The historic roots of the ‘cat lady’

As the term “childless cat lady” becomes a hot topic in the 2024 US presidential election, the BBC explores the historical links between women and their feline friends.

No animal has defined female sexuality in the Western male gaze as much as cats. Sexually provocative women are called “sexy kittens” and women are described as “purring” seductively and having “cat-like” good looks. But behind this “sexy cat” stereotype lies the desexualized trope of the “cat woman.” And in a 2021 commentary: Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance The recently resurfaced “cat-loving woman” trope seems to be alive and well. Where does it originate?

The stereotype of a cat lover is a single woman, A woman without a manor Lesbian abbreviationTheir most common appearance is as a cardigan-wearing, bespectacled recluse with at least one, and possibly several, cats. As Alice Maddicott, author of Cat Women: An Exploration of Feline Friendship and Enduring Superstition, told the BBC, the historical association between cats and women goes back a long way and comes with a persistent dichotomy between them. HyperSexual and united nationssexual.

For example, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath was “called a cat to insult her and suggest she was promiscuous; she went out ‘howling like a cat,'” says Maddicott. In other words, “to be a ‘cat-woman’ makes one less sexually attractive, but the cat is also used as an insult to refer to promiscuity or carnality.” (This isn’t so far-fetched: consider the modern term “cougar,” which describes a woman who dates younger men.)

The relationship between women and cats is ancient and well-known. In ancient Egypt, where cats were almost domesticated, 10,000 years agoHalf cat, half human goddess, BastetBastet served as the goddess of domestic life, fertility and childbirth. She protected the home from evil spirits and disease, and, like other Egyptian deities, acted as a guide and helper for the dead in the afterlife. In Greco-Roman times, Bastet was interpreted as Artemis (Greece) and Diana (Roman), and her association with cats can still be seen today. To a lesser extentThey take on human forms, with Artemis still closely associated with cats and Diana Transform into a cat (Notably, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Roman gods flee to Egypt.) In Europe, perhaps the most notable example is in Norse mythology, where Freyja, goddess of fertility, love, and fortune, rides in a chariot. Led by two male catsIn ancient China, the cat goddess was entrusted with pest control and fertility. Li ShouSo when did the relationship between women and cats become more negative and controversial, especially in the West?

The answer appears to lie in Christianity: “Women and cats were, in effect, associated with a pre-Christian goddess,” Maddicott said, adding: [which] “The Church frowned upon it, [could] This may have been the source of the suspicions that later erupted during the witch trials. Mainly femaleIn her book Cats and the Human Imagination, Catherine M. Rogers writes that the medieval Roman Catholic Church viewed wandering single women in the same light as prowling female cats, and later, in an effort to eradicate non-Christian beliefs from Europe, cats were labeled as demons, along with all non-Christian gods. Satan’s minionsThis was followed by a string of religious propaganda portraying women, cats, or both as evil.

In 1233, Pope Gregory I issued a papal papal decree called the Book of Rama, outlining the “problems” of non-Christian religions, accusing them of engaging in devil worship, and describing in detail the rituals of these religions. According to Donald W. Engels’s The Cats of the Classics: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat:, The papal bull “gave divine sanction to the extermination of cats, especially black cats, and the extermination of their female owners.” When Agnes Waterhouse was executed in 1566 in the first English witchcraft trial, she was accused of killing her cat (Supernatural spirits who served as companions to witchesThe story of her mother, a cat named Satan who was later transformed into a toad, was a tale of a witch who was executed by hanging at the age of 63, and the connection between cats, women and witches was established forever and spread to the United States. Until the Salem Witch Trials.

“[Cats] “Women are independent and often intelligent. If people were trying to control women in the past, they probably wouldn’t have wanted that,” Maddicott says. In many ways, this is Overturning the Christian Hierarchy of Life on Earthwhere men came out on top. Catherine M. Rogers expands on this idea, writing, “Cats conveniently represent men’s long-standing and bitter complaints about women: that they don’t submit to us and don’t love us enough. Men who cannot control women associate them with animals they cannot control.” It’s no wonder that cats appeared in anti-women’s suffrage cartoons in the United States in the early 20th century, mocking and belittling the women’s movement.

Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsi, an academic at the University of Wollongong who approaches zoology from a feminist postcolonial perspective, told the BBC that cat-woman relationships form part of a broader range of interactions between humans and animals. “The ideas we have about animals influence our ideas about gender,” she said. “We routinely use animal metaphors when talking about gender and when policing gendered behaviours (‘bitch’, ‘female’, ‘stud’, ‘cougar’). [race and] Racism always uses animal metaphors to dehumanize and deny the humanity of others.”

Whereas single women had once been called bachelors or bachelorettes and were condemned for draining their relatives’ fortunes, single women who kept cats were seen as doubly doomed. By the Victorian era, the relationship had entered the cultural milieu: in 1880, the Dundee Courier declared that “a single woman without a cat is not representative of her class” and that “without a cat there can be no single woman.”

The single woman-cat trope continued well into the 20th century, perhaps reaching its pop culture zenith with the 1976 documentary Grey Gardens. Its subjects were Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie) and her mother Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie), both relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Grey Gardens was the name of the 14-bedroom house they shared in East Hampton, New York. It was overrun with dozens of cats, food tins and garbage lined the floors of the house, and overgrown plants infested the yard. The documentary was, in some ways, a cautionary tale about what happens to women without men. Big Edie got divorced, and Little Edie never married.

” [cat lady stereotype] “Cat-loving women serve to label women as unacceptable according to patriarchal society’s expectations,” Maddicott says. “Cat-loving women are often older, single and childless, and society tells them this should be considered a failure. Not only will not conforming to expectations lead to loneliness, but if you own a cat, you’ll fall into the grey garden traps of irreversibility, degradation and de-sexualization.”

Grey Gardens set the template for on-screen Catwoman for the next few decades, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry both featuring Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992), with Pfeiffer as one of the Catwomen, and Catwoman (2004), with Berry as the Catwoman in some capacity. Received instruction by one person); Mrs. Deagle in Gremlins (1984); Eleanor Abernathy from The Simpsons (first appeared in 1988) and Robert De Niro as the cat-loving woman on SNL (2004). The Lego Movie (2014) featured Mrs Scratchen Post, a cat-loving woman with around 20 cats. Cat-loving women have also appeared in literature, identical to those later featured in the films, including in both the novel and film versions of A Clockwork Orange, Professor Pringle’s Aunt Jane in PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, and Miss Caroline Pursehouse in Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery.

These days, horror and cautionary tales about cats and women have permeated popular culture. It has become a laughing matter to some extent now.In Gilmore Girls (2000-07), the newly single Lorelai calls her daughter Rory when first one, then two cats show up on her doorstep and tells her, “The cats know. The cats know… that I’m alone. I need to collect the newspapers and magazines, find my blue bathrobe, and lose my front teeth.” Similarly, in an episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-19), Rebecca jokes to her friends: Musical Number The plot is that she becomes a cat-loving woman after becoming single. In other words, the cat-loving woman plot has become almost a total cliché by now.

But the well-worn Catwoman stereotype is losing its impact today: women have the freedom and power to live outside of historical “norms.” Choose to be singleand not having children. They have more power in the workplace and the unfashionable use of the term “single woman” Recently reclaimed by feministsThe term “cat woman” is now widely and proudly used by many cat owners, including some famous people such as: Taylor Swift – On social media.

“There are so many wonderful examples of women and cat friendships that are not stereotypes but are actually positive, lovely, normal pet relationships,” Maddicott says. One of the targets of JD Vance’s “childless cat woman” remarks, Vice President Kamala Harris, is neither childless (she is a stepmother to two) nor does she own a cat, but the historical significance and inference remains. If a woman, or any gender, chooses to embrace being a “cat woman” (whether or not she owns cats), then whether or not she is labeled is perhaps a decision that only she can make.

This is an edited version of an article originally published in 2022.