Opinion | On Cat Ladies, Mama Bears and ‘Momala’

While Donald Trump hides out in Mar-a-Lago, JD Vance has spent the past few weeks taking point on the G.O.P.’s continued struggle to define Kamala Harris. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s beef with women who don’t have children, as outlined in an interview in 2021, has resurfaced. At the time, Vance derided Harris as emblematic of “childless cat ladies” who don’t have a “direct stake” in America. He now claims this “childless cat lady” routine was sarcasm, stating that he meant only that making more babies is a good thing for this nation. That still implies that not having children is un-American. It also underscores how Trump and Vance have very few pro-family policy proposals for actual babies, as opposed to talking about imagined babies that women should be having. Vance’s ham-handed attempts to have it both ways reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.

The idea of a childless cat lady is an uninspired dog whistle among others — old maid, crone, witch — that are designed to reduce a woman’s social value to her ability and willingness to reproduce. When Vance says that Harris is one of many childless cat ladies who are miserable and trying to make the rest of the world miserable, he is calling on a set of sexist, racist ideas about which women are even allowed to count as real women. Namely, married mothers are real women, and the rest of us are horrible divergences from the social contract.

Vance’s commentary hints at a decades-old idea, popular in overlapping antidemocratic circles, that this country has a demographic crisis, couched in the notion that declining birthrates are destabilizing the economy. That idea is rife with xenophobic fears that white Americans are not having enough children and immigration is an undesirable way to bolster demographic growth. Fears about population decline like this typically end up really being racist fears about this country’s declining white majority.

The gag is clear when you consider which issues pronatalists like Vance consider worthy and which he does not. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rates in this country, followed by Native American women. Yet his stated pro-birthing policy policies do not address the high cost of giving birth for minority women.

The G.O.P., in particular, has tapped into white male rage about women — especially educated white women — who can choose when and how they will have children. As a result, some commentators have begun to call this election the presidential contest of the genders, with male grievance finding an outlet in Trump’s brand of big man politics and women finding resonance for their post-Dobbs rage in the Democratic Party. Through Trump’s bluster and Vance’s comments, the G.O.P. has begun to lay a trap for Harris by calling her into a rhetorical war about motherhood that a Black woman of immigrant descent cannot win.

All female political candidates are expected to narrate their motherhood status or, at least, their mother-like qualities. But no other presidential candidate had to meet this challenge the way Harris will. Watching this campaign wrestle with the G.O.P.’s motherhood purity test, so far, has been a lesson in how not to fall for dog whistle traps.