Suffragists and the Cat and Mouse Act

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I'm Brooke Gladstone This week, JD Vance has been doing a lot of press, partly to sell the maybe peace deal with Iran that he had a hand in brokering, but he's also on a book tour. Communion O this week is the follow up to his twenty sixteen bestseller Hill Villy Elegy some Excerpts from it are making headlines of their own, like this one, quote The dumbest things I've ever said came when I argued that, quote, childless cat ladies across the Democratic Party were running our country into the ground. He first made his cat lady quip when he was running for office in Ohio, but it re emerged on the campaign trail with Donald Trump in twenty twenty four. Here's Vance on Meet the Press doubling down. Given that people have told you directly, have spoken out, have said that they were offended, they were hurt by those comments. Do you wish you never made those childless cat lady comments I think that it's much more important for me to just be a normal human being who sometimes says things people disagree with. I have a lot of regrets, Kristin, but making a joke three years ago is not in the top ten of the list H no regrets attitude really ticked off those women in question. You do not want to piss off Cat ladies, we will come for you and we'll have a lot of fun doing it. So now as Vance attempts to claw his way back into the good graces of a certain constituency, we'll take this opportunity to rerun a super fun twenty twenty four interview with Catherine Hughes author of the book Catland, Louis Wayne and the Great Cat Mania In it, she traces the many pernicious things ascribed to cats and their guardians that have undergirded a long history of cruelty to cats including the notorious case in seventeen thirty of the Great Cat massacre in Paris as Hughes describes Yeah, it's an extraordinary event. Two apprentices became really, really outraged because they discovered that their master's wife was feeding her pet cat much nicer food than she was giving them And this just seemed absolutely outrageous. So they rounded up all the cats in the area and staged a sort of mock trial in the courtyard. The charge against these cats was that they were living at a rate of extravagance that was far, far too good for them Very unsurprisingly, these poor cats were found guilty and the apprentices then slaughtered all the cats. And Lagriise, the mistress's cat, was smashed with an iron bar so that her spine broke. So in the late eighteen hundreds, suddenly cats become very popular Could you describe the reasons for and the scale of that cultural shift for millennia, cats had been toerated useful in kitchens for catching mice, useful in the barnyard for catching rats. They have a kind of freelance association with mankind. they're not in the service of anybody And then what happens as Britain becomes more and more urbanized and people are still pouring into the cities There's also space for the cat, as it were to start moving up from the kitchen into the sitting room. You do describe the period from eighteen seventy to the eve of the Second World War, a period of seventy years land When cats were transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors with names, personalities, even biographies You build your story around one of the progenitors of Catland, a peculiar character named Louis Wayne Louis Wayne, a lowly freelance commercial illustrator, starts to draw cats as if they are people They start to walk upright, they start to wear clothes. And onto those creatures, he maps a kind of topography of middle class life in the eighteen nineties and beyond Playing tennis, going to the opera Sitting down to breakfast, taking tea The first really important picture is called the Cat's Christmas Dance and it's a huge cananop of cats in evening dress. under the Christmas tree, having a dance Some of the younger ones are getting a little bit amorous with each other under the mistletoe. His heyday is the nineties. What you call a fantasieca world of artifice, disguise and impersonation What was it about the eighteen nineties that the world is speeding up, the pretty modest middle classes have a little bit more money to spend We now have a weekend annual holidays, so people are kind of carving out a life for themselves, which is not just about putting enough food on the table, but creating a sense of yourself as a person with tastes and pleasures and hobbies And that is, I think particularly ri for Wayne, as it were to map onto his c cats, enjoying a dip in the sea, taking to the road on bicycles. Weirdly, cats were changing to look more like the ones Wayne drew Or did it just seem that way? That's exactly what happens The London cat was well known for being stringy and looking more like a weasel than a cat. And what women particularly start to do is kind of carve out of this genenetic sameness, distinct breeds, so you start to get Persians are imported from France, Siamese from the far East. to beautifully marked tabs together and hope that out of their offspring, you would get a particularly charming kind of effect The British cats were manly and hard working, whereas the foreign ones were effeminate and deceptive Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. So it's very interesting to watch. The long haired cats that come in from France are feminate. They spend too much time grooming themselves. They're pretty, but they're shallow. All those kind of nationalistic stereotypes British cats are short haired, stocky sensible because they know that they need to get on with life This has no bearing in truth Despite this embrace of cats, their improved public image There obviously remain negative associations with the animals and their owners that they never managed to shake off, like the cat lady trope we've been hearing so much about lately, brandished mostly as a term of ridicule. And it's always about the fact that the cat lady is lavishing on the cat the kinds of attention and material resources that should have gone into husband and children So for instance, leaving your cat a lot of money so that it can live in the manner to which it's been accustomed. Everything is about subverting normal family patriarchal rules. And that is what's so offensive. and why so much print is expended on these strange women You say that cats are markers of dissident sexuality. They're not quite tamable. Now it's a trope that draws very obviously on old anxieties around witches and their cats from the Middle Ages as well as the fact that the cat lady may well not have children herself There's a sense in which the cat, as a creature of the streets, makes its own way in life, will never be told what to do And is also very, very fertile, very promiscuous, and is up on the roof calling two or three times a year to be mated Again, we get the slippage between the actual female cat and the female cat owner You write at length about the Lloyd Sisters at one end of the spectrum of cat ladies. How do they end up in the press? The Lloyd Sisters are three sisters who live in Birmingham in the eighteen sixties. They take in cats. and try and nurse them back to health The problem is they don't have the money or the means to do this in any kind of healthy or salubrs ways. A little grey gardens, as you'd say here. Very grey gardens. Yeah. So Charles Austin, a very unpleasant man who lives next door, makes a series of formal complaints and in the end, these women are taken to court The magistrates put the eldest sister Anne Lloyd on trial for really running an unruly household. Yes. She was described by journalists as somewhat eccentric in appearance and manner You know, a mad cat lady suspected of sharing im mododerate intimacy with byy having them sleep in her and her sister's beds. I think the Lloyds is a sort of lightning rod. They attract all the kinds of anxieties, tensions, fears. And it comes to court. And what was so shocking is the misogyny on display. The magistrates laugh at Miss Lloyd every time she opens her mouth to say something about the cats the way they're being tortured by the local boys Worst of all is when the policeman is called as a witness and he's asked about, well, how much did the house really smell? And the policeman says, Well, there's a strong smell of fish. I didn't know whether it was the ladies' bodies or it was the fish that they were feeding to the cats. And the court absolutely erupts And of course, we know, of course, I'm sure it was intended. then a very unpleasant kind of reference to aging female bodies and sort of curdled female juices. And it's just know, this is Victorian England. you know I had no idea that this kind of thing went on Becoming a cat lady in the nineteenth century was for some, quite a lucrative business. Miss Frances Simpson, the stylish daughter of a vicar, pioneered the modern breeding of cats. You wrote, Her greatest achievement was to take a subject that society treated as a bit of a joke, single women and their cats turn it into the means to an independent and dignified life First of all, she's a journalist, so she has a lot of columns in newspapers on cat care and cat history. Miss Simpson, a Vica's daughter, can write with a completely straight face, a column called Practical Pciology, in which she advises people on everything from what to feed your cat, how to dress it in the winter, if it's going on a railway journey But she also gets very interesting cat breeding. She invents the Blue Persian, out of which she makes a very tidy sum of money, selling her cats for up to one hundred pounds ago She is also the main channel between America and Britain. So she works, as it were as an agent in Britain, sending out Pedigree cats, kittens to American cat ladies. She was an entrepreneur. Yeah. I mean, she even sets up Selfidgees, which is our biggest department store, a sort of cat lounge where you could come and buy kittens. So where before you'd have just scooped up a cat from the gutter and hoped for the best, now you picked out a charming cat and then you were briefed on how to look after it by Miss Simpson. So it's becoming very, very tony as a kind of occupation. I think she's an extraordinary woman. One of the most powerful women during the Cat mania was the Duchess of Bedford, known as Lady Russell. She was president of the National Cat Club. She was known for training her cats to hold poses and play croquet. and it seems to me that the richer the cat lady, the more acceptable she was. Money solves everything. The Duchess of Bedford was herself an extremely ambivalent mother. She had one child ten months into her marriage and then stopped sleeping with her husband, the Duke neverever had any more babies, couldouldn't stand her son, in fact and was much more interested in animals and in becoming one of the first female aviators in Britain But nobody thought to be scornful about her because she is the Duchess of Bedford and she's immensely wealthy. I think it's always about the finite amount of resources. I mean, I understand that Jie Vance, the whole point of ra anxiety about cat ladies, is simply that they don't have sufficient stake in the future generations. It's always about where the resources go, where one's interest goes. And I think that is perfectly borne out here You had a fascinating chapter about the use of cat imagery in the suffuffragist movement. and you said that one particular picture actually won some men over to the suffragist side. So a lot of women who were active in the movements to get votes for women were also very, very preoccupied with Societies againainst crruelty to animals and cats in particular. So you would expect to find suffragist artists using the cat as a kind of idea of a kind of independent female denoting agency doesn't happen, in fact. The image of the cat gets taken up by the anti suffragists, pictures of cats dressed up in silly hats holding noticeices saying we demand the vote. a sense again in which all that kind of misogyny comes tumbling out because there's something ridiculous about a cat demanding the vote what next will mice demand the vote But then comes one particular image towards the end of the struggle. When suffragists were imprisoned in Hollowway, they often went on hunger strike and were then forced start go what's called force feeding where a tube was stuck down their throat. a nasty thin gruel tips down which is in itself dangerous. Yeah. it's waterboarding. I mean it's kind of torture. It was so unpopular that state of affairs was reached whereby the women When they got so thin, they would be allowed to go home until they were well enough to be brought back to prison and then they would be tortured again It was called the Cat and Mouse Act. and it was such a disgusting idea. It was called Cat and mouse Act because the cat plays with the mouse, it doesn't finish it off. It enjoys torturing the mouse a particular potent poster was produced showing the home secretary as a bloodthirsty cat with a suffragist clamped between his teeth piece of rhetorical propaganda was so powerful. that it actually got the liberals out of power. Now, you thank your own cats, Maud and Ted in your books for accompanying you as you wrote it What led you to write this Ted and Mord are here actually recording the interview as we speak because they like to have their own copy of everything. so they're sitting here on my lap. My grandmother who was born in nineteen oh seven, was a breeder of Blue Persians, a hopeless breeder because she could never bear to sell them.. My mother, who was an only child, grew up with seventeen cat siblings. My grandmother was a kind of cat lady and I think much preferred a cat to my mother As I was growing up, I remember my grandmother had the Louis Wayne books. She had a lot of Louis Wayne books. And at that point, so I'm talking about the seventies and eighties, they weren't really very well known at all I was fascinated by these books, particularly fascinated by Louis Wayne's schooloolroom scenes because they would have cats behaving really, really badly and the naughty cats were pulling each other's whiskers and chucking mice at each other. And I was completely fascinated by this. and actually really, really frightened because I was a very, very good child and I hated that kind of disorder, which You know, I experienence at my own school as one does grew up, I was very aware that there was always a kind of anxiety in these drawings that other people seemed to find so charming. Often the male cats were a bit lascivious They often had two girlfriends on the go at once. There was just something that was very uncomfortable about them. So I always thought that at some point I would write a book about Louis Wayne No amount of love for cats will ever do away with the cat lady trope. Absolutely. Just look at the way in which cat ladies have come out fighting as a result of