JD Vance and the Age-Old Trope of ‘Childless Cat Ladies’

This 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 candidate diagnosed the American malady. The problem, as Mr. 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.

While Ms. Harris lives on the grounds of the United States Naval Observatory, other “cat ladies” and affiliated malcontents “live in one-bedroom apartments in New York City,” Mr. 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.”

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 Mr. 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?

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.

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, Ala., 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.