Crazy cat ladies have come to dominate this election season. It’s hardly the first time.
By: Natalie Kinkade September 25, 2024 11 minutes
Before internet memes, postcards offered a popular, accessible, shareable means to combine image and word. Messages could be as simple as “wish you were here,” but in their “golden age” (circa 1898–1917), postcards provided a powerful way to promote political agendas, writes scholar Kenneth Florey. The golden age neatly coincided with the height of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and Britain. More than a thousand varieties of pro- and anti-suffrage-themed postcards were produced then, 200 of which are included in “Votes and Petticoats,” a Johns Hopkins University digital collection available on JSTOR. Of these, a significant number, curiously, depict cats—both as women’s pets and as women.
Associations between ladies, cats, and cat ladies—childless and otherwise—are rooted in a long, complicated cultural history. In Edwardian times, cats were linked to women as creatures of the domestic domain: woman was Angel of the House, the cat her companion, both of them sweet, warm, helpful, and cute. At the same time, animal lovers, “spinsters,” and suffragists represented overlapping, suspect categories of womanhood. It’s the perennial paradox in which women find themselves: somehow looked down upon while also placed on a pedestal.
This postcard captures many of the themes that recur across the collection: it suggests that a woman demanding the vote is as silly as a kitten so doing, their protests as ineffective as the kitten’s mewls. The green, white, and purple stripes behind the kitten were the colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), one of the more militant British suffrage societies. Historian Krista Cowman interprets the sexism in this postcard as infantilizing though not especially cruel. Similarly, Florey describes the use of cats in suffrage postcards as softening a message that might otherwise seem harsh.
In a similar vein, this cat is draped in the colors of the WSPU and wearing a fashionably magnificent hat. The message is ambiguous: Larissa Schulte Nordholt contends that it’s probably meant to satirize the concept of women participating in politics, the well-groomed, fat feline playing on the perception of suffragists as spoiled. It was published by a company that produced other, more clearly anti-suffrage postcards. But there’s a certain dignity in the cat’s determined forward gaze and assertive paw that perhaps suffragists could have embraced, regardless of the creator’s intention. Then again, that seriousness can also be interpreted as the very thing an anti-suffragist postcard maker was mocking by attaching it to a fluffy house cat.
Less whimsically, other postcards feature cats as pets in human scenes.
Here, the suffragists portrayed are mannish and middle-aged, typical of many negative suffragist depictions, stereotyping them as unsexed spinsters. While the housewife they address isn’t an idealized Angel of the House, she has a traditionally “motherly” figure and wears more feminine clothing. The suffragists, the viewer thus understands, are out of touch with what “real” working women want. If the suffragists had families to occupy them, they wouldn’t worry about the vote. And if lower-class women had the vote, they wouldn’t care to exercise it.
The cat in this postcard is outside the house and thus linked to the suffragists (it sits slightly apart, but arguably that positioning is dictated by compositional rather than symbolic reasons). The suffragists are “outdoor cats,” less benign and more feral—less feminine—than their indoor counterparts. It’s also worth noting that the cat is black, which taints it, and thus the suffragists, with associations of witchcraft and bad luck.
Here too the suffragist is associated with a black cat, to unflattering, ridiculous effect. Although it was considered appropriately feminine for women to care for animals, women and femininity were also considered weaker, sillier, and more frivolous than men and masculinity; caring too much for other creatures came was considered a sign of fragility and triviality.
Tobias Menely has traced the disparagement of animal welfare through the evolution of gender norms in the modern period. As an early example, he cites a 1786 Scottish magazine story about a “Mrs. Sensitive” who dotes on a menagerie of pets yet cares little for “poor Christians.” In Menely’s analysis, Mrs. Sensitive is “immoral and unnatural, an ancestor of our own crazy cat ladies, women whose maternal instincts, we are led to believe, have been attenuated by an affinity for animals.”
By 1909, around the time these postcards were produced, sensitivity to animals was fully pathologized, as Menely relates: one doctor, Charles Dana, called it “zoöphilpsychosis” and published an article about it in the Medical Record. A case study pronounced a “childless woman who transformed her house into a hospital for sick felines” as “beyond medical redemption.” Sufferers of “zoöphilpsychosis” were described as “sentimental,” “weak,” and “hysterical”—terms loaded with sexist connotations.
These stereotypes are further repeated in conversations surrounding the anti-vivisection movement, another woman-dominated cause that reached its height in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
This is one of several suffrage postcards that feature photographs of live and presumably taxidermized kittens dressed up and posed. Although this postcard’s message could be interpreted multiple ways, Nordholt points out that the use of taxidermy speaks to the “synchronous oppressions of women and cats.”
Indeed, Susan Hamilton quotes a contemporary critic of anti-vivisection using misogyny to defend animal cruelty:
Is it necessary to repeat that women—or rather, old maids—form the most numerous contingent of [antivivisectionists]? Let my adversaries contradict me, if they can show among the leaders of the agitation one young girl, rich, beautiful, and beloved, or some young wife who has found in her home the full satisfaction of her affections!
Although suffragettes and antivivisectionists didn’t always align, the two movements had much in common, including the consistent stereotyping of their members as spinsters. And as we have seen in “But Surely My Good Woman…,” spinsters were objects of mistrust and derision.
It wasn’t always that way. For a time in the nineteenth century, single women could claim feminine power through the “Single Blessedness” movement. Where women had long been shamed or pitied for not marrying, they began to frame their singleness as reflective of a higher calling: still nurturing, still Christian, but outside of marriage. Harriet Tubman, for example, spent eighteen of her most productive and prominent years without a husband. As a Black woman, Tubman faced extra scrutiny for being unmarried. She leveraged the concept of Single Blessedness for respectability.
As women began to agitate more for equal rights, however, Single Blessedness fell out of favor. Lee Chambers-Schiller provides an overview, writing that
[a]s the century wore on, spinsters were increasingly defined as unacceptable childcare providers, guardians, or even teachers of children. Their spinsterhood took on an ominous cast, their celibacy no longer evidence of pure, Christian love, but now suggestive of physical, emotional, and intellectual degeneracy.
It wasn’t just that spinsters lacked the feminine graces needed to attract a man—their “degeneracy” was a result of their childlessness:
The woman whose reproductive organs went unused would experience their atrophy and derangement, together with a painful menopause and general physical and mental deterioration. A spinster could look forward to a shortened life span and quite possibly insanity.
The suffragist in this postcard is marked as a spinster; her masculine features, hat, and clothing tell us as much. Wild-eyed and staring off the page, she’s so out of touch with reality and with her maternal instincts that she doesn’t even realize her audience of “Citizens” consists only of confused children.
Opponents of women’s suffrage argued that banning women from voting was actually a way of protecting them and preserving their angelic femininity. Politics, they claimed, was a nasty business that would take women away from their divine calling in the home, to the detriment of the race.
This woman represents anti-suffragists’ fears of what society would look like if women gained the vote. In contrast to the depictions of suffragists as dowdy old maids, the woman portrayed in this postcard is conventionally attractive and fashionably dressed. But her decadent New Woman status is given away by her cigarette—proper women didn’t smoke!—and her “District Leaderess” sash. The pole behind her is covered in campaign signs for mostly female candidates, including “Miss Spinster” for justice of the children’s court, which viewers are of course meant to interpret as an outrageous irony.
The role-reversal that women’s suffrage would supposedly bring about is communicated in several postcards, once again, through cat imagery.
Here, the man of the house is substituting for the absent woman by staying home, caring for the children, and making tea. The cat suffers the consequences of his ineptitude in the unnatural role.
Alternately, this man is taking good care of the home and family for his suffragist wife, but he’s thus emasculated. The halo of the golden plate, evoking the Virgin Mary, as well as the cat on the hearth behind him, emphasize his domesticity.
The absurdity of men in the women’s/cats’ sphere is surpassed by the absurdity of women/cats in the men’s sphere.
This British postcard seems to reference suffragists’ “raids” on the Houses of Parliament, during which women attempted to occupy the legislative chambers to protest their exclusion from them. The symbolism of this image is a striking echo of how the Daily Express described a suffrage raid in 1907: “[T]he sight reminded one very much of the removal of naughty kittens from a room in which they had been disporting themselves freely.” Cowman cites this description as example of voices in the press that often made light of the women’s suffrage movement, thus “making it appear over-feminine and consequently somewhat frivolous.”
Like “I Want My Vote!”, both this postcard and the Daily Express article infantilize women by portraying them as kittens. Viewers are meant to chuckle at the silly kittens’ attempt to infiltrate the doghouse—the kittens are cute, but they’ll never displace or even disturb the dog, who sleeps through their efforts.
“A Raid on the House” is particularly insulting when contrasted with the reality of the women’s suffrage movement, in which participants faced violent attacks. One march on the House of Commons in 1910 became known as “Black Friday” when suffragists were brutally beaten by police.
Bandaged and bruised, this bedraggled cat seems to represent a suffragist who has been beaten but is still dedicated to the cause. Whether the cat’s determination makes it sympathetic or stupid is a matter of interpretation.
Cats, as it turns out, are difficult to pigeonhole. So are women. According to Alleyn Diesel, the association between cats and women goes back at least as far as Ancient Egypt. Goddesses in ancient and contemporary religions have frequently been portrayed as either part-cat or accompanied by cats. And when it comes to goddesses, being catlike doesn’t mean being sweet and domestic. On the contrary, feline-linked deities are known for “self-reliance, elegance, and… willingness to be tamed strictly on their own terms”: powerful qualities that patriarchal societies mistrust in women.
When JD Vance questioned why a childless person would want to be a teacher or a leader, infamously calling Kamala Harris and her ilk “miserable” and “childless cat ladies,” he was invoking old, sexist stereotypes. The Harris campaign responded by selling “childless cat lady” merch. This tactic of reclaiming an insult and turning it into a badge of honor also has rich historical precedent.
The intention behind this final postcard may have been, yet again, to paint the fight for suffrage as absurd, to make suffragists seem like willful, unfeminine animals.
But the sender of the postcard wrote on the back, “See the expression: In town for the fight. Have used my night off for training my guns in the new campaign. Ha! Ha! You will see the signs soon.” We can’t be sure, but the writer seems to have been a suffragist, claws out.
Editor’s Note: Harry Whittier Frees, the likely photographer of the image depicting clothed kittens in line to vote, used live animals in his work, not taxidermy. The text has been amended to account for this fact.
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