Three years after JD Vance made his disparaging remark about “childless cat ladies” to the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Republican vice-presidential candidate is still seeking to explain, telling NBC on Sunday that he was making a joke, but also a “real, substantive point” about the US becoming “too anti-family.”
As Vance keeps digging, let’s survey cat ladies — past and present, childless and not — to see just how miserable they are.
MAGDALEINE PINCELOUP DE LA GRANGE
Photo: Reuters
To Vance, women who own cats and don’t have children are “miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and seek to spread that unhappiness. At other points in history, however, cats have conferred elegance and even status.
The 18th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau frequently painted his society subjects with feline companions to emphasize their refinement and sophistication.
In this 1747 portrait of Magdaleine Pinceloup de la Grange, Perronneau depicts her with a chartreux, a rare French breed also favored by the novelist Colette, the poet Charles Baudelaire and the former president Charles de Gaulle.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
MARY PICKFORD
Born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Canada, in 1892, Mary Pickford went from being a silent-film superstar known as “the girl with the curls” to one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood. She co-founded the film studio United Artists and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was ahead of her time in campaigning for equal wages and creative control.
According to Pickford’s biographer Eileen Whitfield, one of her recurring rows with her UA co-founder Charlie Chaplin concerned him feeding her pet cat: “Mary would often phone Chaplin, demanding the wandering pet’s return.”
Photo courtesy of IMDB
EARTHA KITT
Cats were an inspiration for the slinky singer Eartha Kitt, who once claimed that “us females are a feline breed.” In the early 1950s, Kitt’s pet cat Jinx was a regular guest in her dressing room. Kitt later played Catwoman in the final season of the Batman television series in 1967.
“Believe me, baby, this pussy cat knows how to scratch and bite,” she told a journalist in 1987. “After all, I’ve had to claw my way up from the very start.”
Photo: AFP
GLORIA STEINEM
The US journalist, activist and feminist Gloria Steinem has owned a number of cats over the years. Her favorite was her grey persian, Magritte, which Steinem said taught her about “strong will and self-authority.”
When Steinem was asked in 2017 about how to raise the next generation of women and girls, she suggested taking our cues from cats: “Cats don’t let you touch them. Cats tell you what they’re going to do, and that’s that.”
ELLEN RIPLEY
Ellen Ripley and Jones the ginger tomcat were the sole survivors of the USCSS Nostromo’s fateful encounter with a xenomorph in Alien. In the 1979 film, Ripley rescues Jones after the alien has picked off the rest of the crew. The sequel, Aliens, suggests that, after 57 years of cryogenic sleep, Jones (an early example of an emotional support animal) shares an apartment with Ripley on Earth.
TAYLOR SWIFT
Perhaps today’s most famous “childless cat lady”, Taylor Swift owns three, including the Scottish folds Meredith Grey and Olivia Benson (named after characters from Grey’s Anatomy and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit respectively).
Her ragdoll, Benjamin Button, was pictured with Swift on the cover of Time magazine when she was named person of the year last year — proof that Swift has embraced her “cat lady” reputation, having previously been publicly derided for her dating history.
When an interviewer at the 2015 Grammys suggested that Swift was sure to attract “lots of men,” she retorted: “I’m going to go hang out with my friends and then I go home to the cats.”
In 2019, Swift said that she admires cats for their independence: “They’re very capable of dealing with their own life.”
GIGI HADID
Gigi Hadid’s kitten Cleo went from rags to riches in 2015, rescued from inside a car engine one week and out to lunch with Joe Jonas the next.
New York magazine’s the Cut poked fun at the model “accessorizing” with the animal, noting that “the cat’s tabby coat complemented Hadid’s Nike leggings and black leather bag.”
Cleo also attracted much fanfare for having her own Instagram page, although Hadid let it lapse after just three posts.
SARAH JESSICA PARKER
Sex and the City celebrated the single life, but Carrie Bradshaw waited until her mid-50s to embrace her destiny as a “childless cat lady.” In last year’s season two finale of the series’ spinoff And Just Like That, Carrie was given a kitten that she named Shoe, in tribute to their shared passion for boxes of Manolo Blahniks.
Sarah Jessica Parker later confirmed that she took the cat — whose off-screen name is Lotus — home from the set, bringing the total number in her family to three.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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