J.D. Vance: We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats by a bunch of childless cat ladies.

Brooke Gladstone: That, dare we say, weird comment by J.D. Vance has become a rallying cry. From WNYC in New York, This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. While a growing faction in the US warned that falling birth rates portend catastrophe, just decades ago, the fear was of too many people crowding the earth.

Paul Ehrlich: Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come, and by the end I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a theory of why some men have never liked cats or cat ladies or ladies across the centuries. Hint, there's an element of fear.

Kathryn Hughes: It's a trope that draws on old anxieties around witches and their cats from the middle ages.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Donald Trump announced his candidacy 721 days before election day. Kamala Harris announced her candidacy roughly 100 days before the election, meaning the real race is being crammed into a fraction of the length of a normal presidential campaign. Is that why every day feels like an eternity? On Monday, Democrats started the week with a new favorite word.

Tim Walz: That stuff is weird. I see Donald Trump talking about the wonderful Hannibal Lecter or whatever weird thing he's on tonight. That is weird behavior.

Kamala Harris: Donald Trump has been resorting to some wild lies about my record and some of what he and his running mate are saying. Well, it's just plain weird.

Gretchen Whitmer: The way they address people. It is bizarre. It's weird. It is weird.

Tim Walz: That stuff is weird, they come across weird. They seem obsessed with this.

News clip: Super weird idea from J.D. Vance.

News clip: Yes, it's quite weird.

Micah Loewinger: Then on Tuesday.

News clip: The director of Project 2025 has stepped down after facing criticism from both Democrats and the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump: I don't know what the hell it is. It's Project 25. He's involved in Project-- Then they read some of the things and they are extreme. I mean, they're seriously extreme, but I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it.

Kamala Harris: The momentum in this race is shifting, and there are signs that Donald Trump is feeling it.

[applause]

Micah Loewinger: Kamala Harris that night at her first rally as presumptive nominee in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kamala Harris: Last week, you may have seen, he pulled out of the debate in September he had previously agreed to. Well Donald, I do hope you'll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage, because as the saying goes, if you got something to say, say it to my face.

Micah Loewinger: Since Harris announced her presidential run, Democrats have held Zoom fundraisers like Black Women for Harris, white women answer the call and one titled White Dudes for Harris, prompting this zinger from Jesse Watters of Fox News on Tuesday.

Jesse Watters: To be a man and then vote for a woman just because she's a woman is either childish, that person has mommy issues, or they're just trying to be accepted by other women. I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.

Micah Loewinger: All right. Onto Wednesday, the day Trump sat on stage with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. NABJ co-chair, Karen Attiah had resigned in protest, writing in the Washington Post, "I could not be part of the production and promotion of performative journalistic charades that degrade our communities and further undermine trust in our profession."

Rachel Scott: I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today.

Micah Loewinger: ABC's Rachel Scott, one of Trump's onstage interviewers. Her question about the DEI label led to the most notable or notorious answer of the day.

Rachel Scott: Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a Black woman?

Donald Trump: Well, I can say no. I think it's maybe a little bit different. I've known her a long time, indirectly, not directly, very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?

Rachel Scott: She has always identified as a Black person--

Micah Loewinger: The feigned ignorance about Harris biracial identity proved too much for even some conservative pundits like Bill O'Reilly.

Bill O'Reilly: Trump blew it, and the happiest person in the country tonight is Kamala Harris. She's sitting there cackling. He's just alienated millions of Black voters.

Scott Jennings: He did crap the bed today.

Micah Loewinger: Conservative analyst Scott Jennings on CNN.

Scott Jennings: The only question is whether he's going to roll around in it or get up and change his sheets.

Micah Loewinger: Thursday, he kept rolling around, posting to truth social an old photo of Kamala Harris wearing a sari. He then reposted a right wing influencer who claimed the vice president's birth certificate, which states her father is Jamaican, proves that she's lying about her Blackness, but later that day, a much needed respite.

News clip: Breaking news, a multinational prisoner exchange involving the US and Russia, one of the largest prisoner swaps since the end of the Cold War. We're talking about decades here. ABC News has learned former US marine Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich are being released.

Micah Loewinger: A tracker on the Wall Street Journal's homepage documenting Gershkovich's time in Russian custody stopped at 491 days, 1 hour and 20 minutes. As I record this, we have 93 long days left till election day.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, to birth or not to birth? That is the question.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. While Trump appeared on stage at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, he mostly sparred with the interviewers about his own record, but at one point, he was asked about his run running mate J.D. Vance.

Laura Ingraham: He said, the Democrats running the country are a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made, and so they don't, they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. Did you know that he had these views about people who do not have children before you picked him to be your running mate and do you agree with him?

Donald Trump: No. I know this. He is very family-oriented, and he thinks family is a great thing. That doesn't mean he thinks that if you don't have a family, it's not-- I know people with families--

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, that references Vance's clip from his 2021 Tucker Carlson interview. You know it, you love it because either way you plan to vote, it's delectably revealing. Vance says that the recent coverage neglected the substance and focused on his sarcasm. Last week on conservative commentator Megyn Kelly's show, Vance clarified, as it were.

J.D. Vance: This is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn't have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child.

Brooke Gladstone: But Vance's trail of comments decrying the child list is long. Here's another from 2021.

J.D. Vance: There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really, really valuable when you have kids in your life, and the fact that so many people, especially in America's leadership class just don't have that in their lives, you know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less mentally stable.

Brooke Gladstone: This bleak analysis can be traced to a movement that's been picking up steam here in the US for more than a decade. Rachel Cohen is a policy correspondent for Vox who's written about pronatalism, the belief that falling birth rates foretell social and economic collapse in the coming years. She says this anxiety is shared by people across the political spectrum.

Rachel Cohen: Now, they're not just conservatives. You find people across the spectrum who share concerns about what a shrinking population will mean, but some of the more extreme right wing parts of this movement have been speaking out recently and gaining more power.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, what we're talking about is the birth rate declining. That's the ratio of live births to the population at large.

Rachel Cohen: Beginning in 2007, birth rates have been going down fairly substantially, and they haven't reversed, and two thirds of all people on earth right now live in a country below what demographers call replacement rate, meaning on average 2.1 children per woman. Population is still going up, but it's not going up at the rate at which we would maintain the same size of the population it is now in a generation or two.

Brooke Gladstone: Walk me through the alleged perils of lower birth rates.

Rachel Cohen: Most countries have a system that depends on workers to fund welfare, to fund pension systems. There's this sense that if nothing changes, there's going to be potentially a lot of economic stagnation, more political strife, more unemployment, more labor shortages, fewer resources to care for the elderly, but the elderly will still have more political power so you can imagine intergenerational conflict and ethno-nationalist conflict. That's the economic grim picture. Then other pronatalists will say also just fewer people means fewer new discoveries, less innovation, less progress. We don't want to live in a world that has less human life.

Rachel Cohen: You see a lot of that from tech people but also religious people. There are some proximate economic concerns to think about but whether or not you solve those with birth rate is the big debate.

Brooke Gladstone: What about immigration? In 2021, Adrian Raftery, a professor of statistics and sociology at the University of Washington, argued in a piece for the conversation that immigration is one reason that the US population will continue to grow even as others don't, but immigration isn't seen at least by the far right, as a positive, so no help there. These, apparently, are the wrong kinds of babies. Is this pronatalism anti-immigration stance really just the great replacement theory and fluffier terms?

Rachel Cohen: There are certainly parts under the banner of pronatalism that are more ethno-nationalist, more racist, and that is the reason why some secular liberal progressive pronatalists feel very uneasy being in coalition with these people. They have the shared goal of more people on Earth, but some of the people in the movement definitely don't want all people on earth. They want a specific kind. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, they have this national policy of procreation not immigration.

Brooke Gladstone: Some politicians are very eager to be hands-on. You mentioned Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In China, officials apparently have nixed gender equality as a priority and advised women to "establish" a correct outlook on marriage and love childbirth, and family. Vladimir Putin late last year encouraged women to have eight or more children just like the old times. These nations, though, are ruled by authoritarians, I guess they'd have to be and have these policies. Is that a political orientation that pronatalists tend to share?

Rachel Cohen: Countries across Europe have also been concerned with this problem of low birth rates and fertility for more decades than the US because the US wasn't having this problem. A lot of European countries, a lot of countries in Asia started to see birth rates declining in the end of the 20th century. There are concerns about it, not just in authoritarian-led nations, but I do think that there is a much greater risk of reactionary social policy on these questions when you have authoritarian leaders get elected.

Brooke Gladstone: You noted that in 2000, lots of countries were dealing with falling birth rates. In 2004, a journalist, Phil Longman, published The Empty Cradle, outlining the political and economic risks of depopulation. He traveled all over the world encouraging leaders to take it more seriously, but the US wasn't back then because they weren't having the problems until 2007, right? I'm wondering, why didn't our population sink back then?

Rachel Cohen: We had more Latino immigrants, and they had a higher birth rate. We also had higher teen births in the 1990s and early 2000s. Some people say America had higher religiosity, and so you saw higher birth rates, in part from those cultures that prioritize childbearing.

Brooke Gladstone: Then when the birth rate started to fall in 2007, some people said it was because of the great recession. What does the data suggest?

Rachel Cohen: There was a period of time where people thought, well, maybe that's the recession because birth rates tend to go down in periods of economic decline. As the economy rebounded, and time went on, it no longer seemed to explain what was going on. Then there was a time, well, maybe people are going to have the same number of kids. They're just going to start later in life. That took another 10 years or so for people to realize, okay, no, there's just right now fewer babies being born.

Rachel Cohen: You do have researchers looking into some of the cultural changes that have gone on and there are a lot of theories right now, but some of them are more debatable than others. Some things are just factually true. Women are postponing marriage and childbearing, some are not getting married. Birth control has also just gotten much more effective. Teen births have gone down. People are using birth control more consistently, so when they don't want to get pregnant they're less likely to.

Rachel Cohen: Other theories, people are having less sex overall. Some people point to smartphones and the internet for sucking up attention that used to go to dating and love. Other people point to climate anxiety and bringing people into an overheating world. Other people say it's just too expensive. Governments all over the world are trying to figure out is it possible to reverse this, or do we need to just come up with a new way of dealing with the economic challenges that might come from having a declining population?

Brooke Gladstone: Sweden allowed a combined 16 months of parental leave. In Norway, 97% of children ages three to five are in private or public childcare centers, which are subsidized and cash is offered to families who can't find a center on their own.

Rachel Cohen: The thing is, none of these thus far have really reversed the decline. There's been some modest effect on birth rates, but nothing really that has taken a country from below replacement rate to at or above replacement rate. There's this question going on right now. Is it possible to use policy to voluntarily boost population in a significant way? People who think you can say, "Well, we just have never really tried big incentives." Giving a family 2 months of subsidized childcare when they still have to pay 10 months of really expensive childcare might not be such a good deal.

Brooke Gladstone: It's also worth noting that some countries, including those or maybe especially those led by nationalist leaders, have pushed for a mix of incentives. Hungary reportedly now plans to exempt women who have four kids or more from income taxes for life. First-time homebuyers who promise to have kids can get housing subsidies. Elsewhere, abortion seems to be a very common target. In 2020, Poland tightened up its laws outlawing abortion for fetal abnormalities, which made up the majority of abortion cases in Poland. Meanwhile, Russian women can still get procedures, but restrictions to drug and clinic access are growing in recent years.

Rachel Cohen: I definitely felt nervous working on this piece. I spend a lot of time writing about rollbacks on abortion rights in the US and the attacks on IVF, and the attempts to conflate birth control with abortion. It doesn't seem to me inconceivable at all that if you make the issue of falling birth rates more salient, if you get people really activated, that's a huge problem and crisis, that some people might become more open to ideas and solutions that we don't necessarily want to be normalized or treated as, mmh, maybe we should go back to that.

Rachel Cohen: Right now, the way that experts are responding to it is saying, "Well, the best evidence we have right now suggests that abortion bans don't actually boost birth rates because in countries with good contraception access women will just turn to that." I hear that and I think, "Okay, well, what if you found was effective?" That's not really super comforting to me because I can certainly imagine a world with more aggressive abortion bans, or harder-to-get birth control. Essentially, the answer right now is if you look at countries like Romania that used to have really, really strict gruesome abortion bans in the name of boosting birth rates, that didn't work well.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned the first Natal Conference, which took place late last year in Texas. Politico's Gaby Del Valle was at the conference and said that at first glance it looked like there might be something new, "a case for having kids that is rooted in a critique of the market-driven forces that shape our lives and the shifts that have made our culture less family-oriented." Things like growing income inequality, I guess.

Brooke Gladstone: Eventually, she said, "The novel arguments for having kids gave way to a 'different set of concerns.'" "Throughout the day," she wrote, "speakers and participants hinted at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the US and other parts of the West. Divorce, gender integration, wokeness, declining genetic quality." She wrote, "This conference suggested there's a simple way around the problem of majority rule, breeding a new majority, one that sounds and looks just like them."

Rachel Cohen: I thought Gaby's touch from the conference was great. I would say that conference definitely featured the more fringe, more extremist, more anti-feminist, anti-immigrant parts of this movement. You had people saying, "We need to make motherhood in large families more hotly desired status symbol, but don't market needles into progressive feminists." You had this right-wing blogger named Charles Haywood saying the actual meaning of masculinity has been destroyed by vampire feminists. You have a lot of blaming of feminism. Now, I interviewed people for my story who share the concerns of falling birth rates, but didn't go to that conference because they didn't want to be associated with those types of people, so it's unclear how much this coalition will be able to really move forward.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned that there is a danger of conflating extremist narratives and proposed solutions with more moderate ones. In fact, you quoted Washington Examiner columnist, Tim Carney, arguing that focusing on the extreme voices amounts to quote, "nut picking," considering that it isn't just far right folks, but the nuts are there. Here's right-wing blogger, Charles Haywood at the inaugural Natal Conference in Austin.

Charles Haywood: Fundamentally, in order to have children, you need to have masculine men, because that's the kind of man that women want to be with.

Rachel Cohen: The problem is that there's a lot of connections right now between the French nuts and the mainstream conservative powers, like JD Vance has connections between some of the speakers at the Natal Conference, and they're pretty direct. I don't think that all conservative, or even all anti-abortion, pro-natalist are great replacement theorists, et cetera. I do think that a lot of them run in similar circles.

Brooke Gladstone: Having done all of this research, what was the most surprising thing you learned? Something that you really want listeners to take away from this?

Rachel Cohen: One of the big arguments that pro-natalists make is they point to these surveys, you can call them childbearing intention surveys, reproductive desire surveys, and they say, "Look, the research suggests that women are not having as many kids by the end of their reproductive lifecycle, as they say they want." The UN publishes these surveys, and there are lots of criticisms and caveats to the surveys, like how the questions are worded, how do people's desires change over the lifetime.

Rachel Cohen: By and large, there's this body of research that gives some people a feeling like, "Look, whatever kind of society we live in right now, a lot of people seem to be open to having more kids, if it were easier. If things looked different." From that perspective, they say, "Look, I'm not even talking about pension systems, I'm not even talking about saving grandma down the line, I'm talking about, we should build a society where people can have the number of children that they want, because that's the right thing to do," which actually sounds a lot like reproductive justice.

Rachel Cohen: That was the takeaway that I was feeling as I was doing the reporting. The thing that gives me pause is, I am very supportive of the idea of trying to think of ways to have people feel empowered to have the number of kids they want, whether that's zero, or however many. I do worry that we don't yet know if it's possible to have a society that can reverse its population decline without restricting women's rights and opportunities. This whole conversation just feels very fraught.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have it, but I don't think people should be naive either about the risks. We are already living in a time where we're seeing unprecedented attacks on reproductive rights in the US. I would love to build a society that helps people have kids if they want to have kids and makes it easier, but I am worried that if we focus so much on birth rates, per se, the conversation goes off the rails.

Brooke Gladstone: Rachel, thank you very much.

Rachel Cohen: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Rachel Cohen is a policy correspondent for Vox.

Micah Loewinger: Whether it's too few people or too many, these shape-shifting concerns around population have haunted us for centuries now. In the 20th, we were gripped by an existential dread of too many of us. Let's consider that story, which flips the fear we just heard on its head. On the Media producer, Candice Wang has a brisk history of the overpopulation panic, and it starts in 1798 when a British economist named Thomas Robert Malthus happened to predict the apocalypse.

Charles Mann: He says people breed so much that the food supply can never keep up with them, and we're all doomed.

Candice Wang: Charles Mann is a science journalist and author who's written about population for three decades.

Charles Mann: We're going to live on this horrible margin, where we just exceed our food supply, and that didn't happen.

Candice Wang: The idea of an impending Malthusian catastrophe led the British government to severely curtail welfare in 1834, a move that was prompted by Malthus his argument that welfare would only help the poor proliferate. A hundred years later, as anxiety about the burgeoning population was mounting in the US, a new field of study emerged, succinctly called, "population." Emily Merchant is the author of Building the Population Bomb.

Emily Merchant: Frederick Osborn was the mover and shaker behind starting this field.

Candice Wang: Osborn, a well-known philanthropist and eugenicist, started one of the first ever demography training centers at Princeton University in 1936, and those newly minted demographers asked, "How can we put pressure on certain people to have more children?"

Emily Merchant: They focused explicitly on middle-class white Protestant couples, because these were the people who they wanted to figure out how to get them to have more babies. That was the initial purpose behind demography.

Candice Wang: By the 1960s, with funding from the UN and the Ford Foundation, more demography research centers had popped up across the country, coinciding with the highest recorded population growth rate in history.

News clip: Overpopulation so long predicted, has stalled on upon us. It's getting worse week by week.

News clip: The US could be busting out at the seams by the end of the century.

Paul Ehrlich: We're having an extremely serious world demographic situation. The population situation is bad beyond what any demographer even dreamed of, 25 years ago.

Candice Wang: That last voice was Paul Ehrlich. Years before he went viral with his views on the end of humanity, young Ehrlich spent days as a biologist studying the death of butterfly populations, poisoned by pesticides, or undone by slight fluctuations in temperature. From that, he extrapolated to the inevitable self-destruction of the human population. When he became an assistant professor at Stanford in 1959, Ehrlich started casually airing his thoughts on population to his students.

Candice Wang Then he graduated to giving small talks at local bird and butterfly events. At one of these gatherings, David Brower, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, sat in the audience captivated. Charles Mann.

Charles Mann: He said, "You should write about this."

Candice Wang: He did. With his wife, Anne Ehrlich, he spent just three weeks writing straight from his lecture notes and memory. He published his book in 1968, and at first, it languished in obscurity, until a series of happy accidents brought him to--

Paul Ehrlich: From Hollywood, for Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. This is--

News clip: Would you welcome Dr. Paul Ehrlich?

[applause]

Charles Mann: He was shown in the Tonight Show in the late 60s and early 70s, the time when there was this enormous respect for science with a capital S.

Candice Wang: The book called The Population Bomb, soared to the top of bestseller lists and sold over 2 million copies. People couldn't get enough. Ehrlich appeared on the Tonight Show around 20 times.

News clip: How much has the world increased in population if you can say 10 years?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, in 10 years we're pushing putting on a billion people. Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come, and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.

Candice Wang: That utter breakdown was described vividly in the book's opening scene. Young Paul and Anne Ehrlich are in Delhi, India, sitting in a taxi during a "stinking hot night well over 100 degrees, the air, a haze of dust and smoke."

Paul Ehrlich: There's just people all over the place and they're pounding on the taxi and calling, and it's sweltering and it's just awful.

Candice Wang: He calls it a nightmare vision, "people eating, people washing, people sleeping, people visiting, arguing and screaming. People defecating and urinating." People, people, people, people. He's so terrified that he wonders, "Would we ever get to our hotel?"

Emily Merchant: He's really writing about the poverty that he fears-

Candice Wang: Emily Merchant.

Emily Merchant: -but he is attributing the poverty to just the number of bodies, the number of people.

Candice Wang: The reality of Delhi was worlds away from what Ehrlich glimpsed through his taxi window. Charles Mann.

Charles Mann: Deli is a relatively new city. At the time, had a population of less than 3 million.

Candice Wang: Compare that to Paris's over 7 million at the time. Delhi's population was growing fast, but not because humans were multiplying at an unprecedented speed.

Charles Mann: The Indian government had ringed Delhi with all these new steel and cement factories, and brought in all these people, and hadn't provided enough housing.

Candice Wang: Ehrlich wrote that by the 1970s, 10 million people would be dying of starvation per year, and that if growth should proceed at the rate it was going, there would one day be 100 people jostling per square yard on the planet's surface. The book's most striking examples--

Charles Mann: It's always illustrated by poor Brown people.

Candice Wang: The aftermath of The Population Bomb was devastating and attempts to control population around the world, left horrific scars.

Emily Merchant: In 1975, in India, the government of Indira Gandhi forced 8 million women and men to undergo sterilization.

Candice Wang: Many Indian states required sterilization for low-income people to even access electricity, water, and medical care. In 1980, the Chinese Communist Party officially instituted the one-child policy that was abolished only 9 years ago.

News clip: For 40 years, brothers and sisters were forbidden. Those who broke the rules could face forced abortion or sterilization. It's estimated that 400 million births were prevented.

Candice Wang: Ehrlich's ideas, though mostly debunked, have lingered in Global South, where in some places, birth rates are still high, like in the Philippines.

News clip: Rodrigo Duterte again stressed the need to promote birth control. He says families with many children have been driven deeper into poverty.

Candice Wang: And in Nigeria.

News clip: Population explosion in Africa is perhaps the biggest problem Africa faces of all of them.

Betsy Hartmann: Why does poverty persist? It's not because of overpopulation, but that's an easy boogeyman to blame overpopulation.

Candice Wang: Betsy Hartmann is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control.

Betsy Hartmann: In environmental circles, it's getting better now, but there's this tendency to view all humans as a scourge on the environment, and not to see that different humans have very different impacts on the environment. I always found it ironic that poor farmers, let's say in Bangladesh, were being blamed for overpopulating the planet when they were actually doing some of the most ecologically sensitive agriculture. It's a tendency to blanket all humanity. Not looking at which humans, why, and which structures of power, corporations, institutions, et cetera. I think it's also a real way to weaponize racist attitudes.

Candice Wang: Hartmann thinks back to the moment that supposedly changed Paul Ehrlich's life. The young scholar stuck in a taxi in Delhi, gazing out at this hellish landscape of begging hands thrusting through his taxi window, the city choked by thick dust and smoke.

Betsy Hartmann: Indian scientists used to say that he should have noticed it was the taxis that was the problem spewing out diesel fuel. They were causing the air pollution, not the people.

Candice Wang: What they experienced was not overpopulation, but pollution, poverty, and bad policy. Too many people was never really the problem. As Hartmann told me, it's the deep structures of power, economic, and political that undergird our systems of production and distribution that are responsible for the world's woes. Fewer people won't make those problems go away, nor will a whole lot more people. For On the Media, I'm Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, an exegesis on the essential nature of cats and cat ladies and the folks who fear them.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[Music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend, thousands of cat ladies are gathering with their familiars in support of Kamala Harris.

News clip: You do not want to piss off cat ladies. We will come for you, and we'll have a lot of fun doing it.

Brooke Gladstone: At yet another mass Zoom this week, Nancy Pelosi declared that quote, "Cat ladies are striking back. That meeting opened with a montage of pet photos and an ABBA soundtrack, followed up by a stern policy discussion." Cat ladies have also written a number of songs in protest of Vance's comments.

[Music]

Brooke Gladstone: The voting power of this block has yet to be measured, though the Trump team doesn't much seem to care. What is it about women and their cats that inspire so much contempt? How great is the distance between derision and dread? Kathryn Hughes is the author of the new book Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania. In it, she traces the many meanings ascribed to cats and their guardians, because cruelty to cats has a long tradition. Early on, Hughes described the notorious case in 1730 of the Great Cat Massacre in Paris.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, 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. This just seemed absolutely outrageous so they rounded up all the cats in the area and staged a 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. La Grise, the mistress's cat, was smashed with an iron bar so that her spine broke.

Brooke Gladstone: In the late 1800s, suddenly cats become very popular. Could you describe the reasons for and the scale of that cultural shift?

Kathryn Hughes: For millennia, cats had been tolerated, useful in kitchens for catching mice, useful in the barnyard for catching rats. They have a freelance association with mankind, but they're not in the service of anybody. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: You do describe the period from 1870 to the eve of the Second World War, a period of 70 years as Catland 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 Wain.

Kathryn Hughes: Louis Wain, the 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 topography of middle-class life in the 1890s and beyond, playing tennis, going to the opera, sitting down to breakfast, taking tea.

Kathryn Hughes: His first really important picture is called A Cats Christmas Dance, and it's a huge panoply 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.

Brooke Gladstone: His heyday is the '90s, what you call a fin de siècle world of artifice, disguise, and impersonation. What was it about the 1890s?

Kathryn Hughes: Well, 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 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. That is, I think, particularly right for Wain, as it were, to map onto his cats; cats enjoying a dip in the sea, taking to the road on bicycles.

Brooke Gladstone: Weirdly, cats were changing to look more like the ones Wain drew, or did it just seem that way?

Kathryn Hughes: That's exactly what happens. The London cat was well known for being stringy and looking more like a weasel than a cat. What women particularly start to do is carve out of this genetic sameness, distinct breeds. You start to get Persians are imported from France, Siamese from the Far East. You might put two beautifully marked tabus together and hope that out of their offspring, you would get a particularly charming effect.

Brooke Gladstone: The British cats were manly and hardworking, whereas the foreign ones were effeminate and deceptive.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, no, that's absolutely right. It's very interesting to watch. The long-haired cats that come in from France are effeminates. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Kathryn Hughes: 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 a husband and children. 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. That is what is so offensive and why so much print is expended on these strange women.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that cats are markers of dissident sexuality. They're not quite tamable.

Kathryn Hughes: 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 street, 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Kathryn Hughes: The Lloyd sisters are three sisters who live in Birmingham in the 1860s. 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 salubrious ways.

Brooke Gladstone: A little gray gardens, as you'd say here.

Kathryn Hughes: Very gray gardens, yes. Charles Austin, a very unpleasant man who lives next door, makes a series of formal complaints. Then in the end, these women are taken to court. The magistrates put the elder sister, Ann Lloyd, on trial for really running an unruly household.

Brooke Gladstone: She was described by journalists as somewhat eccentric in appearance and manner. A mad cat lady suspected of sharing immoderate intimacy with cats by having them sleep in her and her sister's beds.

Kathryn Hughes: I think the Lloyd sisters are a lightning rod. They attract all the kinds of anxieties, intentions, fears. It comes to court and what was so shocking is the misogyny on display. The magistrates laugh at Ms. Lloyd every time she opens her mouth to say something about the cats, about 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, "How much did the house really smell?" The policeman says, "Well, there's a strong smell of fish. I didn't know whether it was the lady's bodies or was the fish that they were feeding to the cats."

Kathryn Hughes The court absolutely erupts. Of course, we know, I'm sure it was intended then. A very unpleasant kind of reference to aging female bodies and curdled female juices. This is Victorian England. I had no idea that this kind of thing went on.

Brooke Gladstone: Becoming a cat lady in the 19th century was, for some, quite a lucrative business. Ms. 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, and turn it into the means to an independent and dignified life.

Kathryn Hughes: First of all, she's a journalist so she has a lot of columns in newspapers on cat care and cat history. Ms. Simpson, a vicar's daughter, can write with a completely straight face a column called practical physiology 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. 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 £100 ago. She is also the main channel between America and Britain. She works, as it were, as an agent in Britain, sending out pedigree cats, kittens to American cat ladies.

Brooke Gladstone: She was an entrepreneur.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes. She even sets up Selfridges, which is our biggest department store, a cat's lounge where you could come and buy kittens. 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 Ms. Simpson. It's becoming very, very tony as an occupation. I think she's an extraordinary woman.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. It seems to me that the richer the cat lady, the more acceptable she was.

Kathryn Hughes: Money solves everything. The Duchess of Bedford was herself an extremely ambivalent mother. She had one child 10 months into her marriage and then stopped sleeping with her husband, the Duke. Never had any more babies, couldn't stand her son, in fact, and was much more interested in animals and in becoming one of the first female aviators in Britain. Nobody thought to be scornful about it because she is the Duchess of Bedford and she's immensely wealthy.

I think it's always about the finite amount of resources. I understand that Jay Vance, the whole point of his anxiety about cat ladies is simply that they don't have sufficient stake in future generations. It's always about where the resources go, where one's interest goes. I think that is perfectly born out here.

Brooke Gladstone: You had a fascinating chapter about the use of cat imagery in the suffragist movement. You said that one particular picture actually won some men over to the suffragist side.

Kathryn Hughes: A lot of women who were active in the movements to get votes for women were also very, very preoccupied with societies against cruelty to animals and cats in particular. You would expect to find suffragist artists using the cat as a kind of idea of indepedent female denoting agency. That 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 notices saying, we demand the vote.

Kathryn Hughes: 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? Then comes one particular image towards the end of the struggle. When suffragists were imprisoned in Holloway, they often went on hunger strike and were then forced on to go what's called force feeding, where a tube is stuck down their throat, a nasty thin gruel tips down.

Brooke Gladstone: Which is in itself dangerous.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, it's waterboarding. It's kind of torture. It was so unpopular that a 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. 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.

Kathryn Hughes: A particular potent poster was produced showing the home secretary as a bloodthirsty cat with a suffragist clamped between his teeth. That piece of rhetorical propaganda was so powerful that it actually got the liberals out of power.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, you thank your own cats, Maud and Ted, in your book for accompanying you as you wrote it. What led you to write this?

Kathryn Hughes: Ted and Maud 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 1907, 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 17 cat siblings. My grandmother was a cat lady and I think much preferred a cat to my mother.

Kathryn Hughes: As I was growing up, I remember my grandmother had the Louis Wain book. She had a lot of Louis Wain books. At that point, so I'm talking about the '70s and '80s, they weren't really very well known at all. I was fascinated by these books, particularly fascinated by Louis Wain's schoolroom scenes because they would have cats behaving really, really badly. The naughty cats were pulling each other's whiskers and chucking mice at each other.

Kathryn Hughes: I was completely fascinated by this and actually really, really frightened because I was a very, very good child. I hated that kind of disorder, which I'd experienced at my own school as one does. As I grew up, I was very aware that there was always a kind of anxiety in these drawings that other people seem 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. I always thought that at some point I would write a book about Louis Wain.

Brooke Gladstone: No amount of love for cats will ever do away with the cat lady trope.

Kathryn Hughes: Absolutely. Just look at the way in which cat leaders have come out fighting as a result of the Vance comment in the last few days. There's just an army of outraged cat ladies, many of whom actually have children, many of whom also have dogs. It's just so interesting, the way that that remark has produced this brouhaha around the world. We're just agog about it here in Britain.

Brooke Gladstone: Kathryn, thank you very much.

Kathryn Hughes: Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you.

Brooke Gladstone: Kathryn Hughes is an emerita professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and a literary critic for The Guardian. She's the author of the book Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Pamela Apia.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer and Katya Rogers is executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

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