I spent 40 years as a "childless cat lady"—here's what they mean when they call us that
They mean we should be serving men.
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As you may have heard, more cute footage has surfaced of JD Vance proclaiming that women who don’t have children have “meaningless” lives.
Meaningless to who? One might ask. Well, meaningless to men, is what Vance means. He means that women’s only worth is serving men as wives and mothers—by providing them sex, children, childcare, housework, etc.
Presumably, women without children don’t find their lives “meaningless.”
I certainly didn’t during the 40 years that I spent as a “childless cat lady” before I had a child in my 40’s (I didn’t actually have a cat or pets—caring for a pet would have cramped my style and my freedom, and I’m, um, afraid of cats actually.)
One of the most popular pieces that I’ve ever written was about my experience of not having kids, and groping my way toward self-worth in a culture that’s hellbent on demeaning women. Especially women who don’t have children and therefore not performing gender roles in a way that serve guys like JD Vance and his political party. (Imagine my surprise when I had a child and found out that women who do have children are also demeaned and devalued but in different ways! But that’s a different essay).
The whole notion of “childless cat ladies” should be ridiculous (and it is)—especially since we have a woman who is a highly accomplished presidential candidate that is not a biological mother. But alas, that’s not the case because one entire party is basing much of its platform on misogyny. Forcing women and children to give birth to prove their “worthiness” is the law in many states—and if Republicans win—will likely become a federal law. Women’s freedoms like access to birth control, and equality in the workplace, and no-fault divorce could all disappear in the next four years.
What “childless cat ladies” rhetoric is meant to do is normalize the idea that women (and girl children) are worthless without pregnancy and giving birth, so forcing them to give birth is actually very normal and natural and definitely not cruel and bizarre.
Unfortunately, the need to stop insisting that women’s only worth is in serving men and children has only become more urgent since I first wrote about my child-free life a few years ago.
As I wrote then, I used to hate Mother’s Day for reasons that I couldn’t quite put my finger on—and I finally realized that it was because so much of the culture was geared toward pinning women’s worth on their usefulness to men. I would turn off my phone on Mother’s Day because as a woman without kids, I would get messages like this:
“Happy Mother’s Day! You are a wonderful ‘mother’ in your own way.” Or, “Happy Mother’s Day, our kids think you’re great.”
Some women who don’t have kids like getting messages like this. Which is okay! At the time, I did not like it. I didn’t like it because it felt like the only reason to wish someone Happy Mother’s Day when they were not, well, a MOM, is if you you think of all women as moms or would-be moms instead of just…women.
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In retrospect, I think some of the people sending me these messages were aware of the problematic cultural messaging about women without kids, and were trying to cut through it and help me feel loved and valued. But here’s how it felt to me at the time, largely due to my religious upbringing:
“I mean, people haven’t sent me messages on Boss’s Day, or Secretary Day, or Father’s Day, or any other role-specific holiday that doesn’t apply to me. Only on Mother’s Day. If you think this isn’t that odd, ask yourself if you would text a guy who doesn’t have kids and wish him a Happy Father’s Day. No? It’s weird, right?
I have polled men without children to see if they are similarly pinged with messages on Father’s Day, and they are not.
So why is this happening?
This is happening because we have conflated the identity and worth of women with motherhood.
I say we, because I was roped into this idea too, from the time I was very young. I was raised Mormon, and on Mother’s Day, the leader of the congregation would ask not only all the mothers to stand, but all the little girls to stand, too.
Then, men and boys in the congregation would distribute a token gift--usually a single rose or some chocolates--to all the girls and women standing in the pews. It was a gift for “all the mothers and ‘future mothers’ in the congregation,” we were told.
This gesture, which now strikes me as a cross between a scene from “The Bachelor” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” left me fuming in my pew, even when I was 12.
It presumed that the role of mother was what I wished for, and that it defined my future. The boys didn’t get the same treatment on Father’s Day. They got to keep sitting in their seats just being boys, or I presume, “future men” whose lives would be full of their own choices and multiple possibilities. The implication was that there were no choices and or even “women” or “future women” among us— only mothers and “future mothers.”
But this kind of messaging doesn’t just come from religious circles, and it’s not new coming from political circles, either. It’s a very old message that’s emboldened now.
“The message that women’s worth lies not in their personhood, but in their childbearing and child-caring, is reiterated in a million ways, inside and outside religious circles.
We see this in public discourse when anti-abortion activists insist that every woman should want to become a mother or should become a mother whether she wants to or not. Revoking the right to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy is a legal assertion of what happened in my church—the assumption that a woman’s destiny, by virtue of the fact that she has a uterus, is to bear a child. And she has not properly fulfilled her role if she’s hasn’t done so.
We also see this message repeated when leaders respond to sexual harassment and assault allegations, from the Trump tapes to the Kavanaugh hearings. They often make statements about protecting “mothers and daughters.”
“We should always honor and respect the dignity of our mothers, sisters and daughters,” Ben Carson stated in regards to the Trump tapes.
Mitt Romney decried Trump’s words as “vile degradations [that] demean our wives and daughters.”
But do you notice what’s happening here, even from “decent” guys?
These statements position women’s worth in relation to men and children — instead of as people who are deserving of respect and rights as individuals. This can make women, as individuals, undervalued or invisible, or worse.”
There’s not much in our culture to help women shape an identity without children, and that’s by design in a patriarchal culture. That leaves women without kids vulnerable, but it also gives them a lot of freedom.
In my 30’s, I had to fight for my self-worth as a woman without a man or children attached. But I had had dozens of exemplars to aid me in this, mostly peers, mostly other women without children.
They taught me how to rely on my own self-regard, how to enjoy the singular pleasures of earning and spending my own time and spending my own money. How to struggle and fail and rely on myself. How to build my own life full of adventures, and fulfilling relationships, and how to build my own Ikea furniture. How to make a home filled with my own books, and art, and occasionally, mermaid decor.
My “childless cat lady” life was very meaningful—to others in my life, but most especially to me. This is the most important thing that I took away from my life without kids—that my own self-regard and self-worth was enough. I was never going to get it from a patriarchal society, so I had to take it for myself. What I took away is that a woman—all on her own—is enough.
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If you love and need female-forward journalism in your life like this piece, this is the time. Paid subscribers get access to subscriber chats, access to our archive of interviews and thoughtful essays, and full access to book club and other paid content that helps keep us sane in these times.
This is the lowest offer we’ll have this year—after tomorrow the price goes up to $50.
You can read the whole essay here. A previous version of this essay appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune. You can also hear me read parts of it on an episode of the podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy.
MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.
Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won fellowships and many SPJ awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.
Allison Lichter is associate dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.
It’s simply absurd that this conflation of “woman” with “mother” persists so strongly in our political life, but maybe it’s because women have so rarely had any political power except when they’ve used their status as mothers to assert influence. (I think of the Tennessee mother who wrote her son to tell him to vote for the 19th amendment - a piece of history I never knew until I saw the musical Suffs!). All this to say that it’s amazing to have Kamala/Momala in the public eye as a step mom, and aunt, and also as a woman who married in her late 40 and didn’t have kids. That role model is so crucial for all of us!
I was raised in Mississippi by rigid catholic parents and yet somehow the indoctrination didn’t stick at all—perhaps because they were so forceful with it. In some ways I think that this is how the Republican Party specifically and misogyny in general will finally destroy itself—they’ve become so blatantly idiotic and hateful that any person in their right mind sees them exactly for who they are.
I loved how you offered two perfect examples of reversing genders on a cultural norm. It’s such a helpful tactic—and the more we publicly acknowledge that bias, and consider its implications, the more we dig out the internalized beliefs that are so corrosive to human dignity. It’s a negotiation tactic and an incredibly useful tool. Thanks for a great piece!