This past week, to a great deal of antagonistic attention, the internet resurrected a 2021 Tucker Carlson interview with JD Vance in which the current Republican vice presidential nominee diagnosed the American malady. The problem, as Vance saw it, was that the country was essentially run “via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Vice President Kamala Harris was among those identified, even though she has two stepchildren.

The Other ‘Cat Ladies’

While Harris lives on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, other “cat ladies” and affiliated malcontents “live in one-bedroom apartments in New York City,” Vance theorized. “They’re obsessed with their jobs. They’re obsessed with their wealth and with their fortunes,” have no “direct stake” in the nation’s future and “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”

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In reality, the “normal Americans” he praises are not terribly different from the urban feminist class in terms of some of these decisions. Fertility rates have been declining across the country for several years, and they are roughly as low in West Virginia and Montana as they are in New York and Connecticut. But according to Vance, it was the “miserable cat lady,” presumably drowning in her billable hours only to return home to an indifferent American bobtail and a fridge full of Spindrift, who needed to stop forcing her misery “on the rest of the country.”

Leaving aside the novelty of rich, power-hungry overachievers living in one-bedroom apartments, the framing relied on a trope that is hundreds of years old — one that imagines female autonomy both as a kind of self-regarding myopia and a dangerous civic unraveling. Women without children are a problem. Women who pointedly chose pets and not motherhood are more than that — unstable. But why and at what point were cats implicated — dragged in to strengthen our sexist cultural critiques, paradoxically overworked both as a symbol of female desperation and loneliness and unchecked social authority?

Parallels with Salem Witch Trials

In this country, we can go back to the Salem Witch Trials to find cats inextricably linked to ungovernable women. Late in the winter of 1692, as girls were writhing and convulsing their way to persecution, an enslaved girl named Tituba, married to one man and in love with another, was called to answer to charges of witchcraft before the relevant Massachusetts tribunal. One of the first to be accused, she confessed to the allegations, apparently claiming to have flown on a pole, signed a book by the devil and watched as possessed spectral cats pinched or choked other girls, driving them to madness.

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Before and long since, cats have served as the dubious companions of spooky, self-determined women (see “Macbeth”). But a more relevant political example of the affiliated prejudice belongs to the history of the suffragists. In April 1916, Alice Snitzer Burke and Nell Richardson set off from New York City to travel 10,000 miles advocating for women to receive the right to vote. In Mobile, Alabama, they were given a black cat. In the spirit of cross-promotion they named him Saxon, after the manufacturer of the roadster they were driving. A mascot of the movement, Saxon was sneaked into hotels at night across the country, photographed in newspapers and so on.

This was a kind of reclamation. Those offended by suffrage argued that voting would inevitably distract women from their roles as wives and mothers. Some of the visual propaganda turned out by the opposition depicted the indignities of men stuck at home, bent over wash bins and kitchen tables, wearing aprons and overwhelmed by the nuisance of minding children.

Cats frequently appeared in these images, further suggesting the bleak, emasculating future. Sometimes the cats looked sad, poorly tended to, about to die — the result of being left in the care of people not meant for domestic responsibility. One poster, headlined “I’m a Suffer Yet,” featured an illustration of a cat, alone and pouting, bandaged and wearing a sling.

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How the ambitious, impressively employed, child-free woman of Tribeca or Georgetown manages to be at once distraught and pathetic while remaining fantastically skilled at imposing her will is an aspect of cat-lady studies that would seem to warrant further clarity. In the Vance-ian formulation, she is something like Eleanor Abernathy, the crazy cat lady of “The Simpsons.” With a medical degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale — a status chaser if ever there was one — she is a burned-out lunatic who throws her pets at people when they walk by; she also runs for mayor.

Cat-Positive Rebranding

While these tropes are frequently laughed off by Gen Xers, who came of age with “The Simpsons” and seem to pride themselves on never taking offense at anything, younger women have gone deep into cat lady rebranding. There is a cat-positive podcast, “Hiss and Tell,” from a young animal behaviorist with 11 cats of her own, and there’s Taylor Swift, with her three cats and all of her vocal cat love.

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When she moved to Brooklyn from Oregon 10 years ago, BriAnne Wills, a fashion photographer, found herself “tired of hearing all the cat lady stereotypes,” she said. So she began to take portraits of women and their cats, a project that eventually resulted in a popular Instagram account, a YouTube channel and a coffee-table book, “Girls and Their Cats.” Wills has photographed 430 women — many married, many with kids, joyful artists, writers and tech people — with their cats, who have names like Leo, Marble, Gigi and Nightmare.

In the social media explosion that followed the resurfacing of Vance’s comments from three years ago, women like them expressed outrage at the judgments directed at their choices. Harris’ stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, was among them. “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I,” she wrote on Instagram.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Ginia Bellafante/Haiyun Jiang
c.2024 The New York Times Company