Swept up from the Streets or Nowhere Else to Go?: The Journeys of Dutch Female Beggars and Vagrants to the Oegstgeest State Labor Institution in the Late Nineteenth Century

Women officially designated as vagrants and beggars and confined in the Oegstgeest State Labor Institution (Rijkswerkinrichting) at the end of the nineteenth century originated almost exclusively from the lower and most vulnerable ranks of the labor population. Their professions and those of their parents and husbands were low and ill-paid. Most of them were relatively old women, single, and a quarter had children out of wedlock. Disease was prevalent, mortality was high and many of them had physical or psychological handicaps. One in five was convicted for, mostly minor, offending. It is argued that their confinement is due to their lack of family support and access to other informal support networks while, at the same time, their “unruly” behavior and status of unwed mother made that they were considered to be “undeserving” of formal poor relief or support from charitable institutions. To beg and get convicted to placement in a State Labor Institution may have been an explicit survival strategy once they were old, ill, and alone.