When Taylor Swift announced her support for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign last week, she signed the post ‘Childless cat lady’. It was a reference to the Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s interview with Tucker Carlson in 2021, in which he said Democratic party members were a “bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives”.

Journalist Elle Hunt and Helen Pidd reflect on their experience being cat owners and why the sexist trope of ‘childless cat ladies’ is holding less power in 2024.

Prof Diane Purkiss explains the history of women’s relationship with cats, and how throughout history, the idea of a lonely cat-obsessed woman has been a popular misogynistic insult. She was not surprised to see JD Vance’s comments.

“I read it immediately as part of the witch-hunting misogynist mindset that suggests that any woman who doesn’t fit into an incredibly narrow stereotype, set up not by women themselves but by men, is somehow crazy or valueless or worthless.”

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