Cats Are Having a Redemption Arc
Imagine being a cat right now.
One minute, you're minding your own business for 12 hours in a closet, confident in your superiority and uninterested in haters. You've accepted that the dopey, drooly dog is the all-American archetypal household pet. A ridiculous choice, you think, but caring is beneath you, and you've got biscuits to make.
Then, boom. It is your meow-ment. Over several months in 2024, you become a national figurehead, a symbol of progressive politics, a brand icon for reproductive freedom. You're draped over the neck of self-proclaimed childless cat lady Taylor Swift in an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris. Your likeness is tacked inside a Hillsborough Democratic Party office space during the presidential debate. You're the subject of countless memes calling out the cat-eating conspiracies of former President Donald Trump. Suddenly, you are hotter than the September pavement in Florida.
How did this happen?
Cats and women have been linked pejoratively for centuries. The trope asserts that crazy, reclusive females with felines are unpalatable, doomed to hide from society and wander down the sidewalk with one slipper. Cat ownership has been gendered in an unsavory way since the days of witch hysteria and Puritanism. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were a symbol of the anti-suffragist movement, used in posters to depict women as too feeble-minded to vote.
To be clear, the "childless cat lady" cliche is sophomoric and deeply unimaginative, rude to both women and cats. It assumes that people who can't or don't want to have children are broken, that those of us who have struggled with infertility (hi, hello) are lesser, condemned to spend our lives in the presence of aloof furbags who would maul us if graced with more size.
It's perhaps unsurprising that vice presidential candidate JD Vance would seize such a low-hanging metaphor. In 2021, he told Tucker Carlson that the U.S. was under rule of "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." His middle school cafeteria putdown resurfaced, of course. But this time, it served to activate a nation of cat lovers.
"Wasn't his best move, but he ignited an entire almost sleeping movement, didn't he?"
That's Steven Meserve, a cat advocate so passionate about how cool cats are that he called me from England to discuss at a moment's notice. Meserve is a celebrity in the cat world, the colorful founder of Loving Cats Worldwide, an organization that hosts cat events for a new generation. He lives in Portugal with his partner and 10 cats.
"Everything that's happened in the media over the last few months has been really incredible," he said. "Taylor Swift's obviously a huge cat fan -- two Scottish Folds and a Ragdoll! She's the biggest childless cat lady that we can think about at the moment. People are starting to take notice."
Cats were trending in a youthful direction before Vance's dustup. When Meserve's cat show came to Tampa last May, he said, the 5,000-person crowd was largely 20- and 30-somethings. Plenty of fans still fit into the older childless cat lady oeuvre, he said. They are loved equally, all sharing the same independent streak that makes a cat lover.
"Cats are not the same," he said. "They're not as domesticated as dogs are. Dogs obey and do what we say. Cats very rarely do."
This sentiment, perhaps, is the purring engine of this cultural moment. Cats don't go along with the will of a master. Cats will always chart their own course on top of the cabinets.
Take those suffragists. In 1916, Nell Richardson and Alice Burke embarked on a cross-country road trip to advance the vote for women. According to the National Parks Service, they understood that cats were being used against them in ads, so they adopted a black kitten named Saxon as their mascot.
Burke chronicled the experience in her diary:
"The little black kitten is suffering as much as we are from the heat, but he keeps under a cover," she wrote. "And all we can see around the corner of it is a pink nose and a youthful whisker."
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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.
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