Sunday, May 18, 2025

Childless cat ladies

Sometime while I was staying with the Schmidts last month, I started thinking about the trope of the "childless cat lady." Of course the phrase got a lot of attention during the last election, because the news media pointed out that some years earlier (before he was a candidate for anything, let alone an officeholder), JD Vance had used it in an interview with Fox News. So in a sense cat ladies had their moment in the sun last year, just as "bad hombres" did eight years earlier.

But what, I began to wonder, really is the distinguishing characteristic of a childless cat lady, and why do they get so much grief? 

Why do people look down on childless cat ladies?

I tried googling this question, and all I found were articles saying that childless cat ladies aren't nearly as bad as everyone thinks. Here's a collection of them:

And that's great to know—don't get me wrong. I guess it's reassuring to hear that the stereotype is incorrect. But I wanted historical information on where the stereotype came from in the first place—and, more particularly, on what the image means in the popular psyche. A couple of articles waved vaguely towards the idea that the condemnation of childless cat ladies was a holdover from the ancient fear of witches. But that doesn't sound likely to me. 

What then?

What follows are my best guesses. I look forward to someone proving I'm wrong.

I think the cats are incidental to the picture. (See the article listed above, for example, where Vance says he has nothing against cats.) I think the dismissal of these people rests, rather, on two assumptions about them:

  1. that they don't have children
  2. that they don't have (regular) sex

What do these assumptions mean politically?

No children

The normal statement is that people with no children have no stake in the future. And if humans were logical, that would make sense. But they aren't, and I don't believe it. 

I think the political distrust of the childless has a different origin. The household is, after all, the smallest political organization that any of us will ever experience. (Aristotle explicitly denies this claim in Politics I, 1, §2, but only by using a very special definition of the word political. If, however, we take politics to include all arenas in which humans exercise power over one another, the household certainly qualifies.) In particular, parents have to exercise power over their children. And I know from experience—as both a manager and a father—that the ways you motivate employees (for example) have a lot in common with the ways you motivate children. I assume it is the same for political officeholders motivating citizens. 

Therefore, if someone has never had to manage children, why should we trust his (or her) opinions about politics in general? At that point, all he really knows about politics is what he "reads in the literature." And most of that is false, because most of it is based on a theoretical understanding of how politics ought to be conducted rather than on a realistic assessment of how it is really conducted. The only text I know that even tries to discuss the realities of politics is Machiavelli's Prince; and even there, I think, one needs practical experience to understand how to make it work.

So if someone has not even raised children, his (or her) opinions about political matters are likely worthless.   

No sex

This condition is even more extreme. Why should we distrust virgins … or those who cannot manage somehow to get laid on a regular basis?

Good question. My first suggestion is, Think about the adult virgins you know.

Over the years, during my career in business, I had a number of employees. Of course I never knew for sure about the sex lives of any of them, not unless they explicitly told me they were married or had children. All the same, there was one of them that I picked out immediately and assumed she was probably a virgin, or at any rate the next closest thing to one. For whatever it is worth, she was not the youngest person who worked for me. She was not even the youngest woman. But she was able to focus on details more carefully than any of my other employees. Early on, I put her in charge of checking the inputs to our department, to make sure all the boxes had been checked. But I had to pull her back regularly because she would invent requirements that I didn't care about. Was the font correct? Were the margins correct? I didn't care. Fonts and margins were not controlled. And so I had to call her into my office—time and again—and order her to accept inputs that she had rejected for made-up reasons. 

And after a while I realized that the instruction I really wanted to give her was, For God's sake, go get laid! And honestly, if she had been getting laid on a regular basis, I assume she wouldn't have kept making up fictitious requirements to reject the inputs to our department. I assume that if she had been getting laid regularly, she would have let the little stuff go. Certainly that was my experience with all of my other employees … including, for example, the college student who worked for me as an intern, who was a lot younger but also significantly sexier. (I assume that the intern had boyfriends at school—or girlfriends, I guess—though of course we never discussed the subject and it was none of my business.)

That's my experience. What's yours? Think about the adult virgins you know. 

And if your experience is anything like mine, then you don't want to give these people political power—not if you can help it. Because the odds are that they will overreact to trivialities—to the fonts and the margins, metaphorically speaking, rather than to the content. 

And that way madness lies.    

Cat ladies in my life today

I first began wondering this when I realized that Schmidt is in fact a childless cat lady in all but sex. 

  • After he left college without a degree, he moved back in with his parents. 
  • There are two houses on the property; so when his grandmother died he moved into her house. 
  • He worked on the farm and in the family business. (They were—still are, I guess, though he's the only one left alive—professional artists and silversmiths.) 
  • He never got out much, although living out past the Ural Mountains would have made that difficult for even the most gregarious soul. (Of course I'm using hyperbole when I mention the Ural Mountains. You understood that, right?) 
  • So far as I know, he never dated. 
  • Certainly he never married. 
  • He has no children. 
  • But he keeps cats—lots of them.

His cats are working cats, by which I mean that while he feeds them he also expects them to hunt rodents. Some of the cats are stationed in his house; some in the barn (which the family has long used as a studio); two in Ma Schmidt's house (once Pa Schmidt died, at any rate). I don't have an exact count, but I'm pretty sure there are close to a dozen cats on the Schmidt farm. Of course the number fluctuates: old ones die, and new ones show up out of the blue—hungry and bedraggled and feral. One by one Schmidt feeds them, then slowly tames them, then carts them off to the vet to be neutered … and finally adopts them in with all the others. So yes, I think he fits the model.

But so does Marie, although she rents her apartment and therefore can't have more than two cats at a time because of Rules. In fact, of my three closest friends, only Debbie has ever had children, and she had only a single daughter out of what was for many years a sexless marriage.*

To be clear, Schmidt pays a lot of attention to his cats. He studies them. He says he has learned a lot about how to raise cats by watching other cats do the same job. We've all read stories of neurodivergent children who learn how to be sensitive to other humans by first being sensitive to animals, so there's nothing really wrong with Schmidt studying them. And for someone who spends more of his life around animals than around people, studying the behavior of his cats is probably even a prudent choice.

But do I trust Schmidt's political opinions? No more than I trust Marie's, which is to say No! Both of them believe what they read, which means they both suffer from TDS somethin' terrible. And Schmidt's judgement in normal human interactions is not especially subtle. I remember once years ago, back when I still had a department of something like eight employees reporting to me, and I discovered that one of them had lied on his job application by inventing a degree he didn’t really have. (I tell this story at the very end of this post here.) By coincidence, Schmidt called during the middle of this episode to ask how things were going. I mentioned that I was struggling to address this problem, and his only input was that it was unfortunate but he supposed I would have to fire the man. As you may recall (or can check for yourself) I did something subtler and better. Now of course it wasn't Schmidt's job to figure out my course of action! But it's also true that he didn't do it. From this I conclude that Schmidt's judgement where personal interaction is concerned might be OK, but it will never be brilliant. And the same for Marie, of course.

Envoi

I started thinking about these topics almost six weeks ago. But unlike many of my posts, this one didn't just write itself when I finally sat down to put my fingers on the keyboard. It has taken me well over a week—maybe two—to figure out what I wanted to say, and to say it. I don't know why. My hand-written notes (from back when I was actually staying with the Schmidts) contain a lot of stuff that I finally decided was irrelevant or wrong. So I guess this is the state of my thinking on the subject as of today.

For whatever it is worth.    

__________  

* Debbie and her husband used to keep dogs. Her daughter Mattie, and Mattie's husband R., have two children and a dog; Wikipedia says that dog people are rule-followers more than cat people, and oh my heavens is that ever true for Mattie and R.! But I digress.    

          

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