To Childless Cat Ladies by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I feel you. In a patriarchy where women’s reproductive abilities determine our worth, to be childless is a curse. We can thank VP candidate JD Vance for revealing this truth in all its ugly fullness. He is a walking billboard for patriarchy. Bottom line: Patriarchy is all about women’s bodies, our reproductive abilities and men’s desire to control them. We saw this in the Dobbs decision where it was declared that women have no constitutional right to the basics of healthcare, in Texas where it’s pretty much illegal to have a poor pregnancy outcome, and in Ohio where raped children are expected to give birth to their abuser’s child. Its endless 

But it is JD who made it plainer than plain what this is all about. Besides childless cat ladies being an old trope, just think of the judgement involved. Who is JD to decide on anyone’s family constellation? Or their pets? He also made disparaging remarks about the “childless left,” who have no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” That is a statement that only a person who totally lacks empathy can make. He is making a sweeping generalization that people without children don’t care about the future. This statement is more confession than truth. He reveals that until he had children, he had no care about the future of our world. It’s beyond egocentric. If only his kids are the center of his “caring,” that shuts out most of the world’s other children.

I wonder, does he have a scale he uses to determine people’s worthiness? Where do you think childless men would land? Or childless men with cats? Never mind, they would be deemed worthy because you know, men, or at least macho men would get a pass.

I went in search of women who might not be worthy in JD’s eyes. Barbara McClintock, (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1983) lived to be 90 years old and she never had children. What would JD say? Rosalyn Franklin discovered the structure of DNA. No children. Malala Yousafzai (Nobel Peace Prize, 2014) doesn’t have children but then again, she is married and in her 20s so there is still some hope for her to prove that her life has value. I don’t know if any of them had/have cats.

I had a dog long before I had children. Did that make me a childless dog lady? Would that be better or worse on JD’s scale? When I was growing up a carnival came to my town. I won a goldfish; the kind that comes in a plastic bag filled with water.  For a time, I was childless goldfish lady. Actually, I was a teenager at the time but of childbearing age. Perhaps I was childless goldfish teenager. In JD’s world (and in the Ohio of today) I would fit the description of lady as I would have already lost my bodily autonomy. I think I was sitting pretty low on JD’s worthiness scale.

Now, I have three kids. I also have a rescue dog, Frieda. Am I safe from patriarchy’s harsh judgement? Two of my kiddos are 30 somethings and one is a 40 something so I can’t call them children anymore. Two of them have cats. Am I an older kiddos grandcats lady? At one point,I didn’t think my kids would have kids of their own. For a while I was granchildless dog lady. Would that have cut off my value since my physical connection to the future would have been limited to one generation? Oh JD I am so confused. How can I know my worth in these scenarios?   

Lo and behold in the past 3 years I became a 5-time grandma. So now, does this give me extra patriarchal status? Do I get triple votes in his system? I’ll tell you what I want with my now elevated status. I want there to be clean water, air and earth for my grandchildren to grow up in. I want to get plastics out of our eco-system. I would like global warming to be addressed. I would like old growth forests to be left alone. But then these are things I wanted well before I had grandchildren. I want them for all the children of the world. I would like to tell JD that this is what empathy looks like. Someone I doubt that he or one of his staff will be calling me for my opinion.

Here is what JD said in 2021, “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by 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.”

You know, I do remember being miserable when I was a childless goldfish teenager. But I don’t think it was because I was childless. I think it was more a commentary on the short life of goldfish, it was hard to keep them alive. I do remember this; I never wanted anyone else to be miserable just because I was. 

When FAR first started, Carol Christ laid out for us the definition and rules of patriarchy (2013). She wrote: Patriarchy is a system of male dominance, rooted in the ethos of war which legitimates violence, sanctified by religious symbols, in which men dominate women through the control of female sexuality [bolding my own], with the intent of passing property to male heirs, and in which men who are heroes of war are told to kill men, and are permitted to rape women, to seize land and treasures, to exploit resources, and to own or otherwise dominate conquered people.

This was in a 3 part series that you can read here:

Patriarchy as a System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection of the Control of Women, Private Property, and War, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ

Patriarchy as a System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection of the Control of Women, Private Property, and War, Part 2 by Carol P. Christ

Patriarchy As An Integral System of Male Dominance Created at the Intersection of the Control of Women, Private Property, and War, Part 3

And you know what’s scary? JD Vance could be Vice President. And you know what else is scary? He is already a US Senator with 4 more years in his term.

Post-note: To all cat ladies, dog ladies with or without children, I send my love and solidarity. As I’ve surveyed my friendships I find many women who are my closest friends are single and have cats. They are all amazing multi-faceted women. It wasn’t a category of “being” I had even considered before. I think it is now something to be wiped from from my consciousness as it is so singularly one dimensional to be useless.