'Childless cat ladies...is that a bad thing?'
'Childless cat ladies...is that a bad thing?'
How the trope was born; and is there any truth in it?
According to Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, back in a 2021 interview, senior Democrats are famously ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.’ Left-wing women in the US and beyond have responded to Vance’s intended insult with some delight and many pro-childless-cat-lady internet memes. ‘Childless cat ladies?...is that a bad thing, I’m confused?’ tweeted one woman, with an implicit wink.
I’m not childless, but I am husband-less, left-wing and admittedly often quite miserable and lonely. And I am definitely a cat-lady - and, like the woman mentioned above, I see that as a strength rather than weakness. So the cultural historian in me started wondering when being a childless cat lady first became, not just ‘a thing’, but apparently ‘a bad thing’. And the cat-lover (ailurophile, apparently) in me started wondering if there’s any truth in the trope; not in the notion that being childless or alone or left-wing automatically connotes misery for women, but in the idea that sad women might have a propensity towards cat-ownership. I wonder whether what’s being ridiculed in the ‘crazy cat lady’ trope is actually a meaningful pattern in which women who have been hurt by the world find healing through contact with animals.
But first, when and how did the trope emerge? Popular culture has linked cats with women for a long time, and the word ‘cat’ has been used as a contemptuous term for women, and specifically for prostituted women, since the middle ages. Women and cats have long been thought (by misogynists) to have similar qualities: both are apparently hunters with sharp claws, spite, malevolence and a sinister air, and both possess ‘tails’ (a word used widely in the Restoration era to refer to women’s skirts (‘the tails of gowns’), women’s bums (as in John Dunton’s 1707 poem Bumography: or, a Touch at the Ladys Tails), and to the ‘tails’ or penises of the men they pursue).
For a short time in the sixteenth century, comparing a woman to a ‘pussy’ was a compliment to both, drawing on their mutual sweetness. But, as we’ll see, over the next two hundred years, this positivity was overpowered by derogatory feelings towards both women and cats, and ‘pussy’ became a critical word for both a weak man and female genitalia. From the eighteenth century onwards, when women were compared to cats, and vice versa, the speaker was usually acting with negative, misogynist intent. But, as has been evident in responses to Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ jibe, women have often willingly reclaimed the trope because we recognise that, in the lifestyles and choices that are being criticised by conservative misogynists, there is actually much meaning and joy.
Eighteenth-century cats: demons in the house
Prior to the late eighteenth century, cats and women were associated with one another in popular culture, mainly in the context of the outdoors. Cats were kept as pets with a predominantly utilitarian purpose – to keep mice and rats at bay – and they were not necessarily allowed inside the home. In early-eighteenth-century cities, flâneurs commented on the number of dogs and cats freely roaming the streets, and some compared such semi-feral urban cats to street prostitutes, and vice versa. In the countryside, women denigrated as witches were thought to possess an affinity to animals such as cats and hares, who were their familiars, and into whose forms shape-shifted in order to move around swiftly, malevolently and incognito.
It was in the late eighteenth century that the specific qualities of being female and alone in the house, surrounded by cats instead of husbands and children, first became cemented. A satirical poem of the 1790s mocked how
… it comes into my head,
Old maids grow cross because their cats are dead;
My governess has been in such a fuss,
About the death of our old tabby puss –
She wears black stockings – Ha! Ha! – what a pother,
‘Cause one old cat’s in mourning for another!
Newspapers started highlighting the predilection of man-less or man-hating women for cat-ownership. In 1768, the Derby Mercury newspaper reported on how an ‘antient French Gentlewoman’ had died and left a substantial bequest to her ‘two favourite Cats’. In July 1776, numerous papers reported that an 80-year-old woman called Ann Cruttenden, whose ‘behaviour…strongly indicated insanity’, had murdered her 43-year-old butcher husband Joseph (whom she had, rather unfortunately, married in Catsfield, in East Sussex) and left his body to be eaten by her ‘half starved voracious cats’.
This emerging association between ailurophilia and women who were home alone - and who were unhappy about living alone - was the result of two social changes that occurred throughout the eighteenth century; one affecting pet ownership, and the other affecting women’s economic power. Aided by Enlightenment philosophers’ interest in animals’ emotions and in the affinities between humans and animals, cats were being increasingly brought inside and valued as domestic companions rather than simply forms of pest control. Scholars Amy Freund and Michael Yonan note that, over the eighteenth century, cats ‘began to appear more frequently in domestic spaces and in works of art that recalled those spaces’.
At the same time, the world of economic work was moving out of the home and cottage industries, and into spaces such as factories, while women were left behind; meaning that public space became even more firmly linked to men and masculinity than it had been before, and domestic space to disempowered women. By the end of the eighteenth century, the home was considered to be the realm of both women and cats. The two were also linked by what Freund and Yonan call ‘tenuous domesticity’, with natures that were rebelling against being thus confined. It’s interesting that cats and women were also being associated in the public mind with liberty at this time, and numerous eighteenth-century visual images of political freedom pictured Liberty as a cat-lady:
In domestic settings, then, neither cats nor women were considered to be completely acquiescent angels in the house. Both were semi-tamed prisoners, not entirely happy with their lot, and with an air of threat and the potential to up-end the patriarchal status quo. Dogs are generally shown in eighteenth-century paintings to be the useful idiots of the landed patriarchy, and numerous writers considered that ‘the dog’s nature is much nearer that of man than the cat’s.’ Whereas dogs were painted as tail-waggingly content with their masters and their homes, cats embody more sinister and rebellious emotions such as fear, horror, and anger - as Freund and Yonan discuss in relation to Jean Siméon Chardin’s disturbing painting of a cat beside a huge, semi-gutted fish:
In this context, people were increasingly making connections between women’s cat-ownership, female solitary confinement in the home, and women’s economic disenfranchisement in a patriarchal society. In 1774, an anonymous correspondent to the Caledonian Mercury newspaper complained that he wished ‘that women gave as much attention to their children as they do to their…cats’. However, he admitted that the situation made sense because, under eighteenth-century law, ‘the children belong to the husband’; and so it seemed inevitable to him that women who were denied ownership or power over anything, including their own children, would put all their energies instead into their ‘cats [who] belong to the wife only.’ The image of a solitary woman at home, surrounded by cats, became a demonic inversion of the family portrait, in which a woman was imagined in her home, happily surrounded by husband and children.
‘It is misery which draws women to cats’
In the next century, these associations between cat ownership and women who lived apart from patriarchal norms became well and truly cemented as a clearly negative and cautionary trope. Much more was made of the idea that solitary cat ladies were miserable and/or crazy and endangered than in the previous century. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were literally thousands of newspaper reports in which women’s cat-ownership was flagged up as a symptom and warning of the unhappiness that would inevitably result from a woman’s decision to eschew men and children. There were reports of a woman who died alone at the age of 75, and whose body was ‘partly devoured’ by her cats; a 60-year-old woman who had ‘never married’ and whose passion for cats got so out-of-hand that she hoarded dead as well as living ones; an ‘old’ single woman whose cats attacked her as she slept; a 75-year-old female ‘recluse’ who lived in the same house nearly all her life, with her single mother and then alone, and was found dead surrounded by cats and birds; and a younger woman who burned to death when she accidentally set fire to herself with a paraffin lamp and died because there was no-one in the house to help her other than her cats (she was married but she’d deliberately chosen to live apart from her husband, because he resided and worked in central London, and she owned twelve cats who didn’t like the city).
In all these cases, women’s cats were not just seen as neutral symptoms of female misery; they were considered to actively endanger women’s wellbeing. Cats were described as not just reflecting, but actually exacerbating, the misery and loneliness that drove women to adopt cats in the first place; and they were shown to endanger women by attacking and eating them (whether alive or dead), and/or by tempting women to eschew more effective, human, male, forms of protection. Cats are not your friend, was the message to female readers; and reports highlighted their essentially untameable, devilish nature, from which even women were not safe. By the end of the nineteenth century, multiple cat ownership (or ‘intemperance in cats’, as one journalist put it) was being presented as a full-blown and dangerous addiction, a ‘feminine vice’ which resulted from ‘moral weakness and absence of self-control’, and was compounded by a woman’s solitary confinement in an empty house. ‘It is misery which draws women to cats,’ the journalist continued. ‘They seek in the society of those demoralising animals forgetfulness of the miseries of daily life’:
By the early twentieth century, this association of cat-ownership with female solitude and insanity was so entrenched that, during a 1915 court hearing to assess a deceased woman’s state of mind when she’d been drawing up her Last Will and Testament, a lawyer asked ‘had she a number of cats in the house?’ Upon being asked to clarify whether ‘love for cats [is] a sign of insanity’, he replied that ‘it depends on the quantity and quality of the cats’. The stereotype of the crazy cat lady had not only saturated popular culture, but had reached the country’s foremost institutions and standards.
Is there any truth in the trope?
Newspaper journalists chose to draw attention to single women’s cat-ownership, but not each and every one of these reports were fabricated. Many women who lived alone, without husbands or children, did often choose to adopt one or more cats, and although there are occasional stories about elderly solitary men being eaten by cats, they are vastly outweighed by their female counterparts. There does also appear to be a long-standing correlation between sad women and cat-ownership. But it seems to me that the inference is not that a life without men or children turns women into crazy, sad, childless cat ladies, because, of course, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, of women living free and fulfilled lives on their own, both with and without cats. Rather, I think that the truth is that some people who feel sad or lonely, for myriad reasons (some of which involve feeling sad or lonely within family units, as well as outside them) have, throughout history, been drawn to the companionship of animals.
I’m currently interested in what the novelist Manju Kapur calls the ‘small revolutions, every day’ that women implement in order to carve out tiny pieces of space for themselves in the midst of a fundamentally female-unfriendly world. And it seems to me that forging emotional relationships with animals is one of those small, everyday revolutions that we adopt in consolation for, or healing or recovery from, unsatisfying and downright abusive human relationships. I would not have thought of myself as an animal-lover before my husband died, but in the nearly-three-years since his death, I’ve felt much more of a profound emotional connection with animals: with my cat, Jennie; with our three rabbits; and with the frogs and newts and even spiders in our garden. (Not slugs, though. Sorry, slugs.) I’ve always been quite scared of horses, but I went on an intensive riding camp in the summer after Pete’s death; and these days, thanks to a horse-mad daughter, I spend a lot of time in stables. I’ve come to value my interactions with horses, and have realised that riding is far from a matter of tyrannically laying down the law or, the opposite, shutting one’s eyes and quaking in fear. Instead, riding is the result of sensitive communication between rider and horse, in which both human and animal are constantly assessing, managing and calming their own and each other’s fears.
Humans are so very complicated. They say one thing and mean another; they have secrets; they lie, and they make false promises and they let you down; they hint obliquely and expect you to read between the lines; and they perform different roles in different situations. After all that, animals are refreshingly honest and simple. Cats purr when they’re happy and walk off when they’ve had enough. They miaow when they want tuna or to be let out into the garden. Horses shy away from angry humans. Communication with animals is generally by touch or simple noises rather than words, and it’s hard to lie when you’re simply patting or stroking or cuddling, or pulling on reins. A cat rubbing its face against your hand, trying to persuade you to stroke its head, is not concealing some secret inner misogynistic hatred. I find the behaviour of prey animals to be especially poignant, and I often feel a flush of compassion, pity, guilt, and protective love when I inadvertently startle the rabbits and they bolt in terror. Indeed, these emotions are the basis of animal-assisted therapies, such as equine-assisted therapy and, yes, feline-assisted therapy. Leslie E. Korn describes how ‘Many people who have experienced trauma have difficulty feeling compassion for themselves,’ and that animals ‘can catalyze compassion.’ Feeling protective of scared bunnies can be the first step to feeling protective of oneself, both in the past and the present.
I don’t think this is inherently gendered, and I know that many men gain a similar comfort and companionship from proximity to animals. Statistically, though, women are more likely to be sufferers of trauma, more likely to live in fear, and they are more likely to be socialised to not feel compassion for themselves; to put themselves and their own needs last. There are equine-assisted therapeutic programmes for men, such as war veterans suffering from PTSD, but much animal-assisted therapy is therefore designed specifically for women and girls: survivors of abuse, rape, eating disorders, and birth trauma. Descriptions of the effects are extremely moving. Tilde, a young Swedish woman who spoke to Lund University researchers Jeanne Højgaard-Bøytler and Elisabeth Argentzell about her experience of equine-assisted therapy described how learning to be comfortable with the horse ‘is something you can transfer to interactions with people afterwards. That, ok, if I can manage such a big animal, then I can also control who is going to be in my life and what they are allowed to do with me.’
Such accounts show how regular contact with animals can awaken ‘small revolutions, every day’ within individual women, catalysing flickers of self-confidence, agency and control which, over time, expand, thrive and change lives and ultimately create women who are able to take part in grander forms of revolution. Cats are far from a sign of weakness for crazy childless cat ladies; they might be the secret weapons by which women overturn the patriarchy.
Such a great essay. Nuanced, thought-provoking, and resonant. Thank you.