“The Old Woman & Her Cats,” Samuel Howitt, 1810 juxtaposed with Time magazine’s 2023 “Person of the Year” cover of Taylor Swift posing with Benjamin Button, one of her cats
3 August 2024
The archetype of the cat lady is an old one, but the phrase is relatively new. The cat lady is typically portrayed as a middle-aged or elderly, unmarried woman who has a plethora of cats. The archetype can be positive or pejorative. The word crazy is often attached when the pejorative connotation is intended, but this is an even more recent development, as is the use of cat lady to denote a successful career-oriented woman who owns a cat or two.
While many female cat owners embrace the term, there is a strong misogynist strain in many of the pejorative uses of cat lady. The association of cats with witchcraft dates back centuries, and there is the implication that a woman doting on cats just cannot “find a man.”
The first use of the phrase cat lady that I have found is from the Massachusetts Springfield Daily Republican of 24 June 1911. The article is about a local woman who cares for stray cats, gently euthanizing those that are too sick or injured:
The girl, after a shrewd look at him, handed him the basket, and guided him down an old-fashioned red-brick street, which began as openly residential, and descended, through drugstores and garages, to frankly commercial uses of the smaller kind. “The cat lady’s house useter be a nice house,” said she, confidentially. “She had everything she wanted, but now she’s poor. ’Nd she always loved cats; so the neighbors, they brought her all the sick ones, and she took care of them. The society, it gives her the stuff to put them to sleep with. ’nd she does it without hurting them.
[…]
It was a yard of quite spacious dimensions, with green grass in it. It’s principal crop, however, was cats. On boxes and barrels that seem arranged in pedestal style sat or curled cats of yellow, cats of gray, white cats, maltese cats, and more cats.
[…]
For the tiny kitchen was fuller of cats than the yard. In fact, it was like a nightmare of cats, all very sick or crippled. There were one-eyed cats, and three-legged cats, and swathed and bandaged cats that looked like mummies. There messes for cats simmering on the stove, and liniment for cats pervading the air. And standing in the midst of it, like a queer old Egyptian priestess of cats, the “cat lady” lifted the poor, limp, mangy creature out of the basket and held it gently in her arms.
[…]
The girl and the Spectator came away together with the basket, and left her with the bag in her harms. Somehow the Spectator felt that he understood Francis of Assisi and the lepers better than he had ever done even in the Portiuncula. “She makes you feel sort of ashamed of wearing gloves [when handling sick or injured cats],” said the little girl. “But then, mother always told me always to. I’m awful glad there is a cat lady, though, in this town.
Uses of cat lady can be found with regularity in American newspapers following this one, leading me to surmise that early examples can be found. There are also earlier uses of cat lady meaning a female cat. One particularly finds this usage in children’s stories.
The phrase crazy cat lady, which is always pejorative, is in place by the late 1960s. There is this account of a cat film festival that appeared in Women’s Wear Daily on 26 December 1969:
During an explicit cat courtship film in groovy grainy black and white, there was a sudden ruckus on the other side of the auditorium. “What’s the matter with you, lady? You’re either drunk or crazy!” shouted an angry woman in the dark. “And look at what you did to my packages. Now I have to lug them all the way home to Brooklyn like this!”
A few minutes later the woman out in the lobby being calmed by Elgin ushers. One of her Macy’s shopping bags was soaking wet. Nobody seemed to know exactly what the other woman had done.
After what seemed like 213 more films of similar ineptitude and humorless banality—including a very dark, jiggly one by Vival that I thought showed a shot of the Andy Warhol superstar actually sniffing a German Shepherd’s tush—Polecat announced over the loudspeaker that Jonas Mekas of the Village Voice, the Hobbit of lobotomized film critics, was going to award children’s books to the man or woman in the audience who most looked like a cat.
Enough of this madness! Four hours after the festival had begun, for the first time I was desperate for a good excuse to leave. Is there a drunk or crazy cat lady in the house who might be willing to lift a leg over one of my shopping bags?
And here is a less weird example from the Boston Globe of 17 January 1982:
In the past decade, such books as Desmond Morris’ Intimate Behavior and R. Szasz’s Petishism: Pet Cults of the Western World have popularized the view that a bond with a pet is something of a perversion—an inferior substitute for a relationship with a human being. Many apparently well-adjusted people nevertheless take their relationships with their pets seriously, but it’s something they don’t want to advertise. Who wants to be regarded as another crazy cat lady or as someone so hard up that he talks to his dog?
And we get crazy cat lady as a self-appellation in the New York Times on 16 February 1985. In this article about a cat groomer, one of the groomer’s customers applies it to herself; the use is mildly pejorative:
The clients she visited over a couple of days seemed to range from quite normal, indeed, to what might be considered a little nuts. “Seeeeeeeee?” said a woman on East 77th Street, holding open a jewelry box of cat whiskers. “I save these. They are like baby teeth.”
Miss Frazier kept combing and clipping, stopping for “cuddle breaks” with the cats. She gave each of them catnip when she finished with them. She and the client sang a song from the musical “Cats.”
“Sabrina has knots in her fur,” Miss Frazier said. “They’re all over town now. This is the season.”
“I guess I’m a crazy cat lady,” said the client, “but they fill up my life.”
Sources:
“The Compassionate Cat Lady.” Springfield Daily Republican (Massachusetts), 24 June 1911, 18/6–7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Dumanoski, Dianne. “It’s More than Puppy Love.” Boston Globe, 17 January 1982, Magazine 12–13, 36–45 at 37. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Geist, William E. “About New York; When East Side Felines Require Pampering.” New York Times, 16 February 1985, 1.27/3. ProQuest Newspapers.
Howell, Chauncey. “Fine Living for Women: Art, et Cetera.” Women’s Wear Daily, 26 December 1969, 28/2. ProQuest: Trade Journals.
Image credits: Samuel Howitt, 1810, Wikimedia Commons, Wellcome Collection public domain image / Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Time, 25 December 2023, fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.