The misogyny of Donald Trump is hard to miss. From openly bragging about being able to sexually assault women because he is a celebrity to being held liable by a jury for raping E. Jean Carroll to talking about women in every context in degrading and dehumanizing terms. And while in the White House and on the campaign trail for the 2024 presidential election, Trump has supported a range of laws and policies that are harmful to women. These are, of course, not unrelated facts. Men who hold sexist attitudes about women behave in ways that reflect and reinforce those ideas.
Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), also seems to think precious little of women, although the revelations so far do not involve allegations of assault. He’s more focused on the “childless cat ladies” who he fears have taken over the world. Maybe he won’t grab anyone by the pussy—let’s hope not—but make no mistake, he will insult women at every opportunity and push for a world in which women remain subordinate to men.
The brazen sexism of Trump and Vance stands in stark contrast to their opposition – presumptive Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris. While they are bitterly complaining about the decline of patriarchy, Harris is energetically campaigning, fundraising, exciting young voters, and talking about actual issues and policies. Haven’t we seen this movie before?
When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ran as the Democratic nominee against Republican nominee Donald Trump, pundits debated whether America was “ready” for a woman to be President. Now they debate: “Is America ready for a Black woman president?” In the 2016 campaign, as Clinton and Trump challenged each other’s character and fitness for office, there was a hefty dose of misogyny and sexism in Trump’s barrage of insults directed at Clinton, as well as by some of his supporters. When she debated effectively, he called her a “nasty woman” and questioned whether she had the “stamina” or “the look” to be the President. He criticized her for having a “shrill” voice and a laugh that “cackled.” And, even worse, she was “playing the woman card” to try to win the election, without which she couldn’t be elected as “dogcatcher.” His running mate in that election, Mike Pence (who was replaced this time around because the insurrectionists threatened to hang him for refusing to help overturn the election), exhorted the importance of “broad-shouldered leadership.” In other words, being a woman made her both unqualified to be President and also gave her an unfair advantage.
Is the U.S. in a different place in 2024? Yes and no. By now, the United States has had the experience of having a woman of color serve as Vice President—the first time someone who is not white or not a man has held that office. But thanks to the relics of the Trump administration, it is also a time when women’s rights have been set back fifty years. “Return to patriarchy” has, in effect, become a rallying cry of the GOP. Kamala Harris has been the presumptive nominee for only five days, and the chorus of sexist and racist Republican attacks on her are already deafening. Harris, a Black and South Asian American woman, has been called “unqualified,” though she is the current Vice President, a former U.S. Senator, the former Attorney General of California, and the former head prosecutor for one of the country’s major cities. She is dismissively labeled a “DEI hire,” even though she was elected to both federal offices in a democratic voting process. It is no secret that when DEI is used as an adjective, it is a pejorative, suggesting that the person was selected because of their race or sex or other protected characteristics. Not only does that suggestion make no sense—diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are distinct from affirmative action policies and also designed to redress the proven, persistent discrimination faced by people who are not white men—Republicans use the term as a racial slur. The racism and sexism launched against Harris were so fast out of the gate after President Joe Biden announced that he was not seeking re-election that House Republican leaders had to hold a closed-door meeting two days later to ask their members to knock it off. Some will, some won’t. And Trump, not surprisingly, has already started mocking Harris’s laugh, a painful reminder of his treatment of Clinton in the 2016 election. Trump (like other Republicans) repeatedly mispronounces her first name, Kamala (a Sanskrit word reflecting her Indian heritage on her mother’s side); Trump has stated that he “couldn’t care less” if he does so.
Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is making virtually nonstop headlines with his past and present sexist treatment of Harris. And some of his remarks indicate new twists on older ideas about why women are not suitable for public office. At a minimum, they are a reminder of the double binds still facing women in politics.
Consider the “childless cat ladies” comment made by Vance to Tucker Carlson on Fox News in July 2021 that has gone viral in recent days. Vance stated:
We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, 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. And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.
If we put aside questions about the connection between childless cat ladies and corporate oligarchs (?), we can focus on this unapologetically sexist slur. There is no male equivalent, no matter how many cats nor how few children a man has. (Vance’s strange inclusion of Buttigieg among “childless cat ladies” seems to reflect homophobic stereotypes that gay men aren’t “real” men.) Vance paints a picture of a lonely spinster who is angry about never having secured a man and lived up to her gender destiny. And though she is running the country, she is bitter and sad. And her only purpose in life is to make other people as sad as she is. Although this statement by Vance has provoked very clever memes and merch (including ones with the most famous childless cat lady, Taylor Swift), we should recognize it for what it is: a slur against women. And this was not a one-off remark. It is part and parcel of a personal and political ideology that wants women seen but not heard, limited in their ability to exit marriages or control their reproductive lives, and most certainly not in the highest political offices in the land. Vance did this Fox interview after he made a controversial speech calling various Democratic leaders the “childless left” who had “no physical commitment to the future of this country.” He has also advocated for allowing children to vote—but only through their parents. The more children, the more votes allocated to a household, again based on the claim that people without children lack at “stake” in the Nation.
As a threshold matter, Vance’s attack on Harris as a person “without children” is either ignorant or consciously disparaging non-biological parenthood. It’s hard to believe he could have been ignorant of the fact that when Harris married Douglas Emhoff, she became a stepmother to his two children, Cole and Ella. So perhaps Vance really means being a stepparent just isn’t really being a parent—at least not for a woman. Biological motherhood is natural, and women who haven’t experienced it are not “real” mothers, at least that is what his commentary suggests. Yet Harris is very much a co-parent to her stepchildren. As has been widely reported, both during her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and during her years as Vice President, those stepchildren call her “Momala,” an important part of her identity. Responding to Vance, Kersten Emhoff, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife, has called Vance’s attacks “baseless,” and praised Harris as a “loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present” co-parent. “I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it,” she added.
Vance doesn’t care whether children are loved (in this case by three parents). His critique of her “childlessness” is a natural outgrowth of his patriarchal worldview. He does not see women as autonomous beings, who might make choices about their life’s path or find fulfillment and happiness in different ways. Rather, women should tend to home and hearth, care for their husbands and children, and find satisfaction in domestic work. Vance is among a group of Republicans seeking to repeal no-fault divorce laws, which he has called “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.” He claimed women “shift spouses like they change their underwear” and that even women in violent marriages should stay for the children. The calls to repeal no-fault divorce are nonsensical, but they result from the sexist attitudes that drove the overruling of Roe v. Wade. Vance, like many other outspoken GOP politicians today, is unabashed in the quest to strip women of autonomy. So perhaps he doesn’t believe that blended families formed after a divorce are “real” families—or that adults coparenting in them have a stake in the future of the country. But at core is a belief that a woman’s place is in the home.
If stepparents are “childless” and lack this stake, then (as others quickly pointed out), George Washington, our first President and stepparent to Martha Washington’s children, was not fit to lead the country. Nor were several other Presidents who did not have children. (Secretary Buttigieg has disclosed, at the time of Vance’s remarks on Fox, he and his husband, Chasten, had just gone through a “fairly heartbreaking setback” in their “adoption journey”; later in 2021, they became parents of adopted twins.)
But what if Vice President Harris didn’t have stepchildren? Vance’s remark is deeply troubling for its notion that only parents have “skin in the game” in terms of caring about the future of the United States. Further, the gendered nature of the comment—“childless cat ladies”—suggests a gender ideology on which women who do not have children are unpatriotic and selfish. They would rather devote their energy to cats than to the public good. This comment discounts all the positive political, philanthropic, and society-building work done by “childless” women. Those women had a broader view of “family” and cared about society’s children. Consider Jane Addams, founder of Hull House and an influential social reformer, who enlisted the rhetoric of motherhood to refer to this broader commitment. Neither a wife nor a biological parent, she was called the “Mother of Social Work.” Or consider the National Black Women’s Club Movement, with the motto “Lifting as We Climb,” had a broad agenda, including child care, education, and preparing the next generation. Yet, according to Paula Giddings (in her classic book, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America) among the first generation of clubwomen, while three-fourths were married and nearly three-fourths worked outside the home, only one-fourth of the women had children.
Vice President Harris repeatedly says, “We stand on the shoulders of Shirley Chisholm.” Representative Chisholm is another powerful example to debunk Vance’s attack on “childless cat ladies.” In 1968, Chisholm became the first Black female member of Congress and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. In 1972, she began a campaign to be the Democratic presidential nominee. At the time she ran, Chisholm was married (she divorced in 1977); she had no children. In 1972, she and her husband, Conrad Chisholm, received the “Childless Couple of 1972” award from the National Organization of Non-parents for “being married 22 years and childless.” As reported in a Daily News story, the organization said of the award: “Shirley Chisholm has done more to promote the rights of women and minority groups than most parents one could name. Her achievements clearly demonstrate that there is something to be said for giving one’s efforts to the larger family of the community.” Notably, over 50 years ago, the author of this news story mentioned the award to Chisholm to counter the common view (found in survey results from 1965) that women who did not want children were “childish, neurotic, and totally self-involved or in ill-health.” It isn’t a very far cry from Vance describing “childless cat ladies” as “miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” (Also, again, see Taylor Swift for evidence of the life a childless cat lady might have.)
An irony of Vance’s attack on “childless” women is that, historically women’s role as wives and mothers was a key rationale for excluding them from political life. An argument against extending the vote to women was that, if married, their husband “represented” them as the political head of the household. Under the common law model of marriage (or coverture), their separate civil existence was suspended. Unmarried women had their fathers and brothers. Further, public duties would interfere with their domestic duties in the home. Further, the science of an earlier time maintained that women’s bodies argued against—or “unfit” them—for professional careers, including political leadership: exerting their brains in certain ways could impair their reproductive functions, just as their reproductive functions could impair their reasoning processes. People like Trump and Vance want to reinforce obligatory motherhood and because it keeps women out of political offices, and board rooms, and other places men want to keep for themselves.
For men, having a family is a career advantage. Married men get paid more and are viewed as better candidates for political office (see Tim Scott’s need to rustle up a “girlfriend” in order to be taken seriously as a GOP presidential candidate). But for women, motherhood and professional achievement are in competition. And it behooves the party of patriarchy to force and shame women into traditional maternal roles, whether they desire them or not.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Remember when being told by a male senator in Washington State that she was “just a mom in tennis shoes” spurred Patti Murray’s successful run for the U.S. Senate in 1992? Well now we have Kamala Harris, who has popularized pearls with Chucks, and stands for the proposition that women can do anything. J.D. Vance’s nostalgia for women’s subordination should be called out for what it is: sexist and unacceptable.