FYI, JD Vance Isn't The First Man To Resent Cat Ladies — They've Always Been Politicized

One voting bloc JD Vance seems completely disinterested in trying to court this election season? Childless cat ladies.

Last week, Vance ― Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election ― doubled down on his dismissive 2021 comments about “miserable” “childless cat ladies” running the government while having no “direct stake in” the future of the country.

In a mild attempt at damage control, Vance, a father of three, said last week on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” that he was being sarcastic and has “nothing against cats.”

“People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said. And the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true,” Vance said, before criticizing the low birthrate in the U.S.

Vance’s alienating comments about childless single women may come back to hurt him; about 63% of unmarried women voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. And according to a 2021 report from Pew Research Center, 44% of childless adults ages 18 to 49 don’t want kids. Plenty of them love their cats and vote.

Vance’s weird pet peeves about childless women and their cats plays on a century-old trope: Unmarried, “Grey Gardens”-esque spinsters living with their cats and very little human contact.

And interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time cats have gotten mixed up in anti-feminist political discourse.

Before women gained the right to vote ― in 1920 in the U.S. and in 1918 in the U.K. ― anti-suffrage propaganda used cats to emphasize that women would not be effective voters “because of their naturally more docile, weak, and feline-like tendencies,” according to Kelly L. Marino, a lecturer in the department of history at Sacred Heart University and the author of “Votes for