J.D. Vance’s recently resurfaced “childless cat ladies” comments, in which he disparaged people with no children and disregarded people with unconventional families, should come as no surprise. Vance, now former President Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, is notoriously conservative and flippant with his words.
Speaking on Fox News in 2021, the Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio senator called Democrats “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.” Vance specifically mentioned Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to be clear, Harris is a stepmother (which apparently doesn’t count because she didn’t birth her children from her body); Buttigieg is gay and now an adoptive father, although at the time he had not yet adopted his children; and Ocasio-Cortez has a long-term boyfriend, with no children.
In another speech in 2021, Vance proposed that parents should have more voting power than people who aren’t parents. “[Does] this mean that parents get a bigger say in how a democracy functions? Yes, absolutely,” he told a crowd at a conservative nonprofit in Virginia.
But the candidate’s comments (which he and Trump have since attempted to roll back) reflect not just blunders or poor word choice, but a real and active Republican agenda that attempts to keep women and queer people in inferior positions in society — particularly those who do not conform to traditional ideals of family, marriage and property. They embrace a patriarchal vision of society centered around the white nuclear family — and nothing is more threatening to that than bodily self-determination.
The precedent for attacks on childless cat ladies arguably originates deep in medieval Europe, when women who lived alone with a familiar were subject to accusations of witchcraft. Hunting down single women as so-called witches crossed the Atlantic with European colonists, as did the image of cats as a sign of Satan — the 1692 Salem witch trials, which led to the execution of 14 women and five men for alleged witchcraft, included many explicit references to cats as a sign of the devil.
In spite of hundreds of years of attempts by white colonizers here in the U.S. to impose a strict patriarchal nuclear family structure on the population, the popularity of remaining child-free and/or single people has grown consistently with the growth of the nation, with the average birth rate steadily declining throughout the 19th and most of the 20th centuries. White nationalist ideologues were also dealt a blow by the end of chattel slavery, which was a system of near-total control over the reproductive lives of Black women; following that system’s collapse, they spent decades developing and advocating for eugenics and scientific racism, a new mode for controlling Black and Brown people’s reproduction.
But all in all, this country’s patriarchal racists have been in a losing battle with the women and LGBTQ people whose bodies they attempt to control.
That loss of control only became more acute through the last century: A brief baby boom and period of social conservatism in the 1950s and ‘60s was followed by the sexual revolution. Birth control became widely available; gay, lesbian and bisexual people emerged from the woodwork; and ideas about virginity, sex outside marriage and monogamy were worn down by an assertive and diverse set of cultural movements advocating for more liberatory options.
While some backlash has followed the gender and sexual liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the cat, so to speak, seems to be out of the bag for good. Today, a record number of adults in the U.S. say they do not plan to have children because they simply don’t want them — they are not just “childless” but child-free by choice.
But at the level of policy, rather than culture, there is still much at stake.
“My view is babies are good, families are good,” Vance told a local TV station last month. This is an attempt to keep his family spin positive — but in reality, Vance only supports some types of families, and only believes in the safety of some children and babies.
Vance and his party are currently pushing policies that severely restrict abortion access and make in-vitro fertilization (IVF) more difficult (although Vance and Trump claim they are pro-IVF). And Vance has taken the unpopular stance that people without children should pay more in taxes — despite skipping a Senate vote just last week on the child tax credit, a popular tax break for families that has been longstanding bipartisan policy. Vance also has it out for transgender children — he introduced a Senate bill last year that would have criminalized providing trans health care to minors and prevented accredited institutions from teaching about gender, and another that would have banned “X” gender markers on passports.
The right’s chaotic attacks and bully rhetoric on women and families have created some easy points of unity on the left. Vance’s newly minted opponent for VP, Tim Walz, presents a near-opposite set of policy stances, supporting full abortion access, protecting IVF, advocating to fund health and child care for all families who need it, and assertively protecting trans children in Minnesota, the state where he is currently governor. These policy stances from the Democrats represent the long-term success of multiple movements for bodily self-determination — and they also represent the majority view in this country.
Despite the right’s best efforts, overwhelming majorities of people in the U.S. support full abortion rights, recognize gay rights and oppose restrictions on trans health.
Perhaps also worth noting, one in four households in this country is home to a cat. And the number of people who plan to never have children only continues to climb — a statistic that accelerated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of the climate crisis, a key concern among younger voters and potential parents.
The anti-cat lady rhetoric, in other words, can only go so far. Many will rightly perceive it as incoherent at best, and reminiscent of medieval witch hunts at worst. The right-wing desperation to scapegoat trans people and women, and the Democrats’ embrace of both, could actually be a good omen in the long history of the culture wars — a reminder that reactionaries are threatened because queers and cat ladies are winning.