On The Unmitigated Joy Of Being A Cat Lady

The archetype of the cat-owning woman has been embedded in the cultural narrative for centuries: from pagan notions of the witch and her “familiar” in the Middle Ages and satirical cat cartoons in anti-suffragette propaganda, to the incoherent ranting of Eleanor Abernathy in The Simpsons, otherwise known as (what else?) Crazy Cat Lady. Cat ownership became a shorthand for a certain sort of woman – typically older, often unmarried and almost always childless. The sort of woman who, in the eyes of some, flies in the face of traditional ideas of womanhood.

And while we might like to think that such chauvinistic attitudes died out along with Nuts magazine and Russell Brand’s career, only last month it emerged that the new Republican Vice Presidential nominee, JD Vance, had described prominent female Democrats as “childless cat ladies” in an interview in 2021, in which he also bemoaned the idea that “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children”. Oh, how he underestimated the wrath of the internet’s cat mom community. Taylor Swift herself weighed in this week, when she officially pledged her allegiance to Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Instagram. The singer posted her message with a picture of herself with one of her cats, and signed it off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

And therein, perhaps, lies the secret to the crazy cat lady’s rebrand: a new and more open-minded generation who are rejecting outdated tropes around what a “successful” life looks like for a woman. Who know that a cat is not a catch-all for some kind of moral failure. “The stereotype of a lonely woman growing old with dozens of cats always implied that said woman had nothing going for her, but the funny thing is, anyone who has ever owned a cat knows the opposite to be true,” says 31-year old fashion journalist and self-proclaimed cat mom, Lauren Eggertsen. “Having a cat gives me so much freedom to pour into all the other aspects of my life, while also receiving the fullest life at home. My cat, Nagini, is independent but values our quality time together like no other!”