On Being a Childless Cat Lady

And the truth about witch hunts and other projections flying around these days

This is an old photo of me with my cat, Artemus. We are both older now, my hair much longer post-pandemic, and I look witchier in my long locks and deeper wrinkles these days. But it’s the photo I had and thought perfect to address this issue that’s been flying over the Internet since Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate, and Harris emerged to oppose them. The idea that childless women are unhappy and want to make other people’s lives miserable like them, is not new or original. It’s a belief promulgated by those who would like to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, and certainly not running for president. It also is partially responsible, I believe, for how much suffering some women have endured who have wanted children but could not conceive. So in that regards, it is cruel.

But truly, not every woman has wanted children, and some women should never have them. Not every woman is cut out for motherhood. Ask any person whose mother was abusive as mine was. It’s partly why I chose not to be a mother. So sure was I, at twenty-three I made the radical decision to have a tubal ligation. And although it was a decision I came to regret seven years later, I still stand by my younger self in her certainty and right to make that choice. Just like the abortion I had at the age of nineteen, about which I have no regrets, but the experience of which weighed heavily in the later decision to get my fallopian tubes cut. I never wanted to have that traumatic experience again.

It was 1971, before Roe vs Wade. Abortion was only legal in a few states, and not in Michigan where I resided as a young college student. I had to fly to NYC where it was legal and go to a women’s center where we were herded through like cattle. At least it wasn’t a back alley. And perhaps the staff were well-meaning in providing such a controversial procedure, but an attitude of shame pervaded the place. Women have always been shamed for our sexuality in the puritanical praxis of this country’s culture. And blamed, as if we alone are responsible for the procreative act. Paternity seems to matter only at the whim of the man. Read Nathanial Hawthornes’, The Scarlet Letter to get my drift here.

Now I have respect for Christians if they’re the kind who believe and follow the actual teachings of Jesus, which is all about love and forgiveness. I’m all in with that. But the ones who call themselves Christian and then spew out hatred and venom towards anyone who is not like them, and want to send humanity back to the middle ages? No thank you. And the irony of them calling themselves victims of witch hunts for being held responsible for their crimes, would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that it was their earlier incarnations as the Christian clergy that tortured and slaughtered women by the hundred thousands in Europe during those burning times.

I imagine childless women with cats were the first hunted down back then. The association of black cats with witches carries over into our times as a supposedly harmless Halloween image. But witches in those times were the remnants of an older pre-Christian culture in which women were revered as healers and mid-wives, as well as mothers. The church wanted to wipe them out, as the Republican party seems to want as well, in order to control not just reproduction, but sexuality, with which it’s always had a perverse relationship. Virgin, wife/mother, or whore are the only choices they would give us. Oh, yes, and witch. But witch and whore are almost synonymous for them, as each has an uncontrollable, wicked sexuality, dangerous to men who come under their spell.

So we are the scapegoats for these men’s lack of control over themselves and why rape is always blamed on the victim. Look at how many male sexual predators we have had running this country, and still do. We have at least two on the Supreme Court right now. And one running for president. And the women who came forward to identify them as perpetrators were excoriated. Only the one who proudly proclaimed herself a whore to begin with had any luck in holding the man responsible, to the tune of millions of dollars. But the crime for which he was prosecuted, and convicted, was about the cover up of the sex, not the sexual assault itself. Much like another former president in years past.

This is the country we’re living in right now, where men can still accuse us of being witches under the guise of being unhappy childless cat ladies, abuse us under the rubric of ‘boys will be boys,’ and run for, and at times win, the highest positions of power in this land. They’ve got their hands right now on our basic reproductive rights and have every intention of putting us back in what they consider to be our place. I don’t think I need to spell that out for you any further than I already have. If I do, go read Project 2025. It’s all there in black in white. They’re coming out from under cover, so powerful do they feel. And it’s not just women they’re coming after to be sure. These are the descendants of slave owners and Klansmen who want to right what went wrong for them in the Civil War. Note the Confederate flags being held in the January 6th “disturbance.” Misogyny and racism go hand in hand for these men. Be assured the only god they truly worship is money and power.

But this childless cat lady is happy that they’ve tipped their hand because they’ve been slowly and very systematically working towards this moment in secret for a long time. And because they thought they had the cat in the bag, so to speak, they published their playbook with typical boyish hubris, foolishly thinking it would be the final selling point in this election. And now Trump at least is paddling backwards trying to disown it, recognizing that it’s not actually what most people want. But it has his name all over it, and it was written by the men who own him. He is as much a pawn in their game as they are in his. A marriage made in heaven? No, more like hell. A pact with the devil.

I, for one, am just as hellbent on making sure they don’t succeed at carrying out their nefarious plan. I refuse to standby quietly and watch them plunder the earth, spread their message of hate, and set us against each other again. Now is the time for all good peace loving, caring people, and yes, childless cat ladies galore, to come out of our broom closets, and sweep our way to a blue tsunami putting Harris in the Whitehouse (we really should rename it!) and enough progressive Democrats in Congress that she can get the job done. We owe this to our children, and I mean all our children, for most childless cat ladies I know, consider all the world’s children to be as if their own.

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