Crazy Cat Lady: Nine Lives of a Stereotype

Introduction

For many years, as a part-time occupation, I have cared for others’ animals. Dogs mostly, but often cats. I love animals — pretty much all animals — and cats are no exception. I’ve owned several, though never more than two felines at a time.

I don’t want to contribute to a worn stereotype, but I’ve had more than my fair share of encounters with women — and in at least one case, a man — whose relationship with cats had crossed some invisible line their neighbours could no longer tolerate. I will leave my own experiences for later, because what I found when I started pulling on this particular thread surprised me considerably. Behind the punchline, there is a long and largely unexamined history of women who kept cats, were prosecuted for it, mocked for it, pathologized for it, and occasionally quoted scripture at the magistrates who ordered them to stop. The science invoked to explain them turns out to prove rather less than advertised. And the cartoon character who gave the stereotype its most enduring popular form turns out, on closer examination, to carry a feminist critique inside her comic grotesquerie.

The Simpsons, as usual, got there first — and so I will begin with them, introducing the cartoon character Eleanor Abernathy.

Eleanor Abernathy, or The Education of a Crazy Cat Lady

Eleanor first appeared on the Simpsons on 19 April 1998, in the ninth season of the show. She finally got her backstory nine seasons later — and I cannot help but notice the coincidence of cats supposedly having nine lives, Eleanor arriving in Season 9, and her history emerging nine seasons after that. But I digress.

In that backstory, we learn that at the tender age of eight, Eleanor had ambitions to become both a doctor and a lawyer, explaining her reasoning with the simple declaration:

“Because a woman can do anything.”

By 24, she had made good on that ambition, graduating from both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School simultaneously. We see her next as a practising lawyer, nicely turned out in a blue skirt suit, apparently in command of her considerable life.

Eight years later, at 32, she is explaining that she had a “little burnout.” The scene is a handsome condo — waterfront view, elegant furniture, potted plants. She is crushing a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a rather large bottle of wine on the table, a glass in her hand, wearing a pantsuit, and an orange cat is cruising the sofa. “Don’t shoot me — I have a glass of wine with Buster here,” she says, laughing in a slightly overwrought fashion. Buster, she notes, is “a real comfort.” She might even get a second cat.

The next scene shows Eleanor considerably older, living in what appears to be a basement — concrete walls, a garbage can, broken furniture. She is shabbily dressed and throwing cats around the room, along with her Yale diploma, while making sounds that may once have been words. The trajectory from blue skirt suit to basement, from Harvard-Yale graduate to woman who turns her out diploma into a projectile, is compressed into a few minutes of animation. It is played for laughs. It is also, if you slow it down, a fairly precise portrait of institutional burnout, addiction, and the particular collapse that can follow when a woman attempts to inhabit a professional world that was not designed to sustain her.

In another episode, Lisa — conducting what appears to be a newscast — questions why Eleanor is called the crazy cat lady. After all, she loves animals, doesn’t she? Eleanor promptly emerges from her ramshackle house with an armful of cats, which she begins throwing at Lisa while screaming gibberish. The show declines to answer Lisa’s question directly. This essay will attempt to do better.

What’s in a Name?

The expression “crazy cat lady” seems as though it needs no explanation. But let’s explore it anyway.

According to Wordorigins.org (which usually delivers rigorous lexicographic work), the phrase “cat lady” — applied to a human woman rather than a female cat — was first documented in the Massachusetts Springfield Daily Republican on 24 June 1911. The article in question portrayed a woman who cared for sick and injured stray cats: a gentle, sympathetic portrait, almost reverential in tone. There is no mockery in it. The phrase was coined, in other words, not as an insult but as something closer to a neighbourhood honorific.

So far, so careful. But Wordorigins.org stumbles on the pejorative form. The site states that “crazy cat lady” — always derogatory — appears to have been in use by the late 1960s, with the earliest documented example appearing in Women’s Wear Daily on 26 December 1969. What the site fails to account for is that by 1851, Henry Mayhew was already describing an unnamed Islington woman who kept 30 cats as a “mad woman” — and that the Victorian press had been producing courtroom comedy at the expense of women with too many cats for decades before anyone thought to coin a tidy phrase for them. The stereotype was fully operational long before it had a name. Lexicography tracks language; it does not always track the thing the language eventually arrives to describe.

And then there is the small matter of Springfield, where the first documented “cat lady” appeared in the eponymous newspaper of the city in Massachusetts. The most culturally influential crazy cat lady in American popular consciousness lives in a fictional American city also called Springfield. Matt Groening chose the name precisely because Springfield is the most common city name in the United States, a town that could be anywhere and therefore everywhere. The coincidence almost certainly means nothing. And yet: the cat lady belongs to Springfield because Springfield belongs to everyone. She always has.

Saint Gertrude of Nivelles and the Trouble with Cats

But long before Springfield, there was Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, whom many consider the patron saint of cats. Except that she isn’t. The Vatican has never officially recognized her in that capacity — and the Roman Catholic Church has, it must be said, a somewhat complicated history with cats, a subject to which we will return shortly.

Gertrude was born in Belgium in 626 CE, the daughter of the Frankish nobleman Pepin of Landen and his wife Itta of Metz — herself eventually canonized, and invoked against toothaches, which seems a rather specialized brief for a saint. Gertrude became a Benedictine abbess and founded an abbey dedicated to helping travellers, the sick, and widows. The widows are worth pausing on, as they will become a recurring figure in this essay. After Gertrude’s death, she was called upon to ward off rats and mice — and since cats do exactly that, her association with rodent control was gradually, and somewhat loosely, conflated into an association with cats themselves. However, the Vatican never formalized this. Still, Catholic cat lovers wanted their saint, and they chose Gertrude. The Church looked the other way.

The family, it should be noted, was extravagantly holy. Gertrude’s mother Itta was Canonized. Her sister Begga was canonized and became — and here The Simpsons would surely approve — the patron saint of stuttering, which rhymes rather nicely with Eleanor Abernathy’s incomprehensible vocalizations. Gertrude’s brother Bavo was canonized and is the patron saint of falcons. Such a family. One can imagine their dinner table conversations.

But Catholic cat lovers would have to content themselves with their unofficial saint, because darker times were coming for older women and their cats.

Agnes Waterhouse and a Cat Called Satan

Most readers will be familiar with the subject of older women and their “familiars” — most often cats. That territory has been mapped and remapped by better historians, and I have no intention of retracing it in full. But one story appeals to my sometimes dark sense of humour sufficiently to warrant a brief detour.

Agnes Waterhouse, born around 1503, was tried as a witch in Chelmsford, Essex in 1566, nearly a thousand years after Gertrude was busy founding abbeys and helping widows. Agnes' familiar was a white cat named Sathan — the archaic spelling, though the wordplay is impossible to miss — which could allegedly transform itself into a toad or a dog, spoke in what witnesses described as a “hollow voice,” and instructed Agnes in the performance of malevolent acts. Agnes freely acknowledged that she prayed regularly — in Latin only, however, because the cat deplored English. A classically trained cat, one must concede.

Agnes Waterhouse was the first woman hanged for witchcraft in England. The full story — the trial, the witnesses, the other women caught up in the proceedings, the pamphlet literature it generated — is genuinely fascinating and constitutes a significant chapter in the history of women, cats, and the uses to which community fear can be put. It is also far too long a digression for this essay. I commend it to the reader’s own curiosity and reluctantly move on.

Cardinal Richelieu and His Cats — Or Perhaps Not

Moving forward in time, but only slightly, we come to the august personage of Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu (1585–1642) — Cardinal, chief minister of France under Louis XIII, and villain of The Three Musketeers. One delightful story about him centres around a cattery he allegedly built to house his many Persian and Angora cats, one of which was said to be always seated on his lap while he worked.

The cats’ names are so gloriously outré that I must list them: Racan, Gazette, Rubis sur l’Ongle — scratchy, naturally, and yes, Simpsons viewers, Itchy and Scratchy were not the first — Pyrame and Thysbe, lovers who slept with their paws entwined, Serpolet who loved to sun himself, Felimare the tiger-striped, Soumise the submissive and his favourite, Lucifer — jet black, inevitably — Ludovic le Cruel the rat-killer, Mimi-Paillon the straw Angora, Mounard le Fougueux who was ardent but capricious, Perruque who had the distinction of falling from the wig of the Academician Racan, and Gavroche.

He also reportedly stipulated a legacy for his cats, providing for their care after his death.

Except that none of it may be true. Historian Katharine MacDonogh, in her 1999 book Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court Since the Renaissance, identifies the story as a myth, invented by Paradis de Moncrif, a toady at the court of Louis XV. Other historians have since dismissed the tale as a smear campaign. Which raises an interesting question: why cats? Why, of all the insults available to those who wished to diminish the most powerful man in France, did someone reach for the crazy cat lady? Because that is precisely what the myth does — it takes the feared and formidable éminence grise and dresses him in the one costume guaranteed to make him ridiculous: the feminized, the domestic, the excessive fondness for cats that polite society had already learned to read as a symptom of something not quite right. The insult works because the stereotype was already in place. You didn’t need to be an older woman to be tarred with it. You simply needed enemies with imagination.

Men Who Escaped the Label: Hemingway and Warhol

While on the subject of men who, had they been women, might have been assigned the “crazy cat lady” moniker, let us briefly consider Ernest Hemingway and Andy Warhol.

Hemingway’s cats are almost as famous as his prose. The connection began with a gift: a white polydactyl cat — six-toed, which sailors considered lucky — presented to Hemingway by a ship’s captain who had noticed his interest in the animal. The descendants of that original cat still occupy the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, where 40-60 cats reside at any given time, roughly half of them displaying the extra toe that has become the property’s unofficial trademark. Hemingway named all his cats after famous people, a tradition the museum maintains to this day. The Key West city commission eventually found it necessary to declare the cats “animals of historic, social and tourism significance” and “an integral part of the history and ambiance of the Hemingway House” — which is one way of handling a polydactyl cat colony, and probably cheaper than litigation. No one has ever called Hemingway a crazy cat lady. He was, after all, a big game hunter, a deep sea fisherman, and a war correspondent. The cats were considered charming.

Andy Warhol’s cat story is rather more intimate, and considerably more domestic. When his mother Julia Warhola moved into his small Upper East Side apartment in the early 1950s to help her struggling son, they were soon joined by a Siamese cat named Hester, a gift from actress Gloria Swanson. Concerned that Hester might appreciate companionship, Andy and Julia acquired a male cat named Sam. Sam and Hester then proceeded to produce litters with considerable enthusiasm, and — in a gesture that prefigures Warhol’s entire aesthetic philosophy — all subsequent cats were named Sam. Every one of them. The household eventually contained multiple Sams and one Hester, the population tracked by magazine profiles that noted eight cats in 1953 and ten by 1954. The situation became sufficiently unmanageable that Warhol was eventually obliged to give cats away. In 1954, mother and son self-published a limited edition book about their feline household: 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy [sic] — the missing “d” in “Named” a mistake by Julia that Andy found too charming to correct. The seriality of the Sams — one name, many subjects, endlessly repeated — is now sometimes read as a dry run for the Marilyns and the soup cans that would follow. Warhol turned his cats into Pop Art before he knew he was doing it.

Two men, abundant cats, zero stigma. The cats were eccentric in one case and artistic in the other. Had either of them been a woman of a certain age living alone, the framing would surely have been much different.

Henry Mayhew and the Women of 1851

Returning to the specific “crazy cat ladies,” one of the earliest citations frequently mentioned is that of the unnamed woman of Islington, documented in 1851. The source is Henry Mayhew’s monumental London Labour and the London Poor — a landmark of Victorian social journalism, compiled from Mayhew’s interviews with street traders, vagrants, and workers at the margins of London life. The passage appears in Volume One, page 183, in a section devoted to the cat’s-meat trade — the commercial business of selling boiled horse meat to London’s pet owners from barrows and baskets, a trade Mayhew estimated served some 300,000 pet cats in the city. The Islington woman appears not as a subject in her own right but as a data point, a footnote to an economic survey, evidence of extreme demand at the outer edge of a commercial market. Mayhew writes:

“There was also a mad woman in Islington, who used to have 14 lbs of meat a day. The party who supplied her had his money often at 2£ and 3£ at a time. She had as many as thirty cats at times in her house. Every stray one that came she would take in and support. The stench was so great that she was obliged to be ejected.”

And that is all. Four sentences. She is unnamed. She is called mad. She keeps 30 cats. She runs up credit with her meat supplier — two and three pounds at a time, a significant sum — suggesting that her relationship with the cat’s-meat man was ongoing, commercial, and apparently well-established before anyone thought to document it. She takes in every stray that presents itself, without discrimination. And then she is ejected, the stench having finally settled the matter that her neighbours’ complaints apparently had not.

What is remarkable about this passage is not what it contains but what it omits. We do not know her name, her age, her circumstances, her history, or her reasons. We do not know whether she had family, income, or anyone who spoke for her when the ejection came. We know only what she cost the cat’s-meat man and what she cost her neighbours’ noses. She exists in the historical record as an extreme case in a commercial report, sandwiched between statistics about weekly trade volumes and the observation that Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays are the best days for cat’s-meat business.

But the same page of Mayhew contains a second woman, also unnamed, whose cat-feeding practice took a rather different form:

“And there was one woman — a black — who used to have as much as 16 pennyworth every day. This person used to get out on the roof of the house and throw it to the cats on the tiles. By this she brought so many stray cats round about the neighbourhood, that the parties in the vicinity complained; it was quite a nuisance. She would have the meat always brought to her before ten in the morning, or else she would send to a shop for it, and between ten and eleven in the morning the noise and cries of the hundreds of stray cats attracted to the spot was ‘terrible to hear.’ When the meat was thrown to the cats on the roof, the riot, and confusion, and fighting, was beyond description. ‘A beer-shop man,’ I was told, ‘was obliged to keep five or six dogs to drive the cats from his walls.’”

Where the Islington woman accumulated cats within her home until the interior became uninhabitable, this woman fed the neighbourhood’s entire feral population from her rooftop on a fixed daily schedule. The meat had to arrive before ten o’clock; if it did not, she sent for it herself. This is not disorder — it is an eccentric but internally consistent domestic routine, organized entirely around the cats’ needs as she understood them. Between ten and eleven every morning, hundreds of cats converged on one rooftop in London. A beer-shop man kept a pack of dogs specifically to manage the consequences. She is identified in Mayhew’s text only by her race — the sole figure in this section of his reportage so described — and by her practice. She has no name, no history, no voice.

Two women, one page, one year. Both unnamed. Both defined entirely by their relationship to cats and to meat. Neither asked why.

Rosalia Goodman aka Catty Goodman

And then there is Rosalia Goodman. Or Rose. Or Rosalie. Or Gutman. The uncertainty of her name is itself a small biographical fact, and we will return to it.

She arrived in New York on 13 July 1852, aboard a Hamburg emigrant vessel called the P J Behnck, listed on the passenger manifest as Rosalie Gutman, aged 17, place of origin: Posen. Posen — now Poznań in present-day Poland — was a Prussian province with a substantial Ashkenazi Jewish community, and 1852 was precisely the period when that community was emigrating in significant numbers, displaced by the political upheavals of 1848 and their aftermath. Rosalie was part of one of the defining immigrant movements of the mid-19^th century. She was also, if the ship manifest is to be believed, travelling alone at 17, in July, into the heat and noise and overwhelming density of New York harbour.

The name Gutman is significant. When she appears in later records, it is usually given as Rosalia Goodman. Henry Goodman, the man she married, was almost certainly Henry Gutman, the same name, the same community, the same probable origin. Whether they married in Posen before departure, or reunited in New York shortly after, is not recorded. What the 1870 federal census records is a household at Ward 7, Lower East Side: Henry Goodman, age 43, cigar maker, born Deutschland; Rosalia Goodman, age 30; and their four children — Elizabeth, 13, Regina, 11, Hilde, 9, and Oscar, 4. All four children were American-born New Yorkers. Rosalia was the immigrant; they were not.

Henry had served in the Union Army — Private, Company K, 56^th New York Infantry — a fact documented in Simon Wolf’s 1895 compilation The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, a book compiled specifically to counter the antisemitic claim that Jewish men did not fight for their adopted country. He naturalized as an American citizen on 21 November 1867, at the Court of Common Pleas, New York County, giving his address as 57 Clinton Street and his former nationality as Prussian. A neighbour named Philipp Milling of Grand Street stood as his witness. The naturalization record is the last document Henry left. He died in 1871, leaving Rosalia a widow at approximately 35, with four children between the ages of five and 14, and whatever remained of the $500 in personal property the 1870 census had recorded against his name.

What she did next is the remarkable part. She purchased a 17^th century Dutch-era building at 170 Division Street — a three-storey wooden structure, gambrel-roofed, its clapboards mossed and blackened, hanging in tatters from decaying beams — and turned it into a tenement. She rented the basement to a cigar dealer, the first floor to an Irish family, a room on the second floor to a German man, and reserved two small rooms for herself, her children, and, gradually, her cats.

It began with a single kitten named Tiger. She had always been afraid of cats, she later told a reporter, but Tiger was “such a little wee thing” that she overcame her fear and took him in. Tiger died, locked in a cellar by a hostile neighbour and left to starve, his bones the only thing she found when she finally located him. She buried him, and then, she said, she made up her mind to take care of every cat she could when people turned them out into the cold.

By February 1875, when the New York Sun sent a reporter to Division Street, she was feeding 80 cats daily at a cost of a $1.50 — spent at the Bowery markets on what the reporter noted were “the best cakes, sausages, and beefsteaks.” The house was a sensory event. Cats yellow and black, golden and dingy, tawny, white, and dubious; cats ring-tailed, dove-tailed, and no-tailed; cats with eyes, without eyes, earless. Along the halls were scattered tin pans of sawdust interspersed with dishes of food; at every landing, low-lipped buckets of water for Tom and Tabby. From sunrise to sunrise, the reporter noted, “an aromatic and voluminous cloud of feline exhalation” was wafted down the stairs into the street. The neighbourhood complained. The Board of Health inspected and found she had violated no law. Rosalia, “beaming with triumph, gathered her pets still closer around her.” Her neighbours resorted to flinging gravel and old crockery at the cats from the rooftops.

The children in the vicinity called her Catty Goodman. The press called her an eccentric, a curiosity, a German philanthropist of the feline world. She spoke to the Sun’s reporter in what he described as broken English — the accent and imperfect syntax of a woman who had arrived in New York speaking German and Yiddish, and had been conducting her life in a second language ever since. What she said, however, was entirely clear:

“I don’t love the cats yet, but I pity them, and I think when I’m dead they’ll have no-one to take care of them.”

And:

“It’s only people without sense or heart that would turn a helpless animal out in the cold. There ought to be some asylum for such abandoned animals in this country, as there is in England, but there is none, and somebody must look out for them.”

This is not the voice of madness or delusion. It is the voice of a pragmatist who has identified a gap in the civic infrastructure and filled it herself, at her own expense, in her own building, with her own beefsteak.

By 1877, the New York Tribune had also visited, finding her with 50 cats — the numbers fluctuated — noting that she “lives alone.” The back room, the Tribune’s reporter observed, was used “as a playhouse for the feline patients” — a phrase with an accidental poetry that no editor appears to have noticed or removed.

In July 1878, a reporter from the Daily Graphic arrived, but was sent away.

“Now, you get out! I don’t told you but once. I have no more newspaper mens make some moneys out of me. My lawyer say to me no reporter have any right to come in my house, and if so I shall shoot him or push him down stairs or take my broomstick.”

She had retained a lawyer. She understood that she was being used as entertainment. She objected, in her own vernacular, with considerable force.

By 1880 she had left Division Street, moving with her four children and her mother Dore, then aged 76, to 44^th Street. James Dabney McCabe’s New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (1882) described the Division Street operation as a still-going concern, calling her “a philanthropic German lady” who “makes a comfortable living” — he was likely working from earlier sources, or she had continued the work at a new address, or both.

The 1910 federal census finds her at 90^th Street, on the Upper East Side, aged 74, head of household, renting, literate, native tongue recorded as English. All four children still living. She had moved steadily northward as the city transformed around her — from the Lower East Side, to Midtown, then to the Upper East Side — a quiet upward drift through five decades of New York life.

She died on 13 September 1917, in Manhattan. She was 84 years old. Certificate number 27243.

Her name, as noted, varies across the documents. The ship manifest says Rosalie Gutman. The 1870 and 1880 censuses say Rosalia. The Sun and the Tribune say Rosalia. The 1910 census says Rosalie. The death index says Rosalie. Secondary sources have mostly settled on Rosalie, though she signed nothing we have found and stated her own name to no recorder whose transcription survives. She arrived in this country with one name and accumulated others, as immigrants do, as women do, as people do who spend 65 years in a city that keeps changing around them. Rose, Rosalie, Rosalia — all the same woman, with the same multitude of cats, and the same beefsteak from the Bowery, and the same broomstick ready at the door.

The reporters who visited Division Street thought they were writing about an eccentric. They were writing about a woman who had another 40 years to live, who would keep all four of her children alive, who would move uptown three times, who would grow old and independent and English-speaking in a city that had long since forgotten Catty Goodman and her cat hospital on Division Street.

She was not a crazy cat lady. She was a widow, a landlady, a mother, a daughter, an immigrant, a veteran’s wife, and an animal welfare advocate in a city with no formal provision for homeless cats. The cats were one decade of a very long life. The newspapers caught that decade and made it her whole story.

They were wrong.

Courts, Courtrooms, and Cats: The Victorian Record

Rosalia Goodman was not alone. Across the Atlantic, and across the decades that followed, women were appearing in courtrooms, in newspaper columns, and in the social record with remarkable regularity, charged with variations of the same offence: too many cats, too much attachment, too little regard for what the neighbours thought.

In July 1863, the Liverpool Mercury reported — reprinting from the Perthshire Journal — on the case of Miss Isabella Kidd, a maiden lady of at least 60 years, charged at the Perth Police Court with causing a nuisance by keeping cats in her house in Mill-street. The witnesses could not agree on the number: one had counted eight, another seven, a third no fewer than eleven on the floor at one time. The magistrate declined to impose a fine but ordered that all cats save one kitten be removed within 48 hours, or the police would carry out the order themselves.

Isabella Kidd was not finished. At the close of the evidence she addressed the court:

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay.”

She then gave the pedigree of several of her cats, to the considerable laughter of a crowded courtroom. When the police had arrived to summon her to appear, they had found her bed occupied by five cats, with numerous others running about the house.

She is the only figure in this essay who spoke back in her own voice, on the record, in a public forum, and left a quotation worth remembering. The court laughed. The Romans quotation stands.

Her defence, it should be noted, was entirely practical: the cats killed mice, she told the court, and therefore were not a nuisance but a service. The magistrate did not engage with the argument. He simply ruled. But the argument was made, and it was not a mad one.

By 1885, the nuisance had spread to Kensington. The New Zealand Herald — demonstrating that an aristocratic English cat case could travel to the other side of the world — reported on proceedings at the Kensington Petty Sessions against the Countess de la Torre, summoned for disobeying a magistrate’s order to discontinue keeping cats and dogs at her premises in Pembroke Square. The Countess did not attend. The case was heard in her absence.

Mr. Whiteman, Inspector of Nuisances, gave evidence. He had visited the house and found: four dogs and two cats in the front kitchen; two dogs and three puppies in the back kitchen; two cats on the first floor back; five cats and two kittens on the first floor front — laughter from the court; and seven cats in the garden, three of which were seated on the cistern — renewed laughter. The smell, Mr. Whiteman confirmed, was very offensive and injurious to health. The vestry, it emerged, had refrained from taking proceedings for some time, “thinking that the Countess would come to her senses.” She had not. A fine of ten shillings a day for 20 days — ten pounds in all, with costs — was imposed in her absence.

The Countess de la Torre is the only figure in this sequence who did not appear to be laughed at. Whether this was dignity, contempt, or simple indifference to a court she considered beneath her is not recorded. The three cats on the cistern offer no clues.

The following year, 1886, Berrow’s Worcester Journal reported on Ann Lloyd, spinster, of Llandudno Villa, Sparkhill — a named house in a respectable Birmingham suburb, which is itself a social marker worth noting — charged at Solihull Police Court with keeping cats to cause a nuisance injurious to health. The Inspector of Nuisances described the smell as “most terrible,” so offensive that he had been obliged to retreat to the backyard for air. Ann Lloyd admitted to six cats, but not, she specified, in the house. The Bench made an order for abatement of the nuisance and said nothing further.

Six cats. A named villa. Two sisters present in the house but not in the dock. An Inspector driven into the yard by a noxious smell that six cats, no matter how poorly managed, should produce. The arithmetic does not quite add up, and the Bench apparently did not press it.

In 1889, the Daily News of London reported on an unnamed elderly maiden lady of Marsham-street, Westminster — central London, respectable address, reduced circumstances — who had already been ordered by magistrate Mr. D’Eyncourt, approximately a fortnight prior, to cease keeping many cats. She had not ceased. The Inspector visited on a Wednesday morning and reported that the lady had told him she could not part with her dear cats, and that she had a right to keep them. He had noticed seven on a table.

The court laughed.

Mr. d’Eyncourt granted a summons for cumulative penalties.

The unnamed Westminster woman made two arguments, compressed into a single reported sentence: one emotional, one legal. She could not part with her dear cats — the word “dear” doing considerable work, these are not animals but beloveds. And she had a right to keep them — a civic claim, a principled position, stated to an Inspector of Nuisances on a Wednesday morning in a single room in Westminster with seven cats on the table. She was not wrong in principle. She was simply outgunned.

Across the Atlantic, in 1897, the Sioux Valley News of South Dakota carried a two-sentence item from Montreal:

“One hundred cats are kept as pets by Mrs. Morley of Montreal. Eighteen boys were recently arrested for stoning them.”

Two sentences, and they contain a complete reversal of everything that had come before. In every preceding case, the woman with cats was the defendant. Here, she was the complainant. The boys were arrested. Mrs. Morley of Montreal had called the law, and the law had come.

But Mrs. Morley deserves considerably more than two sentences, and she shall have them.

Mrs. Stephen Morley, Resplendent

Mrs. Stephen Morley of 200 St. Hubert Street, Montreal, arrived at the Recorder’s Court on 14 July 1887, somewhat late. As she swept past the reporters’ table, the Gazette noted, she was “resplendent in a beautiful lavender silk dress and bonnet, a black lace shawl and yellow gloves.” She was also, the reporter could not resist adding, accompanied by “a peculiar feline odour perceptible in the court room.” She had brought the cats with her, in spirit, within her silk and her gloves. The Clerk of the Crown sat pale with suppressed anxiety. The notary, a longer sufferer, wore what the journalist described as “an anticipating look on his face.” The charge was that Mrs. Morley, by keeping cats at her premises, had caused a public nuisance.

The evidence was considerable, and it had been accumulating for some time.

Sergeant Moran testified that he had visited 200 St. Hubert Street on the fourth of the month, accompanied by another officer, and had been shown through the rooms. There were approximately 70 cats of all sizes and kinds running about. The stench was horrible. All the windows were fitted with double panes, all of them shut — which Mrs. Morley herself explained was to keep the smell in. The other officer had raked filth from the carpet with his stick. The stench, Sergeant Moran confirmed, could be discerned from the sidewalk.

Constable Millette corroborated the Sergeant’s account. He had counted up to 30 cats and lost count. The carpets were very dirty. The smell was abominable. He had been, he admitted, somewhat frightened by the cats as they ran between his legs in all directions — at which point the court laughed, and Mrs. Morley intervened.

“You need not be afraid of them,” she told the Constable, “though they know you are their natural enemies.”

Under cross-examination, Constable Millette was asked whether the smell might be characterized as something other than what it was. He confirmed, to renewed laughter, that he could swear it was not the smell of attar of roses.

Dr. Laberge, the city’s medical health officer, testified that he had visited the following day and found the parlour catless but the smell of cats pervasive throughout. The upper floors were locked against him. He had been there before, he noted, but had never been admitted. He had in fact been attempting to take action for some time, but Mrs. Morley had promised him she would leave the city. He considered any place requiring double windows to contain its smell to be injurious to health.

The neighbours were equally forthcoming. Mr. L.W. Sicotte, Clerk of the Crown, who resided next door at number 202, testified that he had suffered from the stench since the middle of May and that it was unbearable. It was at his instance that proceedings had been taken. He had held back, he explained, because “Madame Morley had promised to vacate the premises.” There were at present, he added, more cats than ever, “rapidly increasing.” The court laughed again. Mr. Louis Bedard, notary, of number 198 on the other side, gave evidence that the nuisance had existed for six years. Six years. The stench pervaded his house and was intolerable, and it was worse at present than it had ever been, “as the cats seemed to breed rapidly.”

Throughout the hearing, the Gazette noted, “the defendant frequently got excited and interrupted the witnesses, but was at once stopped by her counsel.”

Several things emerge from the court record that the laughter tends to obscure. The cats, when Constable Sivigny visited in May, were “of all sizes, were plump and well-fed.” Whatever else was happening at 200 St. Hubert Street, the cats were not suffering. Mrs. Morley was feeding them. The double windows, far from being evidence of obliviousness, where evidence of a woman who knew perfectly well what her household smelled like and had devised a management strategy — however inadequate — to contain it. She had been promising to leave the city, to vacate the premises, to resolve the situation, for years, to multiple officials, with apparent sincerity, but no discernible intention of following through. This is not confusion. It is a sustained negotiation, conducted in lavender silk, with parties she considered it worth negotiating with.

The case was adjourned at six o’clock and continued the following afternoon.

A decade later — or perhaps the same woman in a subsequent proceeding, the records do not entirely clarify — the Sioux Valley News of South Dakota carried its two-sentence dispatch: 100 cats, 18 boys arrested for stoning them. The numbers had grown. The resolve had not diminished. Mrs. Morley, or someone very like her, was still at it.

She is the most fully realized figure in this essay’s Victorian gallery, and the most resistant to the stereotype she appears to embody. She is married — or was. She has a lawyer. She has a strategy. She dresses magnificently for court. She informs a frightened constable that her cats recognize him as their natural enemy. She keeps double windows closed as a courtesy to the neighbourhood she is simultaneously suffocating. She has been doing this for six years at a respectable Montreal address, and she will not stop.

The lavender silk and the feline odour arriving together into the Recorder’s Court is the essay’s perfect image of the woman who refuses to be one thing or the other — respectable or disreputable, sane or mad, neighbour or nuisance. She is all of them at once, in yellow gloves, and she is not remotely sorry.

Cat Houses, and What the Research Says

At the start of this essay I promised I would return to my own experiences in dealing with what pet sitters sometimes term — with no disrespect intended — “cat houses.” I have been to homes where there have been up to perhaps 20 cats ensconced in cat-appropriate luxury. In almost every case the cats were well-cared for, their needs for the most part met. Their owners — usually women, but sometimes men — truly loved their feline companions. Some had forfeited significant portions of their homes to accommodate their furry friends.

One woman in particular had given up her entire upstairs floor and her entire basement to house — I was never quite certain of the exact number — her cats, relegating herself to sleeping in her living room and using the main floor powder room as her bathroom. The cats had two three-piece baths. I am not saying this is normal. Nor am I saying it is pleasingly fragrant. Too many cats crowded into an indoor space will be — well — smelly. Keeping up with litter, food and water bowls, shedding fur and hairballs behind the sofa is not a quick undertaking. It is, beyond a certain number, an impossible one. I personally do not understand what drives cat lovers to such extremes. But then again, perhaps there are underlying causes. The academic literature suggests there may be several.

The foundational researcher in this field is Gary Patronek, VMD, PhD, of Tufts University, who published the first formal diagnostic criteria for animal hoarding, in 1999, in Public Health Reports, defining it as the accumulation of large numbers of animals combined with a failure to provide minimum nutrition, sanitation, and veterinary care, and — crucially — a failure to recognize the deteriorating condition of the animals or the negative effect on one’s own health and well-being. Patronek subsequently established the interdisciplinary Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, known as HARC, at Tufts, whose work was instrumental in the inclusion of animal hoarding under the criteria for hoarding disorder in the DSM-5. Animal hoarding is now formally recognized as a special manifestation of hoarding disorder, though some researchers argue it should be classified as a distinct condition entirely.

The gender data is striking, and worth examining carefully. HARC’s study of 71 cases found that 83 percent of animal hoarders were women, with an average age in the mid-50s. Patronek’s own earlier study of 54 cases found 76 percent female, with nearly half aged 60 or older. From half to nearly three-quarters of individuals across these studies were single, widowed, or divorced. The stereotype, in other words, has a statistical basis.

But the statistics require scrutiny. The samples in virtually all animal hoarding studies are drawn from cases reported to animal control agencies and humane societies — meaning they capture only hoarders who came to official attention. A woman living alone with many cats in a residential neighbourhood is considerably more likely to generate neighbour complaints and trigger official investigation than a man with equivalent numbers of animals on a rural property. The gender skew in the data may partly reflect a reporting bias as much as a genuine prevalence difference. Although, it is worth noting that this point is not prominently made in the literature itself.

Three competing psychiatric frameworks have been proposed to explain the condition. The first is the obsessive-compulsive model — the compulsive acquisition of animals mirrors object hoarding, driven by the same inability to discard and the same anxiety about loss. The second is the delusional disorder model — the hoarder genuinely cannot perceive the condition of the animals, a break from shared reality rather than a failure of will. The third, and for our purposes the most interesting, is the attachment disorder model: the animals substitute for human relationships that failed to develop or were lost, rooted in early childhood insecurity, and what researchers have described as difficulty developing secure attachments combined with decision-making and organizational deficits.

The attachment model is intriguing because it connects to the portraits this essay has been assembling. Rosalia Goodman arrived in a new country at 17, lost her husband at approximately 35, and found in cats something she described not as love but as obligation — “I don’t love the cats yet, but I pity them.” The unnamed Westminster woman told the Inspector she could not part with her “dear” cats. Mrs. Morley kept 70 cats, installed double windows, retained a lawyer, and would not, under any circumstances, desist. Whether any of these women would meet the clinical criteria for animal hoarding disorder is, frankly, doubtful — the HARC definition requires failure of care, and in most of these cases the cats were plump, well-fed, and by the standards of their era reasonably maintained. What the attachment model offers is not a diagnosis but a direction: toward the question of what the cats were providing that nothing else did, or could.

One further finding from the literature deserves mention. Researchers consistently note that animal hoarders tend to be of above-average intelligence, and that a disproportionate number come from what one ASPCA expert described as “helping professions” — teachers, nurses, doctors, even veterinarians. People who have organized their lives around the care of others, and who have extended that orientation — past the point of sustainability, past the point of health, past the point that their neighbours can tolerate — to animals. This is not so very far from Rosalia Goodman buying beefsteak at the Bowery. It is not so very far from Isabella Kidd pointing out that her cats killed mice and therefore served the community. It is not, if we are being honest, entirely foreign to the experience of anyone who has ever taken in one more animal than was strictly sensible.

The clinical term for it is hoarding disorder. The Victorian press called it eccentricity. The neighbours called it a nuisance. The women themselves, when they spoke at all, called it necessity.

And then there is toxoplasmosis.

The Parasite in the Room

Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled protozoan parasite with a life cycle that reads, on close examination, like something from a horror film written by a very precise evolutionary biologist. The parasite can sexually reproduce only in the feline gut. That is its one and only reproductive site in the known world. Everything else it does — every intermediate host it colonies, every behaviour it modifies, every mammal it quietly inhabits — is in service of a single goal: getting itself back into a cat’s intestinal tract.

The mechanism by which it achieves this is where the story becomes genuinely strange. Rodents infected with T. Gondii exhibit measurable behavioural changes, including a documented reduction in — and in some cases a positive attraction toward — the smell of cat urine. The parasite rewires the mouse’s fear response so that the scent of its primary predator becomes, if not appealing, then at least no longer repellent. The mouse wanders toward the cat. The cat eats the mouse. The parasite completes its reproductive cycle. Fascinatingly, research has shown that even after the infection clears from the rodent’s brain, the behavioural change persists — suggesting the parasite flips a switch rather than continuously maintaining control.

The scale of human infection is the detail that tends to drop out of popular coverage entirely. It is estimated that 30-65 percent of the global human population carries T. Gondii — with France, for example, recording seroprevalence of approximately 88 percent, possibly due to a cultural preference for raw and lightly cooked meat rather than cat contact. Britain sits at around 22 percent. The United States carries roughly 40 million infected individuals. The parasite is, by any measure, one of the most successful organisms on the planet, quietly resident in the brains of somewhere between two and three billion people.

For most healthy adults, toxoplasmosis is asymptomatic. But the research into its effects on human behaviour — most prominently conducted by Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague — is considerably more interesting than the popular coverage of “crazy cat lady syndrome” suggests, and points in rather different directions than that coverage implies.

Flegr’s personality research, conducted over more than a decade and involving nearly 2,500 individuals, found that infected men tend toward introversion, suspicion, and rebelliousness, while infected women tend toward extraversion, trust, and compliance. Two entirely different behavioural profiles, for what is ostensibly the same infection. What is notable for our purposes is that when popular science journalism latched onto the toxoplasmosis story, it was almost exclusively the female profile — and its alleged connection to cat-keeping — that generated the “crazy cat lady syndrome” framing. Infected men exhibiting increased risk-taking and rebellious behaviour did not become the story. Infected women did.

Car crash studies are among the more robust findings in the field. At least two studies found that individuals who tested positive for T. Gondii antibodies were statistically more likely to have been involved in traffic accidents, the proposed mechanism being the same disinhibition of appropriate fear responses observed in infected rodents — slower reaction times, reduced risk aversion, a subtly blunted relationship with danger. The entrepreneurship research is the newest and perhaps most surprising: a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that among attendees at entrepreneurship events, those who tested positive for toxoplasmosis were one point eight times more likely to have started their own business. The same reduction in fear of failure that sends infected mice toward cats may, the researchers suggest, send infected humans toward the risks of self-employment.

Now you know why your entrepreneurial boss is, well… peculiar. And don’t tell your car insurance carrier about your toxoplasmosis.

The honest scientific caveat, which this essay would be remiss to omit, is that Flegr’s work and the research it has inspired remains correlational and contested. Establishing causation — proving the parasite causes the behaviour rather than that people with certain pre-existing traits are more likely to be exposed — is genuinely difficult, and several attempts to replicate key findings have produced mixed results. A 2017 study from University College London, using data from 5,000 children, found no link between cat ownership in early childhood and the development of psychotic symptoms in later life. The “crazy cat lady syndrome” of popular science journalism turns out, on examination, to prove almost exactly the opposite of what it claims — or rather, it proves rather less, and implicates more people than its framing suggests.

Consider the actual logic of the parasite applied to the stereotype. Toxoplasma gondii compels its host to be drawn toward cats — likely to be consumed by them. If the stereotype were literally true, if cat ladies were toxoplasma-addled creatures compelled toward cats by a mind-controlling parasite, they would be the parasite’s ideal victims, not its agents. The crazy cat lady, by this reading, is not dangerous. She is prey.

There is one final toxoplasmosis detail worth noting. Jaroslav Flegr — the scientist who has spent his career arguing that a cat parasite may be subtly rewiring human behaviour across the global population — tested positive for T. Gondii himself early in his career, a fact he has discussed publicly. He has submitted it may be part of what made him willing to pursue such an unfashionable line of research for so many decades. The parasite, by his own account, may have produced the scientist who discovered what the parasite does.

That is, as these things go, a fairly elegant outcome.

JD Vance and the Weapon That Never Gets Put Down

I confess that I do not fully know all the implications of the crazy cat lady — the lexicographical, the scientific, the sociological, the historical, the ageist. This essay has traced only some of them, and has likely raised more questions than it has answered. But what I do know is that the phrase seems — recently — to have become yet another pre-sharpened weapon, ready to hand for a particular kind of powerful man who finds women without children, without husbands, and without apparent need of either, profoundly unsettling.

In 2021, none other than JD Vance — now Vice-President of the United States, and formerly, by his own account in his autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, a deeply wounded product of a family laced with generational trauma — offered the following assessment of American political life:

“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.”

He later acknowledged the phrasing was “dumb.” But he stood by the underlying point.

What is worth noting — beyond the obvious — is the specific addition of “childless” to the indictment. It is not enough, in Vance’s formulation, to be a cat lady. One must also be without children, which is to say without the one social credential that might redeem the rest. The cats, in this reading, are not merely a symptom of personal failure. They are a substitution for the children that should, in a properly ordered world, have been there instead. The woman who chooses cats over children — or who simply finds herself, by circumstance or by choice or by the particular shape her life has taken, in a home with cats and without children — is not merely eccentric. She is a civic problem. Her misery, Vance implies, is both self-inflicted and contagious.

It is a very old argument, dressed in a Fox News chyron.

Agnes Waterhouse’s neighbours said much the same thing in 1566, though they used the word witch rather than miserable, and the sentence was considerably harsher than losing a cable news debate.

One is also tempted — and I will give in briefly — to note that Vance made this comment in 2021, and the research on Toxoplasma gondii and risk-taking behaviour has been available in peer-reviewed literature since at least the early 2000s, and that the car crash studies are particularly well-documented. When a man attracted to danger, contemptuous of consequences, is willing to say something epidemiologically interesting on national television about a parasite carried by roughly 40 million Americans — one wonders. One does not conclude. One merely wonders, and points, for reference, to the relevant literature.

Because as this essay has tried to show, not every crazy cat person is weak, or defenceless, or miserable, or wrong. Isabella Kidd quoted Romans at the magistrate and walked out of a Perth courtroom with her dignity intact. Rosalia Goodman told a reporter she would push him down the stairs or take her broomstick to him, having first consulted her lawyer. Mrs. Stephen Morley swept into the Montreal Recorder’s Court in lavender silk and yellow gloves, informed a constable that her cats recognized him as their natural enemy, and declined, across six years and multiple official proceedings, to stop.

Eleanor Abernathy, for her part, held degrees from Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School simultaneously. She threw cats. But she knew exactly what she was throwing them at.

JD Vance would do well to remember that the crazy cat lady has been dealing with men like him — men who believe her choices constitute a public nuisance, men who would prefer she simply went away — for the better part of a thousand years.

She is still here. The cats are doing fine.

Appendix: Sources and Cited Works

Primary Sources

Hamburg Emigration Records / New York Passenger Lists. Rosalie Gutman, age 17, from Posen, departed Hamburg, arrived New York 13 July 1852, Ship P J Behnck. Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. Via Ancestry.com.

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861. Section: “Of the Cats-Meat-Men,” p. 183. Available via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55998

New York Sun. “A Home for Indigent Cats. Eighty Mousers Quartered in an East Side Tenement.” February 12, 1875. Reprinted in numerous US papers, February 17, 1875.

New York Tribune. “Neglected Cats: The Charitable Work of a Poor Woman.” July 12, 1877. Reprinted in The Cleveland Leader (Cleveland, Ohio), July 16, 1877, p. 7. Via Newspapers.com.

Daily Graphic (New York). Report on Rosalia Goodman. July 1878.

Phillips, John. The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex before the Quenes Maiesties Judges the XXVI daye of July anno 1566. London, 1566.

Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London). “Mrs. Goodman’s Hospital for Cats, New York.” July 31, 1875.

Liverpool Mercury. “Prosecution of an ‘Old Maid’ for Keeping Cats.” July 14, 1863, p. 3. Reprinted from the Perthshire Journal. Via Newspapers.com.

New Zealand Herald. “The Countess de la Torre and Her Cats.” September 5, 1885, p. 10. Via Papers Past.

Berrow’s Worcester Journal. “A Colony of Cats.” October 2, 1886, p. 9. Via the British Newspaper Archive.

Daily News (London). “The Police Courts: Westminster — The Old Lady’s Cats.” June 28, 1889, p. 7. Via the British Newspaper Archive.

Sioux Valley News (South Dakota). “One Hundred Cats.” September 24, 1897, p. 2. Via Newspapers.com.

The Gazette (Montreal). “Mrs. Morley, the Proprietor of Several Score of Cats, Before the Recorder.” July 14, 1887, p. 3. Via Newspapers.com.

Census and Civil Records

United States Federal Census, 1870. Henry Goodman and Rosalia Goodman, New York Ward 7 District 6, New York. Dwelling 324. Via Ancestry.com.

United States Federal Census, 1880. Rose Goodman [Rose Waare], age 40, New York City, New York. Roll 892, Page 489a, Enumeration District 537. Via Ancestry.com.

United States Federal Census, 1910. Rosalie Goodman, age 74, Manhattan Ward 12, New York. Roll T624_1020, Page 8a, Enumeration District 0481, FHL microfilm 1375033. Via Ancestry.com.

New York, New York, Death Index, 1862–1948. Rosalie Goodman, age 84, death date September 13, 1917, Manhattan, New York. Certificate Number 27243. Via Ancestry.com.

U.S., Naturalization Record Indexes, 1791–1992. Henry Goodman, naturalised November 21, 1867, Common Pleas Court, New York County. Volume 347, Record 222. Address: 57 Clinton Street, New York City. Witness: Philipp Milling. National Archives and Records Administration. Via Ancestry.ca.

Secondary Sources: Books

Craton, Oswin. A Cloistered Light: Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, Patron Saint of Pilgrims & Cats. :Self Published, 2005. translation of Gertrude, Dame de Nivelles from 1955, French

MacDonogh, Katharine. Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court Since the Renaissance. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.

McCabe, James Dabney. New York by Sunlight and Gaslight: A Work Descriptive of the Great American Metropolis. 1882.

Roeder, Helen. Saints and Their Attributes; With a Guide to Localities and Patronage : H. Regnery Company, 1956.

Vance, JD. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper, 2016.

Wolf, Simon. The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen. Philadelphia: The Levytype Company, 1895. Entry for Henry Goodman, Private, Company K, 56^th Regiment, New York Infantry.

Academic and Scientific Sources

Arluke, Arnold, Randy Frost, et al. “Health Implications of Animal Hoarding.” Health and Social Work 27, no. 2 (2002). [Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium / HARC study of 71 cases.]

Frost, Randy O., and Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium (HARC). “People Who Hoard Animals.” Psychiatric Times 17 (2000): 25–29.

Frost, Randy O., Gary Patronek, and Arnold Arluke. “The Hoarding of Animals: An Update.” Psychiatric Times, 2015. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/hoarding-animals-update

McKeithen, William. “Governing Pet Love: ‘Crazy Cat Ladies,’ Cultural Discourse, and the Spatial Logics of Inter-Species Intimacies.” MA thesis, University of Washington, 2014.

Paloski, L.H., et al. “Explanatory model for animal hoarding including difficulty developing secure attachments in childhood, early life stressors, and decision-making/organizational deficits.” 2017. [Cited in ScienceDirect animal hoarding literature review.]

Patronek, Gary J. “Hoarding of Animals: An Under-Recognized Public Health Problem in a Difficult-to-Study Population.” Public Health Reports 114 (1999): 81–87.

Patronek, Gary J., and Jane N. Nathanson. “A Theoretical Perspective to Inform Assessment and Treatment Strategies for Animal Hoarders.” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 3 (2009): 274–281.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Study on Toxoplasma gondii and entrepreneurship risk-taking. 2018. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/285/1883/20180822/84694/Risky-business-linking-Toxoplasma-gondii-infection

University College London. Study on cat ownership and psychotic symptoms in children. 2017. [Lead author: Dr. James Kirkbride. Avon Longitudinal Study, 5,000 children.]

Online and Periodical Sources

Aleteia. “Why is St. Gertrude the patron saint of cats?” July 29, 2020. https://aleteia.org/2020/07/29/why-is-st-gertrude-the-patron-saint-of-cats/

CBR. “The Simpsons: How Crazy Cat Lady Is the Show’s Greatest Tragedy.” December 18, 2020. https://www.cbr.com/the-simpsons-how-crazy-cat-lady-is-the-shows-greatest-tragedy/

CNN. “Vance Says ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Comment Was ‘Dumb’ But Stands by the Point.” October 12, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/12/politics/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies

Essex Record Office Blog. “The Trial of Agnes Waterhouse – Witchcraft in Essex, 1566.” August 2, 2021. https://www.essexrecordofficeblog.co.uk/the-trial-of-agnes-waterhouse-witchcraft-in-essex-1566/

Fox News. “JD Vance Says ‘Anti-Family’ Dems Took ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Remark ‘Out-of-Context.’” July 29, 2024.

Hartwell, Sarah. “Rosalie Goodman — A Nineteenth Century Cat Hoarder in New York.” Messybeast.com, 2019. http://messybeast.com/1875-cat-hoarder.htm

History.com. “Why St. Patrick’s Day Also Honors Cats.” March 17, 2026. https://www.history.com/articles/march-17-saint-gertrude-cats

Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience. “Noah Syndrome: A Review Regarding Animal Hoarding with Squalor.” 2022. https://innovationscns.com/noah-syndrome-animal-hoarding-squalor/

KQED Arts. “How the ‘Crazy’ Cat Lady Became One of Pop Culture’s Most Enduring Sexist Tropes.” January 12, 2024. https://www.kqed.org/arts/13891913/how-the-crazy-cat-lady-became-one-of-pop-cultures-most-enduring-sexist-tropes

NBC News. “Crazy Cat Ladies: Why Always Cats? Why Always Ladies?” https://www.nbcnews.com/health/body-odd/crazy-cat-ladies-why-always-cats-why-always-ladies-flna1C6437716

Noiser Podcasts (The Curious History of Your Home). “The World’s First Cat Lady.” https://www.noiser.com/the-curious-history-of-your-home/the-worlds-first-cat-lady

Psychology Today. “The Reality of Animal Hoarding.” October 2023. https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/canine-corner/202310/the-reality-of-animal-hoarding

Screen Rant. “The Simpsons: The Crazy Cat Lady’s Dark & Tragic Backstory Explained.” October 3, 2020. https://screenrant.com/simpsons-show-crazy-cat-lady-eleanor-abernathy-backstory-explained/

Sky History. “Chelmsford Witch Trials: The Tragic Case of Agnes Waterhouse.” https://www.history.co.uk/articles/chelmsford-witch-trials-hatfield-perevel-agnes-waterhouse

The Hatching Cat of Gotham (Peggy Gavan). “1871: Rosalie Goodman, the Crazy Cat Lady of New York’s Lower East Side.” April 5, 2014. https://hatchingcatnyc.com/2014/04/05/rosalie-goodman-cat-lady-lower-east-side/

U.S. Catholic. “Meet St. Gertrude, cat lady of the church.” https://uscatholic.org/articles/202003/how-st-gertrude-of-nivelles-became-the-cat-lady-of-the-catholic-church/

Wikipedia. “Agnes Waterhouse.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Waterhouse

Wikipedia. “Animal Hoarding.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_hoarding

Wikipedia. “Cat Lady.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_lady

Wikipedia. “Girly Edition.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girly_Edition

Wordorigins.org. “Cat Lady / Crazy Cat Lady.” [Earliest documented use: Springfield Daily Republican, June 24, 1911; Women’s Wear Daily, December 26, 1969.] https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/cat-lady

WNYC / On the Media. “Cat Ladies: Extended Version.” https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/cat-ladies-extended-version