Profit and Passion. Nicole von Germeten

      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