Following the comments made by vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance on presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, I was approached by the Huffington Post to share my thoughts on the sociological background of the childless cat lady trope. My full interview is included below.
1. How have cats been politicized in the past? I’ve read that during the suffrage movement, cats became a symbol of anti-suffragist propaganda: “Many cartoons showed men at home with kids and a cat, emasculated by women’s newfound ability to participate in politics.” I’ve also heard that cats were used for pro-suffrage messaging. How so?
Yes, the article on cats and suffragettes was based on my research. Cats have been historically aligned with femininity and women’s independence and power. Indeed, this was one reason why women—who were disproportionately unmarried, widowed, living alone with animals, and held some sort of power through landownership or folk healing–were persecuted for witchcraft. Incidentally, cats, by association with women (and, by proxy, the devil) were also persecuted.
When women exercised their power as suffragettes, this trope was revisited. By the 19th century, petkeeping had increased along with the rising middle class and the expectation that women remain in the domestic sphere, thereby solidifying cats as the symbol of feminine domesticity. As women began to resist this expectation by entering the public sphere—in politics, work, and so on—highlighting their association with cats in sexist attacks became a means to shaming women for leaving the home.
Today, as women increasingly opt to eschew other patriarchal obligations—ie. childbearing and childrearing—this association comes with an added layer of stigmatization of supposed queerness/lesbianism. This is a reaction to the success of the gay rights and animal rights movements which have helped women to create alternative families and meaningful bonds outside of patriarchy. Women of the 21st century now openly enjoy all types of emotional, romantic, and sexual relationships without needing to submit their person, property, and uterus to a male head of household.
Nonhuman animals have played an important part in women’s lives, offering companionship and emotional support. This relationship between women and other animals is, however, is a direct threat to the unfair bargain that patriarchy has traditionally forced on women, necessitating that the human-nonhuman bond be admonished by male institutions. The Republican party has worked to reduce women’s control over their own bodies; shaming them in this way is intended to reduce women’s control over their own emotional lives as well.
2. How would you say the stereotypes about “crazy cat ladies” have changed in recent years? It seems that younger generations aren’t as cognizant of it — or if they do know about it, they don’t really care. Nowadays, we here just as much about “cat dads” or the more neutral “cat parent.” We see people like Taylor Swift being held up as a sort of “childfree” (as opposed to childless) cat lady icon.
As the feminist movement and gen-z continue to relieve strict gender norms, I would say that these stereotypes are relaxing, but they surely have not disappeared. Owning cats is still strongly associated with women and choosing to be child-free is still heavily stigmatized as abnormal and unnatural.
3. What are your thoughts on JD Vance targeting childfree “cat women”? How do you think it will play out with cat-owning women without kids?
For most people who live with cats, a strong bond is present. Cohabitation tends to reduce stereotypes about nonhuman animals; we come to know them as individual persons with unique feelings and preferences. Cats are persons too, I think we forget, and these “cat lady” stereotypes denigrate them as much as they denigrate women. In a still relatively sexist society, the status of cats is lowered significantly in being associated with women. Cats and dogs may be euthanized at equivalent rates in the US, but cats are subject to far more cases of abuse by all manner of torture and execution—usually by male perpetrators. By way of one example, it is thought that cats are targeted by serial killers (who often “practice” on animals before moving on to human victims) given their feminine association.
This relationship is reciprocal. Given that women themselves have been animalized (and even felinized), the status of cats has implications for women. Scholars in critical animal studies have suggested that maintaining the societal derogation of animality has profoundly negative consequences, not just for animals, but for all manner of marginalized human groups. Proudly embracing multispecies households is an important means of pushing back on this harmful, even fatal stereotype. Diverse families are resilient families, whether they are interracial blended families like Harris’s or interracial multispecies families without children—like mine!
People who live with cats have been pushing back on this throwaway comment, broadcasting their proud multispecies families across social media. If the Republican party was truly interested in shaming women into having more children, this would not be a very useful tactic. Its history of undermining policy for women’s health and reproductive support has, if anything, achieved the opposite. People today are choosing not to have children because there is exceedingly little structural support in the US. Poor maternity leave, no paternity leave, gender norms that place most of the childrearing duties on women, cost of living crises, climate change and other ethical concerns, and unaffordable healthcare and childcare are some of the many reasons why people opt out. It has nothing to do with moral corruption and everything to do with modern social strains.
4. Anything else you want to add on the subject?
Vegan feminist theory has also argued that there is a cultural link between the construction of gender roles, race, and animality. Women of color have traditionally been associated with some of the worst traits that have also been applied to animals, such as sexual promiscuity, beastliness, and impertinence. Vance may not have directly flagged Harris’s race in his comment, but we must be cognizant of a long history of animalizing Black women, a practice that is linked to colonization and slavery and used to justify systemic oppression and sexual violence at the hands of white men.
Readers can learn more about the feminist politics of veganism in my 2016 publication, A Rational Approach to Animal Rights.
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