According to historians, in England prior to the 19th century, pet owners were ridiculed and derided. The Guardian notes that pet owners, “particularly when they were female, were seen as frivolous consumers who spent their money in absurd ways.”
![[Woman holding cat] from the Library of Congress collection](https://spinstersrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Woman-holding-catfrom-the-Library-of-Congress-collection-1024x827.jpg)
The attitudes towards pets began to shift due in part to Queen Victoria’s love for her pets, who were so numerous as to claim their own Wikipedia page. Her menagerie included a greyhound named Nero, a donkey named Jacquot, and a Pekingese named Looty who was stolen from the Xianfeng Emperor of China during the Second Opium War.
Though pets are now largely accepted as valued members of the family, the same stigma remains against people – especially women – who choose to remain childless while nurturing a little posse of furry friends.
Let me preface this by saying as we’ve stated here before, that I believe that the spinster lifestyle is for everyone – including parents of human children. One of the unexpected gifts of growing older is seeing my loved ones mature and evolve too. I have many friends for whom parenthood is a sacred calling; they are doing the hard, but fulfilling work of healing generational trauma and providing their kids with safe, secure childhoods.
But parenthood is not the only valid life choice. The trope of “crazy cat lady” has been around for ages to discount and humiliate women who choose life goals and pathways other than motherhood. The belief is that if you lack a maternal instinct or don’t see children fitting into your life, you must be mentally ill.
This rhetoric still flourishes today, with Vice President and unhinged try-hard JD Vance saying in a 2021 interview with Fox News that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
As with the rise of the Christian far right in the U.S. today, during the Reformation, “religious, legal, familiar, and cultural pressures” were applied to women so that they would reproduce, with the mere existence of those pressures pointing to the prevalent “fear that women might somehow opt out.”
The world loves to project its own anxieties onto women without children, to view them as an existential threat to the supposed natural order. That is the only way to explain the vitriol and defensiveness with which people attack childless cat ladies. In the 1880, Scottish paper The Dundee Courier published a diatribe against the cat-owning spinster that can only beg the question, “are u ok bro?”
“There is nothing at all surprising in the old maid choosing a cat as a household pet or companion. Solitude is not congenial to human nature, and a poor forlorn female, shut up in a cheerless ‘garret,’ brooding all alone over her blighted hopes, would naturally centre her affections on some of the lower animals, and none would be more congenial as a pet and companion than a kindly purring pussy.”
People who choose pets over children challenge the far right’s notion that we must be psychopaths incapable of real love or nurturing in order to choose a different lifestyle. If we were as mentally deranged, emotionally cold, and miserable as they say we are, how could we possibly choose to treat our pets as beloved companions? How could we house, feed, and make sacrifices for their happiness? How could we sit in the waiting room of emergency veterinary offices and weep for their pain as though it was our own?
The truth is this, as uncomfortable as it may be for those who believe there is only one right (pun intended) way to live – many of us have not chosen to be childless pet owners because we have failed to “win” the perfect little nuclear family as a prize for complying with the patriarchy. We have chosen this lifestyle, and our furry buddies, because it’s what we want, full stop.
![[Horse and woman with letter blocks] from the Library of Congress collection](https://spinstersrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Horse-and-woman-with-letter-blocks-from-the-Library-of-Congress-collection-793x1024.jpg)
