Hofjes are a particular Dutch invention: small courtyard almshouses, usually for elderly women, funded by a wealthy patron and built around a private garden behind an unassuming door on the street. They sit hidden inside the city blocks of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leiden by the dozens. The Zuiderhofje was founded for women of the Vlaemsche Block, the largest of the five Haarlem Mennonite groups, mostly Flemish immigrants who had come north for the linen trade. On 25 February 1640 Jacques van Damme instructed an agent named Michael Slaghreegen to buy a house on the Zuiderstraat and build a row of small dwellings on the site. By the time the buildings stood and the first residents moved in, Jacques was already dying. He was gone by 1642, and Elisabeth was left to run the project alone for the next forty years.

Two years after her husband's death, Elisabeth added a new house and garden to the hofje. Three years after that, in 1647, she did the same for the Bruiningshofje across town, contributing 150 Carolus guldens for the expansion. In 1649 she wrote the Memorie, the memoir that doubled as a binding instruction to her trustees, listing what she expected them to do after her death and reminding them, with unmistakable repetition, that the Mennonite church was to have no say in the affairs of either the hofje or the Mennonite orphanage she and Jacques had founded earlier in the 1630s. The orphanage, she wrote, should be completely self-supporting, with no interference. Her motive was practical. Haarlem's Mennonites, never more than five percent of the city's population, ran roughly a quarter of all the city's charitable institutions. Influence and money flowed through the regents of these hofjes. Anyone with a stake in the church wanted control of them. Elisabeth had watched her co-religionists feud over bankruptcies and breasts and would not let her project become the next casualty.

The Mennonite faith in seventeenth-century Haarlem occupied a peculiar status. The city council tolerated it without recognising it. The churches were technically underground, though everyone knew where they were, and the members moved freely in society as Haarlem's Catholics had after the Reformation, with one additional requirement: Mennonites had to pay a fee called wachtgeld to be excused from service in the schutterij, the citizens' militia. Their faith forbade the carrying of arms, the swearing of oaths, and infant baptism. These three refusals, paired with a rigid practice of shunning members who broke the rules, kept the community small, strict, and bound together by mutual obligation. Their faith called them Doopsgezind, not Mennonite; the Dutch never adopted the name of Menno Simons as their identity, because he was a later leader rather than the founder. The Frisian and Flemish branches of the community in Haarlem squabbled constantly, and the only way for a Mennonite man to gain civic respectability was through philanthropy. Hofjes were where ambition and faith met.

Elisabeth's wishes were trampled almost immediately after her death. In 1672 the Haarlem Mennonite community split again, and the Zuiderhofje was forced to surrender a third of its wealth to the breakaway Gemeente van Vollenhove. In 1685 the church appointed new regents in direct violation of Elisabeth's foundation documents. The arrangement was declared illegal in 1714, then re-legalised in 1716, the hofje becoming officially church property. The regents wrote letters of complaint; the church replied that it had been paying donations since 1685. Finally, in 1784, after 144 years of slow contest, a settlement allowed the Mennonite hofjes to operate independently again. Through all of this, the women living at the Zuiderhofje continued to live there, and the institution survived because Elisabeth's original bequest had been so substantial that even fractional losses could not bankrupt it. The hofje fell into decline in the nineteenth century, was completely torn down and rebuilt in 1891, and reopened in 1892.

Walk along the Zuiderstraat in central Haarlem today and you will almost certainly pass the entrance without noticing it. A door, a corridor, a small courtyard with elderly women's apartments arranged around a garden. The hofje narrowly escaped destruction in the 1960s, when the public library nearby was built on the site of the old stadsdoelen, the schutterij target-practice grounds Elisabeth's faith forbade her from joining. The neighbouring Hofje van Gratie was torn down then; the Zuiderhofje was spared. Today it stands as an island of seventeenth-century almshouse life among newer city buildings, still housing single senior women, still managed under terms that owe their durability to one widow's refusal, in 1649, to let her gift be governed by people she did not trust.