Cow moms v. cat ladies

Ballerina Farm & JD Vance & the effort to pathologize women’s solitude

By now, you’ve probably seen the Times of London profile of Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, which depicts her as a young woman bullied into marrying before she was ready, giving up her career as a ballerina to fulfill her husband’s pastoral dream. Maybe you’ve even seen Neeleman’s uncharacteristic direct response, or the many videos of her egg apron. Meanwhile, an interview recently resurfaced in which JD Vance claims the US is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made” and who just want company in their misery.

If the takeaway here isn’t immediately evident: cats bad, cows good! Married women constantly pregnant good, people without children “less mentally stable,” actually “sociopathic”, based on Vance’s research, conducted by going on Twitter!

I usually try to stay out of the fray when it comes to momfluencer content because it can become so all-consuming. But the convergence of these events— one in the purportedly “neutral,” as Neeleman put it in the BF profile, landscape of influencer content, and the other surrounding a national presidential campaign— says a lot about our current moment. Why do cow ladies supposedly have it so much better? Why are women overrun by husbands, kids and farm animals not understood as suffering from a kind of madness, while women with free time and cats are?

The “crazy cat lady” trope suggests that childfree crones, old maids, and unmarried women of any age are nutty spinsters shunned from society, rather than free women bucking the expectations of femininity— namely, that they will busy themselves serving men through domestic and maternal work, and that this is the highest calling a woman can have. In her brilliant analysis of the Neeleman profile and response, resident BF expert

Sara Petersen

disabuses us of the notion that the nerve the profile hit boils down to a simple matter of supporting women’s different “choices.” As I write in Touched Out as well, agency over one’s “choices” is always conditioned along the lines of race, class, gender, access to reproductive healthcare, and so on.

Disdain for the childfree cat lady is also not just about women choosing another life. The association between women and cats is centuries-old; cats are symbolic of feminine sexuality and wickedness. Cats were also key to anti-suffragette campaigns that showed a dystopian future in which men were stuck at home doing housework and childcare (!) while their wives were off voting. Cats were symbolic of women who wanted the vote, and the vote was often equated with women’s desire to not work in the home. Rae Alexandra writes:

This served two purposes. First, depicting suffragettes as cats acted as a means to reduce women to the status of inconsequential, trifling animals. Second, associating women’s rights activists with this particular pet acted as a wink and a nod to the public about what kind of woman wanted the vote: lonely, bitter man-haters.

Man fearful he will be left at home alone to do the caring and cleaning!

Vance’s biggest donor and mentor has argued that America started going “downhill” at this time, after women attained the right to vote. He also argued that democracy is bad for smart men, and that political policies should enable men to create their own mini-fiefdoms, where they can nourish their intelligence. Men, in other words, not only need solitude, but political paradigms, and women, to create that space for them.

The association between women and cats, however, is rooted in beliefs about felines’ antisocial nature, highlighting just how gendered our moral attitudes toward solitude are: men need their time away from home and family to work, create, innovate, and exert power; women, on the other hand, when not surrounded by home and family at all times, are understood as lonely, mad, narcissistic, mean, isolated, desexualized, hysterical, animal, failures.

As

Anne Helen Petersen

put it, trad wife life “offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home.” But that performative ease occludes the labor, the exhaustion, the difficulty, the control— the fact that there is no ease to be found in being the sole architect of the domestic experience for entitled men. It’s an endless, thankless job.

The cat lady, on the other hand, has it made. She shuns marriage and motherhood, the foundational institutions of patriarchy. She’s often depicted as a woman with a messy home, rebelling against her domestic duties, too. As a result, she has the freedom to go a little mad—that is, she has time and space to think for herself, to imagine and to create another kind of life. And autonomy,

lyz

writes, is joy.

The most striking part of the BF profile to me was the admission of Hannah’s bone-deep exhaustion. Her husband says she “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.” It seems wild that this guy would admit this to a reporter, as though it’s proof of the good life he has and how hard his wife works for it. But it tracks. The idea is that women’s happiness should not come from her own fulfillment— careerist, communal, intellectual, creative, sexual, or otherwise—but in her total physical and psychological depletion in service of her family.

It all betrays a deep assault against women’s solitude and rest— and a fear of what women might find, and make, if they had more time to themselves. The claim that women need the stabilizing force of a cow (better yet a whole dairy farm), a man, and many children to keep their idle hands occupied is tied to the belief that women, left to their own devices, are dangerous. It’s thinking that pathologizes any woman actively seeking solitude and independence.

The Vance/BF convergence also drives home just how much the institution of marriage—and its accompanying gender inequality and roles—is responsible for the lack of psychic autonomy so many mothers casually reference as par for the course. The author of the BF profile notes how hard it is to get Hannah alone for an interview, one not interrupted by children or her husband’s constant commentary. Many have remarked, in response, that this is just what motherhood is like. But it’s not a condition of motherhood, or parenting. It’s a particular way of understanding marriage, family, and home life, and the role that women should serve in relation to their husband’s fantasies.

I cannot even imagine how touched out Hannah Neeleman is with her 8 kids and needy-looking husband. As I write in my book Touched Out, sacrificial motherhood requires a daily physical and psychological disciplining of the body. We do it to ourselves, as we internalize beliefs about family life and what we must take on to serve those ideals. But it’s also done to us, in our socialization from a young age, in our marriages. Then again, the Neelemans also have a huge plot of land, which likely helps, and which illustrates how her “choice” to be a domestic goddess doing it all with “ease” (if we believe that to be true) is one she can only make because of her family’s wealth. But culturally, we understate the effects of women being incapacitated by constant childbearing and overwork in the home, cut off from dreams and desires, from the ability to create art, from political influence, and more simply, from their own bodies and minds. It’s enough to actually drive a person mad.

Which is why the image of the “crazy cat lady” is so important to this weird Christian nationalist dream. Women without men and children supposed to be pitied. We are supposed to believe that without the disciplining force of marriage and motherhood, women’s lives would have no structure, no meaning, no purpose. They would go off the rails. They would go insane. They would live in their own worlds.

Sounds delicious.