Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [50]
Annetje’s younger sister, Marritje, was equally gifted at making her way in the world. Her first husband was the West India Company’s chief shipwright on Manhattan, her second a carpenter turned farmer. When she married for the third and last time it was to Govert Loockermans, a fur trader and landowner who was probably New Amsterdam’s richest man at the time of their marriage in 1649. As it happened, Govert’s sister, Anneken, had married Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, one of the soldiers who came over with Van Twiller. Although Oloff, like Govert, had a talent for making money and knew the right people (Kieft helped him along with the job of company commissary), it was Anneken who guided the family fortunes for thirty-odd years. She invested heavily in real estate around New Amsterdam (acquiring along the way a big farm in what is now Greenwich Village), and she is said to have talked Oloff into opening a lucrative brewery by the fort. Like her sisters-in-law Annetje and Marritje Jans, she also passed her business and social talents on to her children. One daughter, Maria, having run the family brewery while still in her teens, married Jeremias van Rensselaer and ran Rensselaerswyck by herself for fifteen years after his death. Two other daughters found husbands in the Philipse and Schuyler families, while a son, Stephanus, would become one of the colony’s greatest landowners.
None of this would have seemed odd or unusual back in the Netherlands, where strong and assertive Dutch wives were commonplace. In Dutch law, a unique mixture of Roman and Germanic antecedents, women enjoyed far greater autonomy than they did in the patriarchal English-speaking world. A Dutch woman had recourse to legal process and could file claims against a man. She could own property and retain control of it after marriage. With her husband’s permission, she could borrow money, conduct business, and make contracts in her own name. Prenuptial agreements spelling out these rights were mandatory, and the law allowed husbands and wives to prepare mutual wills stipulating that the death of one would not deprive the other of their common property. A Dutch wife wasn’t her husband’s peer: the law gave him extensive authority to control her actions and allowed him, among other things, to sell or bequeath their common property without her consent. Even so, culturally as well as legally, his power was qualified by the conviction that a submissive wife was incompatible with a strong household.1
In other ways as well—and in sharp contrast to the bulk of New Amsterdam’s inhabitants—the members of this emerging municipal elite were unmistakably Dutch in taste, manner, and outlook. They commissioned comfortable brick and stone townhouses whose steeply pitched gables, high stoops, double doors, and manicured gardens of roses, tulips, and lilies wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Amsterdam’s better neighborhoods. Those who could afford to followed Stuyvesant’s example in furnishing their houses, as did wealthy inhabitants of Amsterdam, with furniture of rare woods, paintings, fine china, and heavy silver. Wives of wealthy merchants dressed in the fashionable styles of Amsterdam and Paris, with dresses sent over from Europe or made locally by seamstresses. Their husbands’ tastes ran to silk or velvet breeches and to coats flowered with silver lace. Emulating the merchant nabobs of the Dutch empire in the East Indies, they surrounded themselves with servants and slaves. Many imported spinets and virginals to satisfy their love