The cat lady is finally experiencing a phoenix moment.

Ever since J.D. Vance’s regressive comments resurfaced, about America being run by ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives’, Kamala Harris has become an icon for cat ladies everywhere.

The cat-owning woman has had a turbulent history. She began as a goddess: Freyja, Norse goddess of fertility, love and luck, rode a chariot powered by two formidable blue-grey toms; Artemis, the Greek deity of wild animals, hunting, chastity and childbirth, took feline form in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and Hathor, the Egyptian precursor to Bacchus and Dionysus, could transform into a lioness. Back down on earth, Cleopatra famously styled herself on the goddess Isis — whose daughter just happened to be the cat-goddess Bastet — and she owned a beautiful Egyptian Mau believed to be the world’s first domesticated cat.

Things only really went south in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church declared cats — a powerful pagan symbol — “Satan’s minions”. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII ordained that all cats in the company of women be considered their familiars; cat and witch were then burned together. In fact, the first woman executed for witchcraft in England was Ages Waterhouse, who was tried for the crime of owning a familiar named “Sathan”. In modern times, cats have featured on American anti-Suffragette posters; The Simpsons screenwriters branded the feminist character Elenor Abernathy a “Crazy Cat Lady”; and the word “spinster” will forever be imbued with the potent whiff of an open tin of Whiskers.

However, in the wake of Vance’s comments — he went on to argue that people without children should make up less of the vote share, and that the ‘whole purpose of the post-menopausal female’ is to raise her grandchildren — a wave of support has risen in defence of Kamala, and every woman’s right to determine the course of her own life free of shame or stigma. Now, with the support of Taylor Swift, Harris’s own modern day Bastet, and a whole pride of cat-lady-goddesses (including Jenifer Aniston, Selina Gomez, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Elizabeth Day), the image of the cat lady is finally getting the rebrand it deserves.

In the words of French journalist Mona Chollet, the contemporary cat lady is a woman (although they could also be a man) who ‘refuse[s] to give up the full exercise of their abilities and their liberty, the exploration of their desires and potential, they will not sacrifice the full enjoyment of their own lives’ by submitting to normative societal expectations. Kamala may become the first woman — as well as the first person of Black and South Asian heritage — to become the President of the United States; she is proof that the modern cat lady is not ‘miserable’, as Vance described, but extraordinary.

But when you cut off the head of a monster, another sprouts in its stead. Alluding to the fact that Harris is the only Presidential candidate (if we include both Trump and Biden) who drinks, James Blair, political director of Trump’s 2024 campaign, recently wrote on X: “A lot of rumors out there about Kamala having a serious drinking problem…apparently coming into focus as campaign heats up.” In the comments, Harris is accused of being ‘sauced’ and ‘a party girl’; people have posted sexualised AI generated images of her consuming wine, beer and spirits; she is called ‘cackles’ — what noise do witches make again?

In fact, the history of the alcohol-enjoying-woman is so proximate to that of the cat lady that they are arguably one and the same. The first alcohol-ruling deities were female: Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, and Hathor, the Egyptian drunken goddess, both predate Bacchus and Dionysus. Back on earth, Cleopatra and Catherine the Great were celebrated drinkers; and women were the first brewers — now viewed as a trendy, genderless term, the word “brewster” actually means female brewer — playing a pivotal role in the evolution of this now “manly” beverage.

In the Middle Ages, ale was produced by women called alewives. They brewed the drink in a large cauldron in their own homes, mixing germinated oats, barley or wheat with boiling water. At the time, this simple brew was one of the only ways women could earn a living and offered a valuable lifeline to unmarried women, single mothers, deserted (or deserting) wives, and widows. However, the drink had a short shelf-life, so, when it was ready, alewives would supposedly advertise its availability by fixing a long, thin stake topped with a bundle of twigs above her front door. If she had any stock left over, she might then pop to the market wearing her traditional alewife uniform: a large, often pointy, hat.

 

Alewives were independent women in an industry that was rapidly becoming extremely lucrative. They presided over the OG pop-up taverns, tempting churchgoers away from Sunday Mass. Worse still, alehouses could be rowdy, sexual environments; O’Meara has described how the women running these establishments were wrongly depicted as wilful, lusty temptresses. According to Judith Bennet, in 1540, the city of Chester even ordered that no woman between 14 and 40 should be permitted to sell ale to ‘expunge [the industry’s] association with prostitution’. Threatened by the popularity of alehouses, the perceived power of the women who ran them, and the unpredictability of any women who frequented them, the Catholic Church branded the tavern ‘the devil’s schoolhouse’, and the alewife — with her cauldron, broomstick and pointy hat — its demonic, spell-casting headmistress.

Alewives were not the first women to be executed for their association with alcohol — Romulus, the first king of Rome, brought in the death penalty for any woman caught drinking; the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, decreed that any priestess entering a tavern must be burned alive — and the figure of the drunk woman remains under scrutiny to this day. William Hogarth’s iconic Gin Lane (1751) is dominated by the image of a drunk woman, covered in syphilitic sores, her baby boy falling from her breast to a certain death; her head tilts towards the far-right hand side of the sketch, where another mother feeds her child a dram of juniper-infused spirit. Research published as recently as 2018 reveals that attitudes have changed startlingly little since the Middle Ages or the craze for “Mother’s Ruin”. A young man, asked what he thinks when he sees a drunk woman, reportedly said: ‘I’d see a guy and think – “lad!” and see a woman [and] I’d think, I don’t know, “you tramp”’.

‘Alcoholic’, ‘evil’, ‘lush’, ‘godless […] aligned with the dark’, ‘cackling idiot’. These are just some of the vile slurs made against Harris in the comments of Blair’s unsubstantiated tweet. Cat lady, alewife, and female presidential candidate are not so different: they are independent, resourceful, and uncontrollable. They are a threat to the established order.

In Swift’s endorsement of Kamala — which she posted alongside an image of herself with her blue-eyed Ragdoll, Benjamin Button — she described Harris as ‘a warrior’, ‘gifted’, ‘steady-handed’ and ‘calm’. Harris has faced the Republican’s social-media-age witch-trial with composure and good-humour, as well as the quiet confidence one has come to expect of the cat lady in 2024. Move over brat summer, step aside demure, autumn is the season of the cat lady.

What does she like to drink? That’s easy. Whatever she likes. Kamala Harris reportedly enjoys wines from her home state of California and is a member of Rock Wall Wine Co., a local urban winery. Servers in Washington, D.C. have also revealed that she likes adding ice to her white wine; a controversial move, very cat lady. For me, it’s a glass of Fleur Godart’s Witches, made in collaboration with the Chablis-based, organic and biodynamic producer, Athenaïs de Béru. It’s a silky, whole bunch Gamay that’s spent 16 months brewing in old Burgundy barrels; a beautifully perfumed potion of blueberries, violet, lavender and rosemary that’s pure magic with Meera Sodha’s Marmite risotto (which I like to top with slow-cooked, thyme-infused mushrooms), or herby roast pumpkin.

So, I may have slightly fewer Instagram followers than Taylor Swift, but tonight I will be raising a glass to the childless cat ladies; to the female brewers, winemakers, and distillers who continue to be underrepresented or hailed as anomalies in their respective categories; and to the women who just want to have a drink in peace.

With love and hope from a Childless Cat Lady

References:

• Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600. Oxford University Press (1996).
• Mona Chollat, In Defence of Witches: why women are still on trial, trans. Sophie R. Lewis. Picador (2022).
• Mallory O’Meara, Girly Drinks: A world history of women and alcohol. Hurst (2022).
• Jemma Lennox, Carol Emslie, Helen Sweeting, Antonia Lyons, “The role of alcohol in constructing gender and class identities among young women in the age of social media”, Science Direct (2018)

Photo by Jan-Erik Leusink on Unsplash