In 1233, Pope Gregory I issued a papal papal decree called the Book of Rama, outlining the “problems” of non-Christian religions, accusing them of engaging in devil worship, and describing in detail the rituals of these religions. According to Donald W. Engels’s The Cats of the Classics: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat:, The papal bull “gave divine sanction to the extermination of cats, especially black cats, and the extermination of their female owners.” When Agnes Waterhouse was executed in 1566 in the first English witchcraft trial, she was accused of killing her cat (Supernatural spirits who served as companions to witchesThe story of her mother, a cat named Satan who was later transformed into a toad, was a tale of a witch who was executed by hanging at the age of 63, and the connection between cats, women and witches was established forever and spread to the United States. Until the Salem Witch Trials.
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“[Cats] “Women are independent and often intelligent. If people were trying to control women in the past, they probably wouldn’t have wanted that,” Maddicott says. In many ways, this is Overturning the Christian Hierarchy of Life on Eartha society in which men came out on top. Catherine M. Rogers expands on this idea, writing, “Cats conveniently represent men’s long-standing and bitter complaints about women: that they don’t submit to us and don’t love us enough. Men who cannot control women associate them with animals they cannot control.” It’s no wonder that anti-suffrage cartoons in the United States in the early 20th century featured cats to mock and belittle the women’s movement.
Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsi, an academic at the University of Wollongong who approaches zoology from a feminist postcolonial perspective, told the BBC that cat-woman relationships form part of a broader range of interactions between humans and animals. “The ideas we have about animals influence our ideas about gender,” she said. “We routinely use animal metaphors when talking about gender and when policing gendered behaviours (‘bitch’, ‘female’, ‘stud’, ‘cougar’). [race and] Racism always uses animal metaphors to dehumanize and deny the humanity of others.”
Cat-loving women in popular culture
Whereas single women had once been called bachelors or bachelorettes and were condemned for draining their relatives’ fortunes, single women who kept cats were seen as doubly doomed. By the Victorian era, the relationship had entered the cultural milieu: in 1880, the Dundee Courier declared that “a single woman without a cat is not representative of her class” and that “without cats there can be no single woman.”
The single woman-cat trope continued well into the 20th century, perhaps reaching its pop culture zenith with the 1976 documentary Grey Gardens. Its subjects were Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie) and her mother Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie), both relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Grey Gardens was the name of the 14-bedroom house they shared in East Hampton, New York. It was overrun with dozens of cats, food tins and garbage lined the floors of the house, and overgrown plants infested the yard. The documentary was, in some ways, a cautionary tale about what happens to women without men. Big Edie got divorced, and Little Edie never married.
