In defence of ‘childless cat ladies’

The Republican vice-presidential candidate has attacked women without children. Millie examines the logic of misogyny behind these attacks.

Soon after JD Vance was named as Donald Trump’s nominee for vice president, a 2021 Tucker Carlson interview was widely posted online in which Vance said: ‘We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats… by a bunch of childless cat ladies… you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigeg, AOC – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.’ He went on to say people without children should have fewer democratic rights. 

These statements reflect reactionary right-wing anxiety about the changing role of women, a loss of patriarchal male power in the household, and a falling birth rate. For my whole childhood the dominant narrative was that the earth was overpopulated, that the population was increasing in the Global South, with runaway growth that would overwhelm natural resources and lead to war and social breakdown. 

High birth rates were met with authoritarian measures by governments including forced sterilisation in India during the state of emergency between 1975-77, and China’s one child policy. 

Now that birth rates have gone below the 2.1 children per woman replacement rate, not only in Europe and the US but also in India and Bangladesh, there is a panic about low birth rates, how we will pay for pensions, who will do all the care for the elderly, and so on. 

Right-wing attacks on women’s autonomy have always been based on the idea that some women should be having more babies – and some other women should be having fewer. This is still happening. We have in Britain newspapers simultaneously complaining about the low birth rate, and supporting the two child limit for Universal Credit. Birth rate anxiety is often, on closer examination a version of the the ‘Great Replacement theory’, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging a transnational project of social engineering, often claimed to be coordinated by Jewish financiers such as George Soros, to replace white people in America and western Europe with black and brown immigrants.

While women without children are being judged as worthless cat ladies, poor people with children are pushed beyond endurance. The two child limit on Universal Credit pushes thousands of families below the breadline. Parents on Universal Credit are harried constantly to increase their work hours and threatened with sanctions. Families in temporary accommodation are threatened with eviction to force them to relocate miles away. Governments of all parties bang on about hard working families but then treat them like political footballs. 

In the 1970s, many Black and working class women in Britain were seen as undesirable mothers. Some were pressured to have sterilisations, sometimes without consent. Working class women in Glasgow were given contraceptive injections by deception. Children born to these women were assumed to grow up to be a hassle and to use up resources. 

These abuses to prevent births by ‘undesirable’ mothers went on while women were also having to fight for access to contraceptives and legal safe abortion. Forced sterilisation and denial of the right to choose abortion are two sides of the same coin; an attempt to take away women’s autonomy, to stop them choosing their own destiny, and a vision of women as breeders, some desirable, some undesirable.

Oppression of, and discrimination against women, are very much live issues, but there has been a major change over two generations in women’s independence. Women are more economically independent and are more able to choose to work, live alone, go on holiday with friends and live happy and satisfying lives outside of marriage and the patriarchal family. This independence is what the right seeks to destroy, to return women to a subordinate position within marriage and the family.

The extent to which misogyny is a fundamental motivation for men on  the right is often underestimated. Perceived loss of power over women is a massive recruitment issue into reactionary politics for resentful men. In reality, they haven’t lost enough power.

Kamala Harris is stepmother to two children. She is still a ‘childless cat lady’, in the eyes of Vance. People care for children and adults in all kinds of relationships that are not biological kinship. Vance and his ilk don’t actually value caring and childrearing, they just want to enforce it on women in a hierarchical relationship. Even being a married woman with step children does not ward off right-wing bile. 

A fundamental part of human life is loving and caring for other people. This is fulfilling and it involves hard work and sacrifice that is not equally distributed. Many bonds of love and care are callously ripped apart, cheered on by the forces of the right. Migrant children are separated from their parents and put in cages. Parents of trans children trying to do their best by them are threatened with state reprisals. Both traditional family relationships and other kinds of relationships are destroyed by the criminal justice system, by preventable death, and by borders. Caring for others is done by people in all kinds of relationships, and people have struggled to build structures for caring for each other outside of the traditional family and this caring is unsupported, and often hindered, by the state. 

The right doesn’t want to protect families. If they did, they would be out there campaigning about air pollution and black mould in damp homes, both big killers of children. The recent riots in Britain saw people claiming to be motivated by concerns for women and children throwing bricks through front windows of houses and setting fire to hotels while terrified people huddled together inside. The figure of the outsider – the immigrant, the deviant –  as a threat to ‘our’ women and children (i.e., the possessions of men) is a fascist trope. The right don’t care about children and families. What they want is to destroy all the alternatives to the patriarchal family, whether that is queer families, living alone, no fault divorce or single parenthood; they want to drive women back to the kitchen sink and bolt the door. It is imperative they are stopped.