[Grace Kao] Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ make memes for democracy

Who doesn’t love a good cat meme?

In a 2021 interview with Fox News, US Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance referred to Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Later he adds, “It's just a basic fact -- you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC -- the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.” It turns out that Vice President Kamala Harris has children (she is a stepmother to two children) and the news reports I can find suggest she has no cats. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was at the time going through a difficult adoption process and now has twins. I do not know if he has cats, but maybe it’s not relevant since he’s not a woman.

Perhaps Mr. Vance forgot that cats rule the internet. Admittedly, many of my friends, including myself, are “childless cat ladies.” We also support Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy for US President, so the recent news coverage of former President Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s comments has proliferated my social media feed with hilarious cat memes. I thought it would be fun to document them here.

The idea of a “cat lady” is of a woman who lives alone, never married and does not have children. These women are treated as suspicious and deviant because they have not met the expectations of a woman in a patriarchal capitalist society. According to a July 2024 CNN article, Hart Ayrault in an 1881 issue of Potter’s American Monthly described unmarried women as “having failed in the prime object of existence.” Moreover, these women lack “maternal instinct for all creatures but her pets.” The phrase “cat lady” and its association with single women is a common one. According to the same CNN article, black cats are also associated with witches.

Cats were also used by anti-suffragettes, who sometimes argued that giving women the right to vote was as ridiculous as giving cats the right to vote. One such postcard from 1905 shows a cat with a card that says “Vote for Shes” followed by the caption "The 'Suffragette,' Down with the Tom Cats."

This brings me to one of the first memes I saw. It was a photo of a black cat with the following slogan:

Cats against JD Vance.

Because he would be a Cat-tasrophe

Paid for by Childless Cat Ladies of America

And the Neuter Vance 2024 PAC

A second meme was one of thousands of AI-generated cats on a lawn in DC. It reads:

I’m with Her!

Kamala Harris 2024

The Million Meow March

Another meme features a fluffy calico cat with an US flag as a cape flying near the White House. The caption reads: "Childless Cat Ladies for Harris 2024." Or how about the one that simply shows a cat looking up with the slogan, “Harris 2024. Yes we cat.”

There’s also the beautifully illustrated meme featuring a row of forward-facing cats with the slogan “Felines Against Felons.” Another one that I saw on Facebook simply states, “Cat ladies for Kamala. We’re not going back to the alley.”

Others use old photographs. For example, one post shows a line of women, each with a black cat, which reads, “2024 Voting Lines.” I don’t know if the cats are photoshopped, but it effectively makes its point.

Of course, dogs were used to also lend support to Vice President Harris. One meme includes black and white photographs of Vance and Trump with the captions “hates cats” and “hates dogs” respectively. The bottom half features a cute photo of a cat and dog in front of an American flag with the slogan, “Pets for Kamala.” An Instagram post under the hashtag #childlesscatladies states, “Hope everyone enjoys a good book today. Except JD Vance. Just wanted to make it clear that childless dog women hate you too.”

There’s another genre that includes celebrities -- usually women who are known to love cats. These include memes featuring Taylor Swift (who has 3 cats), Dolly Parton, Betty White, Sigourney Weaver (as her character in Alien), among others. Men have also joined the effort against the Republicans. Lance Bass (formerly of boy group NSYNC) lovingly holds his cat with the caption, “Cats 4 Kamala Harris.” Recently, there was even a massive zoom call in support of presidential candidate Harris titled, “White Dudes for Harris.” This call included 190,000 listeners and featured actors Jeff Bridges (who played The Dude in the film “The Big Lebowski”), Mark Hamill and Mark Ruffalo.

In all seriousness, much is at stake in the upcoming US presidential elections. Former President Trump recently told his supporters at a rally, “Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein once said, “How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven.” I hope he’s right, but for now I’ll be happy if cat memes help save democracy in the US.

Grace Kao

Grace Kao is an IBM professor of sociology and professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. -- Ed.