There may be some truth in the idea that animal hoarding is more common in women. Eleanor Abernathy, for example, has cats dripping off her: she is, essentially, portrayed as a mentally ill, alcoholic, compulsive hoarder.
Added to this, the extreme end of the modern “crazy cat lady” stereotype has more than a few cats, which is unusual. The inception of the “crazy” moniker is harder to pin down, but its connotations of hysteria are an old gender stereotype. Vintage illustration of a witch and her black cat on a broom on Halloween. In the 1900s, anti-suffragette propaganda used images of cats to portray women as silly, useless, catty and ridiculous in their attempt to enter political life.
The Old Maid card game was often illustrated with a dour woman and her cat, the “friend of the friendless”, as it was described at the time. The Victorians switched witches for old-maid stereotypes – for single women without children: “Old maids and cats have long been proverbially associated together, and, rightly or wrongly, these creatures have been looked upon with a certain degree of suspicion and aversion by a large proportion of the human race,” wrote a journalist in the Dundee Courier in 1880. Although the Bible does not specifically mention cats, early Christian pilgrims were highly suspicious of other religions, and they deemed the black cat to be so demonic that being seen with one could be punishable by death.Īlthough the 18th century saw people beginning to question superstitions – such as the belief that a woman’s wart was a teat suckled by Satan – negative connotations of the relationship between cats and women remained. The Ancient Egyptians worshipped Bastet, a woman with a head of a cat. Unlike dogs, they refuse to obey and be domesticated.
Why would cats get such a satanic rep? We can only guess. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images Upper portion of a bronze figure of Bastet holding a cat aegis.
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