40 Dutch regulations on prostitution online

Prostitution was legal in the nineteenth century. As part of the General Local Regulations (AVP), municipalities could determine the regulations on this topic themselves. It is quite a search in a municipal archive to find such an ordinance. So when I came across a bounded collection with no less than forty nineteenth-century prostitution regulations from various municipalities at an online antiquarian bookshop a year ago, I was overjoyed. My delight disappeared, however, quickly when I noticed the price tag. Shortly afterwards I discussed my beautiful findings with colleague Frank de Jong of the International Institute of Social History (IISH). He immediately had an interest in purchasing the collection and also wanted to scan it and make the data online available. The findings turned out to fit perfectly with the local regulations of various municipalities from the same period that the IISH already owned. The idea of adding and digitising the regulations has recently been realized and this new gold mine at the IISH is now accessible online for everyone.


Amendments to regulations 
The Dutch Municipal Act of 1851 stated that local ordinances, including the rules on prostitution, had to be reviewed every five years to see if adjustments were necessary. Although it was a topic for municipalities, the national government could suspend an ordinance if the rules conflicted with the law. (1) Rules on prostitution could therefore be adjusted over time. How often this happened differs per municipality. Haarlem, for example, introduced the rules on prostitution as early as 1838. Then they were adjusted in 1851, 1861, 1866 and 1893 until the last adjustment in 1899 ended the existence of brothels in this city. For a municipality such as 's-Hertogenbosch, the rules remained unchanged from 1857 onwards, until their suspension in 1905. Compliance with the rules was the responsibility of the mayor (or Burgemeester), who could leave the day-to-day implementation to his police commissioner. 

Which municipal regulations on prostitution are online?
This is an overview of all municipal ordinances that can be found in the source (including other local ordinances in various cities).
  • Alkmaar (1864 and 1881)
  • Arnhem (1861, 1868, 1872 and 1881)
  • Assen (1876)
  • Bergen op Zoom (1876)
  • Den Haag (1859, 1861 and 1884)
  • Goes (1869)
  • Gouda (1876)
  • Haarlem (1866)
  • Groningen (1861 and 1863)
  • Hellevoetsluis (1863)
  • 's-Hertogenbosch (1857)
  • Hoorn  (1861)
  • Kampen (1864)
  • Leeuwarden (1876)
  • Maastricht (1858)
  • Middelburg (1857, 1859 and 1883)
  • Nijmegen (1856 and 1882)
  • Roosendaal (1878)
  • Schiedam (1880)
  • Venlo (1864)
  • Vlissingen (1857/1858 and 1877)
  • Woerden (1856)
  • IJlst (1867)
  • Zutphen (1872 and 1873)
  • Zwolle (1859 and 1882)
In large format, announcements of regulations are also available for the municipalities of:
  • Harderwijk (1873)
  • Den Helder (1856)
  • Leeuwarden (1878)
  • Middelburg (1857)


Is the municipality you are looking for not listed here?
A regulation on prostitution was mainly introduced in garrison towns. Regulations on prostitution can be found in various sources within a Dutch municipal archive: 

  • municipal council reports (see index at the back of the reports), 
  • newly introduced or amended ordinances were printed in the local newspaper, 
  • police archive. 
Not all cities introduced ordinances on prostitution. Amsterdam and Utrecht, for example. Causes were often differences of opinion within the council on the topic. Or people feared that regulations would actually lead to not a decrease, but an increase in illegal prostitution. Towards the end of the century, more and more cities began to lift ordinances on prostitution until in 1911 a nationwide ban on brothels ended the tolerance.




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Note
(1) See for an overview on the Dutch regulation on prostitution my thesis (in Dutch): W. van den Brink, Zedelijk Haarlem: de invloed van de moderne economische groei op het verloop van de Haarlemse prostitutie in de tweede helt van de negentiende eeuw (Masterscriptie VU; Amsterdam 2008) 21-25. And see also the book (in Dutch): M. Bossenbroek en J. H. Kompagnie, Het mysterie van de verdwenen bordelen: prostitutie in Nederland in de negentiende eeuw (Amsterdam 1998). There is an index in the book where you can find the names of municipalities and the pages in the book where they are mentioned. 

*photo blog post by WvdB in 2023. 



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