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ON CAT LADIES, MAMA BEARS AND ‘MOMALA’  
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Tressie McMillan Cottom
August 19, 2024
New York Times
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_ “All female political candidates are expected to narrate their
motherhood status or, at least, their mother-like qualities,” writes
@tressiemcphd . “But no other presidential candidate had to meet
this challenge the way Harris will.” _

Illustration: Erin Schaff/The New York Times,

 

While Donald Trump hides out in Mar-a-Lago, JD Vance has spent the
past few weeks taking point on the G.O.P.’s continued struggle to
define Kamala Harris. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s
beef with women who don’t have children, as outlined in an interview
in 2021, has resurfaced. At the time, Vance derided Harris as
emblematic of “childless cat ladies” who don’t have a “direct
stake” in America. He now claims this “childless cat lady”
routine was sarcasm, stating that he meant only that making more
babies is a good thing for this nation. That still implies that not
having children is un-American. It also underscores how Trump and
Vance have very few pro-family policy proposals for actual babies, as
opposed to talking about imagined babies that women should be having.
Vance’s ham-handed attempts to have it both ways reveal the
wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and
point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play
out through innuendo and metaphor.

The idea
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a childless cat lady is an uninspired dog whistle among others — old
maid, crone, witch — that are designed to reduce a woman’s social
value to her ability and willingness to reproduce. When Vance says
that Harris is one of many childless cat ladies who are miserable and
trying to make the rest of the world miserable, he is calling on a set
of sexist, racist ideas about which_ _women are even allowed to count
as real women. Namely, married mothers are real women, and the rest of
us are horrible divergences from the social contract.

Vance’s commentary hints at a decades-old idea, popular in
overlapping antidemocratic circles, that this country has
a demographic crisis
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couched in the notion that declining birthrates are destabilizing the
economy. That idea is rife with xenophobic fears that white Americans
are not having enough children and immigration is an undesirable way
to bolster demographic growth. Fears about population decline like
this typically end up really being racist fears about this country’s
declining white majority.

The fears behind Vances cat-lady gag is clear when you consider which
issues pronatalists like Vance consider worthy and which he does not.
Black women have the highest maternal mortality rates in this country,
followed by Native American women. Yet his stated pro-birthing policy
policies do not address the high cost of giving birth for minority
women.

 

The G.O.P., in particular, has tapped into white male rage about women
— especially educated white women — who can choose when and how
they will have children. As a result, some commentators have begun
to call
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election the presidential contest of the genders, with male grievance
finding an outlet in Trump’s brand of big man politics and women
finding resonance for their post-Dobbs rage in the Democratic Party.
Through Trump’s bluster and Vance’s comments, the G.O.P. has begun
to lay a trap for Harris by calling her into a rhetorical war about
motherhood that a Black woman of immigrant descent cannot win.

All female political candidates are expected to narrate their
motherhood status or, at least, their mother-like qualities. But no
other presidential candidate had to meet this challenge the way Harris
will. Watching this campaign wrestle with the G.O.P.’s motherhood
purity test, so far, has been a lesson in how not to fall for dog
whistle traps.

In the 2020 primary contest, Harris introduced us
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“Momala,” a term of endearment from her stepchildren. “Momala”
gestures to her role as a woman who mothers but does not have
biological children. That kind of mothering is familiar to millions of
Americans who have blended families, but a broader concept of
mothering is also cultural. In communities that do not hew as closely
to the idea of a white Western nuclear family, anyone who invests in
and cares for children and social relations can mother.

Vance’s cat lady comments are an early sign of the G.O.P.’s
easiest attack on what “Momala” represents. In multiple public
comments, Vance has hammered home
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“real” Americans are those with children. His policy proposals
show a preference for traditional, married households. Brad Wilcox, a
professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, has said
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deserves credit for the way that “family life, childbearing and
pronatalism has gotten a lot more popular.” While Vance tries to
backpedal from his 2021 remarks, he has a track record of claiming
that people without children represent this nation’s “anti-child
ideology.” He has referred to “our people” not having enough
children, which raises the question: Who is included in “our,” and
who is not?

It seems to exclude single parents, stepparents, gay parents and all
manner of nontraditional families. These attacks are designed to bait
Harris into attempting to prove that she is what many on the right
imagine a real mother to be. That mother is not just a biological
parent. She’s an iteration of another gendered G.O.P. trope: the
mama bear. That’s the ferocious mother figure who enacts political
consequences in defense of her children and in service of a
white-first nation whose full franchise belongs to white men.

As much as Americans talk about Hillary Clinton when it comes to women
in presidential politics, our country also owes a lot to Sarah Palin.
In 2010 she was a political supernova. At an anti-abortion fund-raiser
she introduced the world to a brand of “mama grizzly” conservative
women in national politics. “Real” women, like her, did not enter
the rough-and-tumble world of presidential politics for fame and
glory. They ran and governed because they were afraid for their
children’s future. And they carried guns — especially assault
rifles — so they could defend their children, putting a charming
face on the G.O.P.’s most important constituency: the N.R.A.
evangelists.

Palin’s shtick had a clear message: Anything a mother like her did
in defense of her young was also good for America. Since then, her
archetype morphed into the mama bear brand of retail politics deployed
by women like Kari Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Whereas Palin’s
branding played up her homespun Alaskan frontier image, mama bear
politics encompass something bigger. It is a female conservative
political brand that embraces gun rights and female aggression in
defense of traditional family values.

Harris cannot be a mama bear. No one who looks like Harris can be a
mama bear. When Black mothers take up arms in defense of their
children, they are threats to social order. When Black mothers grieve
their children’s deaths in public — like Mike Brown’s mother,
like Eric Garner’s mother, like Emmett Till’s mother — they
indict the very white violence that the mama bear symbolizes. The
power of their grief visibly threatens the power structures of white
supremacy.

Immigrant mothers, especially those of brown complexions, embody
similar threats. In the imagination of many Americans, they have
“anchor babies” to steal white Americans’ rights and tax
dollars. They cross the border, dirtying the nation’s sovereignty.
As a woman of color, Harris is more likely to embody the nation’s
fears about violent nonwhite Americans, dangerous borders and a
multiracial democracy than its hope for a white nation.

Given how powerful all of these triggers are in political discourse,
it would be natural to want to fight back with proof that Harris is a
real mother and women like her are real mothers. That would be a
mistake. However charming “Momala” is as a political biography, it
is in no way powerful enough to counter the racial fears that nonwhite
motherhood stokes in this nation’s soul.

The Harris campaign has, so far, toned down the mother-in-chief
narrative that her 2020 primary campaign prioritized. Instead, they
are focusing on how, as vice president, she has championed policies
that benefit all mothers, like child care, maternity leave and
motherhood mortality research. She led the Biden administration’s
first Maternal Health Day of Action. As a candidate, she is working
family-friendly policies into her economic platform, such as restoring
the administration’s child tax credit, giving families with a
newborn a $6,000 credit, and expanding the earned-income tax credit
for low-wage workers. That is not as powerful as the G.O.P. mama bear
symbolism. But it does not have to be.

It just has to resist the temptation to fall for the trap that Vance
has set — worrying about the talk of motherhood — and instead
focus on policies that actually help parents of all types and their
children.

_[TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM (@tressiemcphd
[[link removed]]) became a New York Times Opinion
columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library
Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays
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fellow.]_

* Kamala Harris
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* J.D. Vance
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* Donald Trump
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* 2024 Elections
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* Cat Ladies
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* Childless Cat Lady
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* Dog Whistle
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* war on women
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* Women
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* sexism
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* Racism
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* misogyny
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* Single parents
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