As debates over the term 'childless cats' dominate the 2024 US election campaign, the BBC explores the historical connections between women and their furry friends.
No other animal has more convincingly described how the Western man views female sexuality than cats.
Sexually provocative women are called "sexy cats", women who "purr" seductively and those who look good are "cats".
However, the opposite of the "sexy cat" stereotype is the desexualized appearance of the "cat girl".
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And as the comments made by JD Vance, Donald Trump's 2021 vice-presidential candidate, that the country is ruled by "cats without children" recently resurfaced in public, it seems that the story of "cats" is still very current.
How did that story begin?
The stereotypical cat woman is a sitter, a woman who lives without a man, very often a lesbian.
She usually wears a sweater and glasses, is withdrawn and owns at least one cat, but more often than not.
Alice Madokot, author of Cats: Exploring Feline Friendships and Prevailing Superstitions (Cat Women: An Exploration of Feline Friendships and Lingering Superstitions) tells the BBC that historical connections between cats and women go back a long way, with a constant dichotomy between the hypersexual and the nonsexual.
Chaucer's Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales (1476), for example, was called a cat "which was an insult and an allusion to her being promiscuous - because she 'went to meow,'" Madikot says.
In other words, "being a cat desexualizes a woman, but it can also be used as an insult to indicate promiscuity and lust." (This comparison is not accidental; consider the term "cougar" used to describe women who are in relationships with younger men.)
The connection between women and cats is both older and more widespread.
In ancient Egypt, where cats were domesticated nearly 10.000 years ago, half-cat, half-woman, Bastet was the goddess of the household, fertility and childbirth.
She protected the home from evil spirits and diseases, and as is the case with most Egyptian deities, she also had a role in the afterlife, where she guided the dead and helped them.
In the Greco-Roman period, interpretations of the role of Bastet were taken over by Artemis (Greece) and Diana (Rome), whose connections with cats were visible, but to a lesser extent than with the predecessor.
These deities were represented in human form, where Artemis had close connections with cats, and Diana transformed into a cat (especially in Ovid's Metamorphoses, when the Roman gods fled to Egypt).
In Europe, the most significant example exists in Norse mythology - Freya, the goddess of fertility, love and luck, rode on a two-cart pulled by two cats.
In ancient China, fertility and pest control were dealt with by the cat goddess Li Shou.
So when did relationships between women and cats, especially in the West, acquire negative connotations and become controversial?
The origin of the connection between the cat and the woman
It seems that we can find the answer to that question in Christianity.
"The union of the woman and the cat is associated with pre-Christian goddesses," says Madicot, adding "that the church did not look favorably on and this may be the root of the later suspicion that exploded in the witch trials." (The witch trials were a series of hearings of people, most often women, who were accused of practicing witchcraft. Those found guilty were sentenced to death.)
In her book The Cat and the Human Imagination (The Cat and the Human Imagination), Kathryn M. Rogers writes that in the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church viewed single women who roamed freely like prowling cats.
Later, in order to eradicate all non-Christian beliefs in Europe, the church declared all non-Christian deities evil, and cats were treated as followers of Satan.
What followed was a flurry of religious propaganda in which women or cats or both were considered evil.
In 1233, Pope Gregory announced Vox in Rama, a decree that presented Europe's problem with non-Christian beliefs, accusing believers of participating in satanic cults while describing in detail the rituals of these sects.
Based on the book Classic Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat by Donald V. Eggers (Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat), this papal decree "blessed the extermination of cats, especially black cats, as well as the extermination of their owners."
When Agnes Waterhouse was executed in England after the first witch trial in 1566, she confessed that her personal demon (a supernatural spirit that accompanies a witch) was a cat called Satan, who later turned into a frog.
The sixty-three-year-old woman was hanged, which forever created the cat-woman-witch connection, which reached the United States by the end of the witch trials in the city of Salem.
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"Cats are independent and often intelligent—things that in the past people trying to control women didn't want them to be," says Madicot.
In more ways than one, this threatens the Christian hierarchy of life on earth, within which man is at the top.
Catherine M. Rogers develops this idea further, writing: “Cats quite aptly represent what men have longed for in women and bitterly complained about—they don't listen and they don't love enough.
Men who cannot control women as much as they would like to associate them with uncontrollable animals."
So it's no surprise that cats appeared in cartoons against the suffragette movement in America in the early 20th century to mock the women's movement and try to diminish its influence.
The connection between cats and women is part of a wider relationship between humans and animals, University of Wollongong Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsi, who approaches animal studies from a feminist postcolonial perspective, tells the BBC.
"The ideas we have about animals fit into the ideas we have about gender," she says.
"We habitually use descriptions of animals to talk about gender and to mark distinctive gendered behaviors ('bitch', 'hen', 'stallion', 'cougar') in the same way that race and racism do, within which descriptions of animals are constantly used to dehumanize people and deprive them of their humanity."
Catgirls in popular culture
As unmarried women are considered to be sitters and nanny girls, who only draw on relatives' financial resources, unmarried women who have cats are considered to be cursed in multiple ways.
By the beginning of the Victorian era, this relationship had entered the cultural milieu.
In 1880, the Dundee Courier magazine wrote: "a granny girl does not represent her own class, if she does not have a cat", because "one cannot exist without the other".
The image of an unmarried woman with a cat survived until the 20th century, experiencing a pop cultural zenith in 1976, when the documentary film Gray Gardens was shown.
The heroines of this film are Edith Bouvier Bill "Little Edie" and her mother Edith Iving Bouvier Bill "Big Edie" - relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Gray Gardens is the name of their house, which had 14 rooms in East Hampton, near New York.
Cats had taken over the house, and the floors were littered with cans of cat food and garbage, while the yard was overgrown with weeds.
This documentary was in a way a warning of what can happen to a woman when she is left without a man: Big Edi was divorced, and Little Edi never married.
"The catwoman stereotype marks women who don't meet the expectations of patriarchal society," says Madicot.
"Cat women are often older, unmarried and without children, and society tells women that this is a failure. If you don't meet expectations, then you will not only end up alone, but if you also have cats, then there is no going back and that leads to complete misery and desexualization."
Gray Gardens established a cat-girl template that has endured on the big screen for decades to come.
Both Michelle Pfeiffer and Halle Berry played Catwoman, but in those films the catwoman was also present - Pfeiffer was that in Batman Returns in 1992, while in Catwoman (2004), Berry had a feline mentor.
Then, remember Mrs. Diggle from Gremlin (1984), Eleanor Abernathy from The Simpsons (first appeared in 1988) and Robert De Niro as the cat lady in the show Saturday Night Live (2004)
The cat also appears in the LEGO movie (2014) - Mrs. Skračen-Post owns about twenty cats.
Cats are also a part of literature; some are identical to later characters on film, such as Catwoman in the book and film A Hell's Orange, then Aunt Jane of Professor Pringle in PJ Wodehouse's Jeeves and Worcester series, as well as Miss Caroline Piershouse in Agatha Christie's Sitford Mystery.
In recent times, the fear of women and cats, but also the stories that have a more naturalistic presence in popular culture, have become comical to some extent.
In the Gilmore series (2000-2007), Lorelai, recently out of a relationship again, calls her daughter Rory when first one, then another cat appears on her doorstep: “They know. The cats know I'm alone. I need to start collecting newspapers, find a blue bathrobe and lose my front teeth."
In a similar manner is the episode of the series Luda bivša devojka (2015-2019), where Rebeka jokes with her friends in a scene from the musical that she will become a catwoman, because she is left without a boyfriend.
In other words, the appearance of a catwoman is, to the greatest extent, a complete cliché.
These well-worn stereotypes about cat women, however, don't go over so well today.
Women have more freedom and power to survive outside the historically imposed "norms" - more and more of them decide on their own not to have a partner, not to give birth to children, to take on greater responsibility in the workplace, and the term "sedatelica", which is no longer in fashion, from recently used by feminists.
Even the name "cat girl" is widely and proudly used by cat owners on social networks, among them famous personalities like Taylor Swift.
"More than the stereotypes, there are many wonderful examples of friendships between women and cats that are actually just what they appear to be - positive relationships between pet and owner," says Medikot.
It turns out that Vice President Kamala Harris, the person to whom JD Vance directed the "childless cat lady" comment, is neither childless (she's a stepmother to two), nor does she own a cat, but the historical significance of the term and the conclusions we draw from it remain.
If a woman or person of any gender will accept being a "cat person" (regardless of whether they own an animal or not), then perhaps the choice of whether to identify as such in public is also solely hers or theirs.
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