State workhouses for women: Punishment or refuge?

Over 1,000 women ended up in a Dutch state workhouse between 1886 and 1934. This was a place for vagrants, beggars and drunkards: people who were said to be too lazy to work. Who were the women who were sent there? Leiden University Ph.D. candidate Marian Weevers has investigated.

The state workhouses originated from the beggars’ colonies that Suzanna Jansen, among others, writes about in her bestseller “Het Pauperparadijs.” People could be sent to these places by police order, but they could also apply voluntarily. That changed around 1886.

“The state no longer took responsibility for caring for the poor,” Weevers says. “In this view, the government was mainly responsible for public order and safety, and that would be threatened by vagrants and beggars.”

Weevers discovered, however, that there were relatively many old and sick women living in the state workhouse.

“Some women were half-blind or deaf, missing a limb or limping,” she lists. “Most were over 50, but they were also posing a threat to public order, and it was very difficult for them to find work.

“This raised the question as to why exactly they ended up in a state workhouse, when a condition for being there was that one was capable of working. A judge had to substantiate this with arguments. This made it unlikely that the police and judiciary would prosecute particularly these old, sick or (heavily) pregnant women. Had they perhaps had a part in their committal themselves?”

Last safety net

“At the time, there were already rumors that many people would actively try to have themselves committed to a state workhouse, but apart from a very few studies, this was hardly systematically investigated,” Weevers says. “Added to this, those studies were almost always confined to men.

“When I looked into the situation for women, I noticed that there were a few courts that sentenced women to a state workhouse remarkably regularly. Often, the women were not from the vicinity of the court, which suggests that they deliberately moved there with the aim of ending up in a state workhouse.”

Other sources also support the hypothesis that a lot of women wanted to be taken to a state workhouse. Weevers notes, “Some of the women even explicitly asked to be referred to the police or the judge.”

‘She couldn’t get it that good anywhere’

The punishment of being sent to a state workhouse was long: a minimum of three months to a maximum of three years. This period was thought to be necessary to improve the women’s behavior.

On the eve of their departure from the state workhouse, the women would meet the Leiden Ladies Committee of the Dutch Society for the Moral Improvement of Prisoners. This committee aimed to help them find a place in society.

“For example, it tried to mediate if there had been a quarrel with a husband, made sure a woman could go to her family or could find work somewhere as a cleaner,” Weevers says. “The notes in the register the committee kept about this are a very interesting source.”

Despite all the good intentions, the efforts of the Ladies’ Committee usually had no lasting effect, says Weevers.

“I came across a statement about this from one of the women committed to the workhouse, that no matter how hard she worked, she would not have it as good anywhere as in the state workhouse. This perhaps mainly indicates how hard life was for these women outside the workhouse. For several of them, it must have functioned as a refuge rather than a punishment.”