The Witch to Childless Cat Lady Pipeline

When a straight white Evangelical Christian man is out here calling you a witch, you are doing something right.

Over the past month I've gotten more interview requests than ever before. Not about LGBTQ representation in pop culture, which is what most people have wanted to talk to me about in the past. Not even about Long Covid, my second most requested interview topic. No, these reporters and podcasters, etc. want to talk to me about Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance. I thought, at first, folks were reaching out due to the fact that I am an actual hillbilly, born and bred and a whole entire childhood of frolicking in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains — but no! It's because I am "famously" a Childless Cat Lady. Famously! And I guess that's true because I do have four (4) cats and zero (0) kids and people keep emailing and messaging me and asking me to write about this. 

And okay, I'm gonna do it, but only because it means I can talk about witches. 

It's been almost a month since the video resurfaced: Vance telling Tucker Carlson in 2021 that the Democratic party is "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." He also tweeted about "weird cat ladies" around that time. An earth month is about eleventy gazillion years in internet time, so the fact that people are still angry about this really shows what a deep nerve it hit. Or, I don't know, maybe it's the fact that Trump supporters are showing up at rallies with cups of fake Vance jizz, maybe that's what's keeping it in the conversation. 

I am terrible at Childless Cat Lady Discourse because I don't care about being called any of those things because "childless cat lady" is, and always has been, shorthand for "witch" — and when a straight white Evangelical Christian man is out here calling you a witch, you are doing something right. 

In Carmen Maria Machado's foreword to Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial, she asks readers to hold in their minds the first witch that really captured their imaginations, and then she says she's going to tell us some things about that witch, whoever she is, whatever story she came from: "She is a woman, single and childless. She has her own little house, which she may or may not share with an animal. She is an artist, or a craftswoman, or a scientist, if you imagine magic as a kind of science." 

Why? Well it started because the most independent women — and therefore the most threatening women to the Catholic Church and its single minded pursuit of white patriarchal power — in the Middle Ages were alewives. When the Black Death swept through Europe in 1348, killing half the population, widows who had the ability to brew beer and sell it at the local market were basically the only single women who had the means to support themselves. It freaked out the Catholic Church so badly that they launched a propaganda campaign against alewives that ultimately paved the way for the Witch Trials 350 years later.

Alewives wearing their tall black pointed hats so they'd stand out above the crowds in town with their wares. Alewives with their cats who kept the mice out of their grain storage. Alewives with their cauldrons for brewing their beer. Alewives without children because their children DIED IN A PLAGUE. 

Before the Catholic Church lost its mind and commissioned thousands of Doom Paintings around Europe depicting alewives burning in hell for their make-believe debauchery, women were responsible for brewing beer almost everywhere in the world. In fact, many cultures believed that female deities created the art of brewing and gifted it directly to women. And, in many of those cultures, those female deities of beer were also the deities of fertility and childbirth. Because OF COURSE the women who were brewing beer were also the ones brewing all the alchemical remedies of the day. And OF COURSE the women who brewed the alchemical remedies, and who had access to any kind of sedative, were also the ones in charge of bringing children into the world. 

And here come the cats. 

The Egyptian goddess Bastet, whose name means something close to "she of the ointment jar," was half-cat, half-woman; she was the goddess of home, domesticity, fertility, childbirth, and women's secrets. The Norse goddess Freya, who oversaw fertility and sex, rode a chariot pulled by two cats. Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting, animals, and childbirth, is sometimes depicted in the form of a cat. Chinese goddess Li Shou was a goddess of fertility, among other things, and she also took the form of a cat.

The few women who had any autonomy in the Middle Ages were women who brewed beer and potions, and women who practiced medicine — especially midwifery — in the best ways available to them. The pagan deities who represented their power were, more often than not, cats.

Is it any surprise, then, that by the time German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer published Malleus Maleficarum, thee professional manual for witch hunters, in 1486, he proclaimed that witches could shapeshift into cats?

Agnes Waterhouse, the first witch executed in England, was rumored to have a blood-drinking cat named Satan. The Church tortured a "confession" out of Tituba during the Salem Witch Trials, in which she told the court that she'd been told by two cats to "serve them." Reverend Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, America's "first Evangelical" and notorious witch hunter/killer, beat a woman into saying the Devil visited her in the form of a cat. A farmer named Samuel Wardwell, whose claim to fame was that he could get his cows to follow him the way Babe did with sheep, was hanged for witchcraft after confessing that he saw a whole gaggle of cats talking to a dark prince ten years earlier behind a store in town. 

In We Were Witches, Ariel Gore writes, "The greatest factor for being accused, tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft was to have a female body." And then: "Having a job or being sexual or single or outspoken or an unwed mother or unconcerned with cultural beauty norms or mentally ill or a healer — especially a midwife or counselor — and you were pretty much dead. Dare to help another woman find contraceptives, and you were dead. Have the audacity to be old and grumpy, and you were most definitely dead." 

Tens of thousands of women were tortured and killed for being witches because they were found guilty of "murdering babies." Many of those women were healers. They were intimately acquainted with dead mothers and dead babies because their job was to help women try to give birth IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Of course they saw and held a lot of dead babies! It is so important to remember that the Witch Trials coincided with the rise of Western medicine being practiced for profit, at a time when men paid the Catholic Church to certify them to be doctors, and began marching into villages all over the world demanding to be in charge of the health of its people. 

This exact propaganda — witches are power-hungry women with cats, maybe even they are cats, who kill babies — has kept straight white Church people in a chokehold since its inception. When the women's suffrage movement started picking up steam in the early 1900s, opponents were literally like, "I know what'll work: Just depict these bitches as cats."

I was still in elementary school the first time I heard this tangled, mangled story. In the early 1990s, Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, one of the architects of the modern day theocratic hysteria that now defines the Republican Party, was fundraising to stop marriage equality in Iowa. He sent out a letter in which he proclaimed: "The feminist agenda is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Read JD Vance's comments in the full light of all this context and all you'll hear is "witches, witches, witches, witches, witches."

When Vance says "childless cat ladies," he's talking about the history of the goddesses of fertility and childbirth and brewing beer, the history of midwives and alewives, the ways we've burned and the ways we burn. He tries to play it like pity or disdain, but what JD Vance feels about witches is pure, white-hot terror. A world where women don't need men or their money or their permission or their sperm. Where guys like him are useless because the only thing he adds to our culture is impotently parroting Malleus Maleficarum. 

When well-meaning people ask why I don't want kids, they always make a concerned face and say things like, "Is it your health?" Or, "Is it the cost of living?" Or, "Is it the climate crisis?" Or, "Is it overpopulation and rapidly depleting natural resources?" 

Look: I love kids! I love playing with kids! I love learning from kids! I love their silly little jokes and how they crack themselves up most of all. I love watching them experience the world. And I love, love, love seeing attentive and adoring parents interact with their children. Being a genuinely good parent seems like one of the very best things you could possibly ever do with your one wild and precious life. Good parents should be so fucking proud. I admire good parents with my whole entire heart. 

I just don’t want kids of my own. I WANT to be a childless cat lady. (Yes, I fucking love the witchy lineage.)

Remember that witch Carmen Maria Machado asked us to hold in our mind? The childless one with her little cat and her little house in the woods? Here's the rest of Machado’s assessment: "She has an undeniable air of poise and a wonderful sense of style. She is wily, self-satisfied, and in charge of her own affairs. She commands respect. She is, to interesting people, someone worth learning from, if not emulating entirely. She is what happens when women get to direct the warp and weft of their own lives."