a fishwife’. Or, in the equivalent passage in
The London Jilt
, a ‘Daughter of a sordid Orange Woman, or Kitchin-Stuff Wench, or of the
Billingsgate
Tribe’.
50
Their demeanour gave them away. In daytime they peddled fruit from barrows; at night in the music houses they went about in‘ridiculously gay’ garments, like bad actresses,

betrayed by ‘the aukwardness, the hard Hands, and course breeding’, as Mandeville writes.
51
In
1778
French author Louis Desjobert expressed his abhorrence of women in the music houses who were well dressed but had fat red arms, would look no one in the eye, and were poor dancers—all signs of humble origins.
52

Clothing was often used as a metaphor: beautiful outer garments, a glamorous exterior, were pure show. A person might be clad in satin, but God looked only at the undergarments, and the cleanliness of the shift divulged the spiritual truth.
53
Prostitutes were a prime example of a deceptive exterior obscuring a filthy interior, a metaphorical func- tion they shared with the Spin House, and since they spent what little money they had on impressing the outside world, this might often be true in a literal sense. Four young men who went out with a well- dressed Amsterdam girl in
1714
, got her drunk, and had intercourse with her were shocked when they lifted her skirts to reveal undergar- ments of the highest quality.‘This is no whore,’ they exclaimed,‘for she is wearing fine clothes.’ They were charged with rape.
54

Like superficial beauty, artificial loveliness was associated with prosti- tution. A wig, the clergy preached after such accoutrements came into fashion, was ‘borrowed and false hair, from animals and murderers’ (and therefore clearly not honourable attire). It was a ‘fake ornament, as if an honest girl were to decorate herself with the common, paltry trinkets’ of a prostitute, and therefore it would be worn only by ‘strumpets and shameless whores’.
55
Prostitutes used make-up, a fashion that was far from common in this period outside court circles.
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
provides extensive information about the cosmetics they used and indicates where they could be bought in Amsterdam, as does
D’Openhertige Juffrouw
. Faces were whitened, the cheeks, by contrast, rouged, although there is no way of knowing the exact composition of the ‘Spanish paper’ and ‘Antoinette roots’ used for the purpose. Prosti- tutes also applied black velvet beauty spots or
mouches
and the final result was crowned with false curls.
56

These works date from
1680
to
1681
, and from precisely those years onwards mention is frequently made in the Confession Books of bawds providing expensive gowns, mantuas, and
fontanges
(tall head- dresses with ribbons and locks of artificial hair). This is precisely the kind of clothing and finery that maids were forbidden to wear in the statute of
1682
.
57
Such garments were often confiscated, although sometimes only at the end of a term of imprisonment, since in the

latter part of the seventeenth century prostitutes might have to serve their sentences wearing the adornments of their trade. Sitting in the Spin House ‘clothed in the gay habiliaments of love, adorned with plumes of feathers on their heads, patched and painted’, as the English traveller Joseph Shaw wrote, they were intended to serve as a warning and a deterrent, but of course they also helped attract visitors.
58