How 'cat lady' became an insult for women of a certain age
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The stereotypical 'cat lady' is one of pop culture’s most bizarre characters — and easiest punching bags. Here's how it rose to infamy.
The stereotypical “cat lady” is one of pop culture’s most bizarre characters — and easiest punching bags.
She’s “The Simpsons” recurring character Eleanor Abernathy, a reclusive resident of Springfield who speaks in gibberish and hurls her cats at passersby. She’s bedridden “Big Edie” Beale, tucked inside Grey Gardens, cuddling kittens while raccoons, rats and nature eat away at her decrepit mansion. She’s even Robert DeNiro in a 2004 sketch from “Saturday Night Live,” in which he plays a eccentric woman who lives with 80 cats.
She’s … Vice President Kamala Harris?
So said former President Donald Trump’s current running mate, Sen. JD Vance, in a recently resurfaced 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson. “Cat lady” is an insult usually reserved for women without children who share their homes with cats, but here, he used it to describe Harris and other politicians who don’t have biological children.
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” Vance said. “And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
“You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he went on. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” (Buttigieg and his husband announced that they adopted twins the month following Vance’s interview.)
Vance’s using “cat lady” as a dig at Harris “expresses hostility for women in public office by implying they should be at home” with children, said Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, a professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia who authored a chapter about “crazy cat ladies” in the nonfiction book “Animaladies.”
