Shortly after Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ choice of candidate this summer, cats emerged as front runners in the US presidential election. First came the swipe by JD Vance about Kamala Harris’s being a “childless cat lady”. The Ohio senator had originally made the jibe in a 2021 interview with Fox News as part of a wider grizzle about how “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children”. As Vance stepped forward as the Republican’s vice-presidential nominee in the high summer of 2024, someone dredged up his old comment and the cat ladies were enraged.
The first point of counterattack was an easy one. The fact that Harris has been a cherished stepmom to her husband’s two children for over a decade merely highlighted Vance’s record of trashing any family pattern that did not conform to a tradwife model. According to this playbook, a Presidential family must always consist of a middle-aged man in a suit, a glamorous wife, two school age children — and a dog: the Kennedys had Clipper, the Reagans had Peggy and the Obamas had Bo. Only the Clintons, who so spectacularly failed to live up to First Family normcore, were known as the owners of a cat, the infamous Socks.
The next salvo in the Cat Wars came at the end of July when political strategist Christine Pelosi organised a “cat ladies for Kamala” event on Zoom and got her mother, Nancy, to boogie along to Abba’s Dancing Queen while a carousel of images of much-loved moggies revolved in the background.
It was at this point Donald Trump realised that he had missed a trick. You might expect that a man described by Joe Biden as having “the morals of an alley cat” and who was famous for boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy” would be finely attuned to this feline turn in political discourse. Instead, it took him until September to pounce. Repeating another wild statement by Vance, his newly-minted running mate, Trump declared that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio had been spotted abducting and eating the local pet cats. Then, just to make sure that the outrageous claim was landing equally with Republican voters who might be assumed to lean canine, Trump added lamely that the immigrants were “eating the dogs” too.
Immediately after the presidential debate between Trump and Harris on 10 September, in which the former president ranted about the dogs and cats of Springfield, Taylor Swift came out for Harris on Instagram. She signed her post “Childless Cat Lady” and added a selfie with Benjamin Button, her fabulously photogenic kitten.
The cat’s rhetorical nimbleness, its capacity for co-option into political discourse by both the right and left, has a long and distinguished history. It rests on the species’ evolving and unstable position as a boundary marker between the wild and the tamed, savage and civilised, totem and taboo. Cats were domesticated millennia after the dog, pig, sheep and horse and remain, in important ways, beyond our customary ways of dividing up the world. If this sounds like a stretch, try substituting the word “dog” or “horse” or even “sheep” in the cat lady ruckus and you will find that it simply doesn’t work. In any place where there is deep cultural reckoning in process, only the cat will do.
Or to put it another way, this thing has a long tail. Trump’s slur about the cat-chomping Haitians could have been lifted straight from the rhetoric swirling around the siege of Paris in 1870. During this final desperate phase of the Franco-Prussian war, the news started seeping out that the beleaguered citoyens had resorted to eating cats, with the smarter restaurants even devising a particularly tasty ragoût de chat. Horrific though this news struck right-thinking Britons, in other ways it was exactly what they expected of foreigners, especially the sort who happily chowed down on snail, frog and horse even when there was no excuse.
John Bull (and his bulldog) was not about to condone eating cats, no matter how challenging the circumstances. At the Birmingham cat show of 1873 much fuss was made of one of the competitors, a tabby, whose unfortunate mother had been consumed during the siege of Paris. This sentimental backstory, though, didn’t get any traction with the stony-hearted judges. The unfortunate orphan failed to win a rosette, let alone a silver cup. In the lingo of the professional cat show, it remained “unplaced”.
It is this placelessness, or being out of place, that has made the cat so symbolically rich. In the late 1730s a gang of hungry apprentices on the left bank of the Seine went on a rampage, rounding up stray cats and staging mock trials in which the unfortunate creatures were found “coupable” of witchcraft and promptly hanged. But really something more material, not to say visceral, was in play. The two ringleaders were particularly resentful of their boss’s wife who fed her favourite pet much better food than she gave to the lads. The growing teenagers were expected to make do with rotting meat scraps that no self-respecting feline would touch.
Robert Darnton, the Harvard historian who first wrote about The Great Cat Massacre in the early 1980s, was clear that this macabre piece of feline street theatre could be read as a dress rehearsal for the French Revolution. The apprentices had been given limited permission by their master to exterminate the street cats whose screeching kept right-minded burghers awake at night. But the boys had exceeded their brief, singling out their mistress’s pampered cat La Grise for a particularly vicious death. They suspected too that Mme Vincent, along with lavishing the best food on La Grise, was also conducting an affair with the local priest. This only added extra anti-clerical fuel to their fantasies about witchcraft and black magic and allowed them to make bawdy play on the multiple meanings of their mistress’s “pussy”. Here, in microcosm, was a preview of the events of 1789 in which a limited programme of reform led by bourgeois actors was swept aside within five years by a screeching mob intent on unleashing La Terreur.
Cat ladies, then, have historically been accused not so much of being sexless as of having the wrong kind of sex. Even in Victorian Britain the animus against the cat lady was less about her erotic lack as her misplaced desire. Behind the savage newspaper mockery of elderly widows and spinsters who bequeathed their fortunes to their cats lay patriarchal rage at the way these independent women had snubbed the usual rules around inheritance: if they didn’t have biological children, the money should have gone to their nephews or godchildren instead. Likewise, those who treated their cat’s death as a bereavement and sought the comfort of a quasi-Christian burial service, complete with a handsome oak coffin, were coruscated for subverting the usual pieties and turning them into the equivalent of a black mass.
Meanwhile, in other, sadder, cases where Victorian cat ladies of slender means were brought before the magistrate for hoarding cats or running an informal feline hospital, the community gathered to jeer. Local newspapers ran headlines like “Three Old Maids and their Pets” (Burton Chronicle, 1886) when reporting the sad story of the Lloyd sisters who were accused of turning their home into “a nuisance injurious to health”. The ladies’ real crime, though, was siphoning off resources – care as well as cash – that should have been invested in the heteronormative household. Or, to put it another way, they should have been nursing ailing parents and siblings or even the local poor rather than lavishing their love on Sooty and Snowdrop.
Whenever cat ladies got together to act in concert, they could expect a particularly hostile reaction. Punch inevitably mocked the founding of the Feline Defence League in 1902 – suggesting that its president was “Baroness Puszkin” and that its concerns were so niche that it deserved to stand alongside the entirely fictitious “Infants’ Anti-Sausage Society”. It wasn’t the humanitarian impulse the patriarchy found funny so much as the fact that these silly women were extending it to that most abject creature, the cat. Dogs and horses were working animals and as such had been the subject of concern and legal protection for several decades. But cats lay beyond this benevolent if self-interested gaze, until no less a woman than Queen Victoria decided to intervene.
In 1875 Her Majesty had graciously given her approval to the RSPCA’s wish to introduce “The Queen’s Medal” to be awarded to individuals who had made a significant contribution to the society’s welfare work. But the medal’s original design, which showed images of a dog, horse, goat and cow, did not include a cat. Victoria insisted that the situation be remedied and even provided a sketch to show the sort of thing she had in mind. Her Majesty wasn’t, as is usually inferred, making a point about her personal fondness for cats which, in truth, remained lukewarm (she was a dog person). Rather, she wanted something done about the way that cats were “generally so misunderstood and grossly ill-treated”. Just like the poor, cats were always with us and it was the duty of the Queen of Great Britain to extend her protection to these most abject of her subjects.
Many of the women who were involved in the feline welfare initiatives of the late 19th-century were also active in the growing suffrage movement. They were often the granddaughters of families who had campaigned against slavery a hundred years earlier. All three causes shared a single principle – the right of sentient creatures according to natural law to live free of artificial impediments imposed by man. This progressive alliance, though, was a gift to often misogynist newspaper editors and the cartoonists they commissioned. Caricatures poured from the popular press showing cats dressed up as suffragettes and vice versa. The captions pointed to further insulting symmetries: cats, like women, could purr nicely when they wanted something, but the moment they were crossed they unsheathed their claws, something which the dog, aka “man’s best friend” was incapable of doing. Politically active cat ladies strolled into shops and galleries looking sleek and well-bred, and then revealed their wildcat temperament as they threw paint at masterworks and screeched about “Votes for Women”. Particularly unfortunate suffragists who addressed public meetings got used to having dead cats lobbed in their direction.
Yet even in these fraught circumstances the cat, as ever, refused to be pinned down. In 1913 the Liberal Government passed The Cat and Mouse Act which allowed prison doctors to release hunger-striking suffragettes temporarily until their health improved and they were well enough to return to jail and endure another round of forced-feeding. The Act got its unofficial name from the way a cat plays with its prey, allowing it to escape multiple times before swooping down for a fatal final snap. In one of the most powerful bits of political art ever created, the Women’s Social and Political Union designed a poster which literalises the Cat and Mouse Act by showing a giant domestic cat with a limp suffragette clamped beneath its bloody teeth. The homicidal animals represents the police, the prison authorities but above all the Liberals – the party historically associated with individual conscience and principled dissent – who had signed the act into existence. The limp suffragette represents every woman who has been refused the resources – political, social and economic – that would enable her to live on the same terms as men. It remains one of the most iconic bits of political imagery ever produced and is credited by historians as the moment when the progressive middle-classes wondered for the first time in their lives whether they should give up their natural affiliation to the Liberal party and defect to Labour instead.
Whatever way the presidential vote goes on 5 November, we can be sure that the cat lady trope will be pressed into play. If Kamala Harris wins she will be denigrated by Republicans as the cat that got the cream – obscenely smug at having stolen something that is far beyond her natural due. If she loses then she will go back to being a “childless cat lady”, an abject creature who has failed to fulfil her natural obligations and, from now on, can expect only pity mixed in with a dash of contempt.
Kathryn Hughes is the author of Catland: feline enchantment and the making of the modern world, 4th Estate
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