LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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