I am a more or less well-adjusted—if at times slightly neurotic—cat lady. The feisty two-year old tabby who turned me into one steals socks and rubber doorstop bumpers and annoys the hell out of me on a daily basis. She’s laid waste to shoes, curtains and doorjambs with claws that grow back as fast as I can cut them. And she talks back whenever I scold her. But I freely chose this tender and conniving little savage as a companion and wouldn’t have it any other way.
The stereotypical cat lady is middle-aged or older, though sometimes she can be young. She is childless and without husband or partner; almost always she lives alone, a social outcast. Like the two down-at-the-heel Edies in Grey Gardens, she has several cats she smothers with cooing, cloying affection. If she isn’t lonely and bitter, she’s usually half mad or worse and almost always the butt of jokes. Of course, the cat lady intrigues me; she’s the ultimate contrarian who descends from a long line of female disruptors of the status quo.
I wonder if she doesn’t exist as a reminder of lost power. Or power contained but forgotten. Egyptians saw felines as bringers of good fortune to anyone who housed them and worshipped a cat-headed domestic goddess named Bastet The Vikings used felines to keep their ships free of rodents; their war goddess Freya used two cats to pull her chariot. In ancient China the cat-goddess Li Shou symbolized fertility and ruled the world after it was first created. When she stepped away from that responsibility and lost the power of speech, her purring remained, a reminder that she controlled the machinery that moved the earth.
Christianity is largely to blame for demonizing both women and cats. The thirteenth century pope Gregory IX claimed Satan often assumed the form of a cat. Not surprisingly, single females, widows and other marginalized females—many of whom owned felines—became targets of medieval/early modern European and colonial American witch hunters. Women after all were descendants of Eve, the one who first gave ear to Satan. How could they and their evil, slant-eyed pets ever be trusted?
The hysteria and persecution went on for centuries. After the last witch-burning in 1811, single women with cats became figures of contempt. They were social rule-breakers, financial liabilities to their relatives. Jane Austen, who chose spinsterhood, knew this well. So did her female characters: in a society where women had few rights to call their own, it was marriage or bust. By the late nineteenth century, the suffrage movement once again called attention to the woman-feline connection. In Britain, anti-female suffrage groups used cat images to belittle suffragettes. Voting women—who by that time were also demanding greater economic equality—was as ridiculous a concept as voting cats.
Selena Kyle—the 80-year-old comic book character also known as Catwoman—is one figure that complicates the stereotype. Most know her as an infamous thief and one of Batman’s long-time Gotham City adversaries. But beneath the skin-tight black suit and mask is an adoring cat lady who has cared for everything from giant panthers to strays. She even named one of her favorite females Hecate after the Greek goddess of sorcery. I like to think Selina Kyle remembers witches, remembers their fate, finding ways to charm or evade those who mean her harm.
Her alter-ego Catwoman exists on the fringes of society not as a pitiable outcast but as a thief and virtuoso criminal. Rather than keep to herself and her cats, she engages with the world, albeit in violent ways, often wielding a bullwhip. She is the cat lady who has reclaimed power and her sexuality, which she does not hesitate to use to get what—or who—she wants, including Batman, the man she eternally loves and hates. Modern in her complexity, she represents the struggles of women living in a world that still does not see or respect them as whole human beings.
These days it’s actually males who are more likely to own cats than women. And they are in good company. Abraham Lincoln and T.S. Eliot were also self-professed also cat lovers. Lincoln was the first American president to bring cats—and not a few strays— into the White House. He also made a habit of talking to them. Eliot dedicated an entire book of verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, to musings on the multiple faces of feline roguery. Yet neither of these men—nor any other I’ve known who’ve kept felines—were ever called cat men. Let alone crazy cat men.
And that’s very fine. There’s strength in claiming scorned titles, in knowing something about the histories no one ever discusses. And knowing that beneath the most seemingly harmless exterior lies a fury and wildness not even the most placid of lives can ever fully domesticate.