Video footage from 2021 has resurfaced of JD Vance attacking “childless cat ladies” on Fox News. Childless women like Kamala Harris, he claimed, have no direct stake in the future of the country. Miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made, they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.
Childless
Vance is not the first person to suggest childless women have no stake in their nation’s future. In 2007, Australian Senator Bill Heffernan declared Labour Party deputy leader Julia Gillard unfit for leadership because she was “deliberately barren“.
In 2016, Andrea Leadsom was forced to withdraw from the Conservative Party leadership race after attempting to capitalise on Theresa May’s “very sad” lack of children; while former Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon was obliged to explain her childless state by revealing personal information about a miscarriage. There really was no ‘need’ for us to know that Sturgeon and May are not ‘childless’ by choice, but now we do.
Kamala Harris, in fact, is not ‘childless’. She is step-parent to her husband Douglas Emhoff’s two children and is, according to Emhoff’s former wife, “a loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present co-parent”. This, it seems, is not good enough for Vance.
Variations on the genetic nuclear family are not new. Six former US Presidents had no biological children: ‘Father of the Nation’ George Washington; ‘Father of the Constitution’ James Madison; James K. Polk (1845-1849); James Buchanan (1857-1861); Andrew Johnson (1865-1869); and Warren G. Harding (1921-1923).
Four of them, however – Washington, Madison, Johnson and Harding – either adopted their wives’ children or were guardians to others. Undoubtedly, this reinforced the fine reputations of these former Presidents.
Ladies
Clearly, childlessness is an issue that is problematic in relation to women but not, generally, to men. True, Vance included Pete Buttigieg in his attack on childless cat ladies, but more as a homophobic sideswipe. At the time of Vance’s recording in 2021, Buttigieg and his husband were in the process of adopting. He was criticised shortly afterwards for taking paternal leave.
For Vance, a decision by a woman not to have children is unnatural. Childbirth is her raison d’être: her God-given duty. He is not alone: Project 2025 sets out the US conservative Heritage Foundation’s proposals for the US government and its policy aims. Central to Project 2025 is “restor[ing] the family as the centrepiece of American life”.
Allied to this is the overturning in 2022 of Roe v. Wade, which effectively dissolved federal protections on reproductive rights, stripping women of autonomy over their own bodies in nearly half of US states, potentially even in cases of rape, incest or danger to the woman’s own life. Both issues involve a shocking roll-back of women’s rights regarding decisions about their own bodies or about the right to choose a lifestyle that is fulfilling for them.
At the heart of this is control: a woman’s ‘natural’ place is in the home taking care of children; therefore not having children is deviant. In this nostalgic winding back of the clock to the conservative values of the 1950s, a woman is humble, modest, submissive and obedient towards her husband. A woman who chooses a career rather than marriage and motherhood is viewed as a destabilising threat – all the more so if she aspires to and achieves positions of power.
‘Othering’ such women is not difficult: the Madonna/whore dichotomy holds that a woman who is not a virgin or a wife/mother must, by default, be a whore. Hence, based on a relationship with an older man when she was 29, highly successful career woman Kamala Harris, who did not marry until the age of 49, is accused of having “slept her way to the top“.
Yet Harris’s accusers do not judge her current opponent in the race for the presidency by the same standards. Donald Trump is twice divorced, has had five children by three wives, multiple extra-marital affairs and a conviction for sexual abuse. Yet sociology professor Samuel L Perry believes that for Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters, his sexual misdeeds affirm his masculinity, confirming him as “a virile, red-blooded man”, struggling with “not just lust for sex…but for power”. Sometimes he fails: this gives other ‘real’ men trying to live by the scriptures a sense of connection to him.
Cats
An online search for ‘description of witch’ returns the following: ‘a woman, usually old, who has evil powers’; ‘scheming, power-hungry, manipulating’; ‘crone-like’ or alternatively ‘seductive’; ‘loud cackle’. “Throw in a cat and you’ve got iron-clad proof that said woman was a witch.”
When, in 2018, former BBC presenter Andrew Neil referred to Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr as “mad cat woman”, she understood that he was calling her a witch. He “might as well burn me at the stake”, was her response.
During the early modern period (15th to early 18th centuries), Europe and British America were in the grip of a witch-hunting frenzy. Most of those accused were women. Often they were old, ‘odd’, a nuisance, or perhaps had simply made enemies. What they were not, was ‘witches’. Women, it seemed, were a necessary evil: necessary for procreation; evil because the ‘original sin’ was theirs. This is why they must be controlled.
The association of cats with witches stems from this time. The 1324 trial in Ireland of Alice Kyteler included the accusation that she possessed an incubus resembling a black cat. Others accused of being witches could shape-shift, or kept black cats as ‘familiars’ that suckled on their ‘witch’s mark’. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared that the cat was the devil’s favourite animal and idol of all witches. Interestingly, investigations for this article suggest that neither Kamala Harris nor Carole Cadwalladr has a cat. Vance has this covered: in another podcast he asserted that childless people were sociopathic, deranged and psychotic.
If the control and ‘othering’ of women goes back centuries, their treatment during presidential campaigns is new. While patently impossible to sideline Hillary Clinton as a ‘childless cat lady’, when, during the final US presidential debate in 2016, she commented on Trump’s tax history, his immediate response was “Such a nasty woman“. The phrase resonated and continues to do so with many women the world over who have been reprimanded for being ‘bossy’ or stepping out of line.
As for Kamala Harris – well, alongside the childlessness, the ‘slut-shaming’, the racism and questioning of her eligibility on grounds of birthplace, there is one more very significant characteristic: Kamala cackles!
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