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3

Respectable Mistresses

After you’ve won by urgent plea

the right to tarnish her good name,

you still expect her to behave—

you, that coaxed her into shame.

You batter her resistance down

and then, all righteousness, proclaim

that feminine frivolity,

not your persistence, is to blame.

Or which is more to be blamed—

Though both will have cause for chagrin:

the woman who sins for money

or the man who pays money to sin? ¹

Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz’s poem observes the insincerity of late-seventeenth-century criticisms of transactional sex. Scribes recorded this late-baroque duplicity in their files when investigating women who asserted their “good name[s]” as they faced accusations of “feminine frivolity.” Sor Juana eloquently criticizes the hypocrisy of male moralizing. But other than her voice, we do not know if and how other women, the women she discusses as the victims of the hombres necios, wrote themselves into this sexually hypocritical milieu—until we read the stories of the elusive kept women of the eighteenth century.

The inscription of certain doñas into the archives began when observant neighbors complained to officials about them. In response, the authorities listened and took notes as the plaintiffs told elaborate tales of their innocence, with supporting evidence added by favorable witnesses. The accused fashioned themselves as modest and reputable workingwomen or even pitiable ladies, making a living in decent jobs as servants to elite men or living at home in seclusion with their families. But servitude or paltry inheritances could not support their spending habits, nor did working as cigarette rollers.² Instead, they took advantage of the petty favors available from soldiers or salaried men or even more elite patrons, if possible. Their alleged sexual transactions and longer-term relationships took place inside homes, with funding for their housing provided by their clients. They clung to a vestige of recogimiento and reacted to denunciations by seducing the scribes into exploring their delicately balanced lives in depth to counter the writing of oral gossip about their immorality and scandal.

These women are the most ambiguous of any discussed in this book because they subtly and effectively integrated themselves into the lives of their clientele and, thus, had the patronage necessary to make their transgressions and disreputable labels illegible or even invisible in the written records of transactional sex. Church and state bureaucrats, along with low-ranking military officers, all generally Spaniards, patronized certain women as potential or real sex partners. These doñas did not entertain plebeian men and thus operated more like medieval and early-modern Spanish clandestinas, as opposed to the whores in brothels or the surrounding taverns and inns. Reclusive mistresses did not solicit in public, but the fact that they have an archival presence at all proves that they roused local suspicions due to the heavy male traffic to their abodes or other circumstantial evidence.

Especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, the heavy caseload of busy Bourbon administrators lifted the veil that until this point obscured plebeian street-level sex, elite courtesans and concubines, and the women who worked in relative indoor comfort somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.³ Each of these categories generated very different kinds of texts because women’s actual experiences of transactional sex varied depending on whether they “had their own dwellings” or “lived under the control or protection of others.”⁴ This chapter and the next two show how sex for sale in the eighteenth century encompassed very broad levels of exchange, from streetwalkers to fashionable “kept mistresses . . . women of great style, wealth and influence, who could even prove to be a power in the land.”⁵ The women in this chapter fit in between these two extremes in terms of their paper trail: they generated less paperwork than loquacious, highly cultured courtesans, and more than illiterate plebeians whose words appear only briefly in the police dockets of the era.

Women of good reputation but without wealth or solid male protection took a social risk when they interacted with men other than the members of their families. They occupied an especially vulnerable position in terms of defending themselves against any threat to their precarious honor. Living for longer periods in their own houses or apartments, they endured more surveillance from nosy, jealous neighbors. They lacked the courtesans’ ability to manipulate powerful patronage at the top of the viceregal hierarchy for judicial protection. They also could not afford the many months or even years of writing their own petitions to assert their good reputation in court. However, due to their class rank, these kept women could easily deny illicit activity and call on their overall respectable status when faced with accusations. Due to their very effective scribal seductions, they sometimes even escaped any judicial retribution whatsoever, despite their prying neighbors’ censorious interventions.

CHANGES IN GENDERED INTERACTIONS IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND THE TERMINOLOGY

OF TRANSACTIONAL SEX

In the eighteenth century, “the idea of offending society [began] to replace the concept of offending God.”⁶ While sin, honor, and shame remained part of many juridical discussions of sex for sale, the values of social good became more and more important in the justification for why the courts needed to at least rhetorically control female sexuality. Christian discussions of the spread of sin still held sway, but the legal rhetoric more frequently invoked the theoretical entity of a state or body of citizens as the opposing mass that needed protection from the dangers of promiscuous women. Eighteenth-century legal reform sought to de-emphasize sin as the motivation for prosecuting nonmonogamous or nonmarital sex, opening up more opportunities for secular authorities to adjudicate over personal life. However, ecclesiastical courts and religious houses of seclusion continued to handle some cases. Some eighteenth-century cases dealing with sex work survive because their sexually focused adjudication confused church and state authorities who, at this point, had yet to clarify which judicial entity had jurisdiction over crimes that offended morality and were not viewed as crimes in traditional, crown legal traditions such as the Siete Partidas.⁷

The confused eighteenth-century reactions by church, state, and neighbors to sexually active women often derived from increased opportunities for permitted or at least tolerated socializing between the sexes. These new social spaces challenged official ideas of public order and permissible gender interaction. While previously, gender-mixed gatherings with music and drink roused suspicions of idolatry or even satanic Sabbaths, gradually plebeian and even some elite women openly attended fandangos, public dance schools, and other parties, including illegal gambling houses.⁸ These new or expanding venues drew the attention of eighteenth-century reformers. Some bureaucrats hypocritically railed against all kinds of social settings where plebeian men and women might indiscriminately interact, even dance schools. While coed dance instruction had existed in the viceroyalties at least since Cortés’s era, church and state made a clear distinction between the formal dance of courtly parties, the dances men and women performed on stage during plays or operas, and the scandalous—even heathen—dancing of the lower classes, especially Afro-descended subjects.⁹ Parties called jamaicas, which included dancing, music, and drinking, became more of a concern for the Bourbon authorities, especially because by then it had become more common for private individuals to organize these events either at homes or businesses. They were no longer strictly held with the support and approval of church or state.¹⁰ The Holy Office even went so far as to prohibit some plebeian dances.¹¹

In the eighteenth century, a gender-mixed clientele attended escuelas de danza (“dance schools”; businesses that functioned along the lines of a modern dance club) nightly, raising the ire of those who viewed these venues as morally suspect. In 1779, three weeks before his death, Viceroy Antonio María Bucareli y Ursua issued a strict 10:00 p.m. curfew for men who visited dance schools.¹² Bucareli could not justify completely forbidding dances, as some operated in a completely licit fashion, but he believed that they needed some rules to govern the interactions between men and women in order to prevent scandal and disorder. The burden of enforcing this rule fell on the managers of the dance schools, who risked a penalty of four years in forced military service in a presidio if they ignored it. Even the musicians could serve six months in prison for disobeying the curfew. In a (pen) stroke of irony, the court notary who signed and recorded this document was none other than the most infamous paramour of the era, Joseph de Gorraez, a lover of Mexico City’s most notorious courtesan and actress, Josepha Ordóñez (chapter 4).

As noted in the last chapter, changing terminology affected all public women in this era. Writing women as “prostitutes” textually differentiated them from domestic, private, moral woman.¹³ In the New and Old Worlds, this use of the term prostitute coincided with the publication of guides that listed and classified women who claimed this occupation. These guides had both a literary and commercial function.¹⁴ For example, a London headwaiter called Jack Harris composed and circulated Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, an up-to-date guide to local sex workers, detailing their rates, services, appearances, and attitudes. When men asked for “girls” in taverns or inns, the porter might supply them with the list for their perusal. Women paid for their entries/advertisements in Harris’s List and possibly received some protection from Harris himself, who also worked as a panderer. Existing printed copies of the List date from 1788 to 1793, although it may have circulated from the 1740s. Parisians also had access to various guides of this kind, including alphabetical and geographically organized lists of public women. The French guides provided many anecdotes and titillating stories, placing them more in the genre of erotica, although the listings for bordellos took a more factual approach, specifying the categories of women that patrons might find at various brothels.¹⁵

In 1783, an anonymous author circulated a similar guide for Mexico City, entitled Guía de Forasteros de México, listing all of the “prostitute women of this city,” a knowing mockery of the less salacious practical guides for visitors.¹⁶ Most likely, this guide contained some of the same kinds of information found in Harris’s guide. The author of the Guía might have purposefully imitated the London List or similar guides from other cities. The Mexico City version may have spread in an informal way for many years, as did Harris’s List. But unlike London, Mexico City had a local tribunal of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition, a court that took great interest in censoring literature in this era. Horrified by the obscenities contained within the guide and by the possible moral degradation it would cause among the young men of the city, the Holy Office frantically banned the Guía in hopes of confiscating all existing copies. Anyone in possession of or reading this book risked a fine of two hundred ducats and excommunication. The tribunal wiped out any copies of this book, so there is no way of knowing more about the women who appeared within its pages. Even without seeing a surviving exemplar, its existence indicates the proliferation of sex for sale in this era and the widespread interest men had in buying it, as well as a new print culture dedicated to promoting the libertine lifestyle. A select class of well-off men in Mexico City sought to imitate and recreate the continental libertinism fad so popular at this time.

Written publications about the demimonde may have familiarized eighteenth-century litigators with the vocabulary of transactional sex. Some parents even felt that they could blame their sons’ crimes on the corrupting influence of “prostitutes,” or vaguely referred to public women, as threatening family wealth and stability. In the Bourbon reforming context of greater state intervention in private life, these parents reached out to the authorities to protect their patrimonies. Even earlier, in 1713, a widowed mother came before the archbishop’s court to accuse her son, a cleric in minor orders, of disappearing from the home for periods of time to waste family money on “women who live evil lives.”¹⁷ He stole money and important inheritance documents from her to pay for his libertine indulgences. The son’s dissolute and irregular lifestyle led to violent fights with his mother. The young cleric deployed older terms to insult her, including calling her a whore. He disparaged her by using the words ramera, puta, and amancebada. In this case, vague references to illicit women simply provide the general context for the son’s misbehavior, but in another example a mother tried to manipulate her own low regard for public women as an excuse for her son’s misdeeds. In 1796, the widow María Guerrero begged for leniency for her imprisoned son, whom she claimed did nothing more than shout at and beat a “known worldly woman [una mujer mundana conocida por tal]” in front of several witnesses.¹⁸ Guerrero did not believe that such acts deserved imprisonment and presented her son as quite respectable and as the source of financial stability in their family. The authorities objected, labeling him a drunk and vagrant gambler who deserved a sentence of forced labor.

Readily deploying these vague terms in litigation does not indicate necessarily an overall increase in sex work or even a greater popular disdain for it. Instead, the wider use of the word prostitution and its older synonyms suggests that litigators believed that judicial officials would pay attention to their claims if they verbally affiliated their adversaries with commercial sex. Derogatory terms entered the judicial records of personal disputes at all social levels, especially those raised in objection to proposed marriages or in the context of divorce cases. While the above petitions made by mothers used a vague, older vocabulary, a male petitioner labeled the potential wife of his adopted son a prostitute, in response to her efforts to carry out the young man’s promises of marriage.¹⁹ In this case, the father felt that the pregnant woman’s defloration and breach-of-promise suit justified this label, probably due to her lowly indigenous status.

Husbands pronounced the word prostitute and its cognates, along with other classic misogynistic vocabulary, to portray their wives as incorrigible adulteresses before ecclesiastical judges in support of their petitions for divorce. Certain formulas dominate the records because mutual divorces could not happen in this era. One person had to accuse the other of serious infractions against the sacrament of marriage. The ecclesiastical courts would not agree to any kind of divorce if both partners had behaved badly.²⁰ Therefore, each petitioner for divorce, buffered by as many character witnesses as they could find, presented themselves as an innocent victim, while each defendant apparently luxuriated in a bath of pure immorality.

Across the viceroyalties, women filed the overwhelming majority of requests for divorce, but when the rare man decided to take this path, frequently he focused his evidence on his wife’s sexual immorality.²¹ Sometimes the plaintiffs used vague terms, but other times the petitioners felt that using the word prostitute would help their case. For example, in 1788, Alonso Gavidia accused his wife, Doña Ana María Sanchez (or Saenz) Revollo, of prostitution with “many friends,” and she was placed in a house of seclusion. Doña Ana, allegedly a “daring” and “arrogant” woman, lived a scandalous and libertine way of life and refused to obey her husband or try to reconcile within the bonds of matrimony.²² A representative of the archbishop of Michoacán objected to these accusations as nothing more than slander caused by their extreme marital discord.²³