A Brief History of the Cat Lady

From the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, countless thousands of cats across Europe were tortured and burned to death alongside the women whose “familiars” in witchcraft those cats were presumed to be.  Sometimes the cats themselves were believed to be witches.  The women were usually single and often elderly.  Medieval and Early Modern society’s mistrust of single women, cats, and any bond between the two lingers in today’s conception of the “cat lady.”  Like her persecuted “witch” predecessors, the cat lady is our culture’s envisioning of the woman who has failed to remain within the social order, who lies precariously outside it. 

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Ask Momo: 1/14/2016

New year, new naptimes, folks. Try to keep up. I hope you had a pleasant and restful human holiday. Mine was spent covertly peeping at my humans through the low-hanging boughs of their strange artificial tree, sampling some fine Christmas catnip, and savagely rending roll upon roll of crisp new wrapping paper. My goals for the new year? To stay as magnificent as ever and to take my advice column as seriously as I always have—which is to say, mostly seriously to varying degrees. Here’s to another year of everyone’s favorite slightly snarky, mostly earnest scribbling kitty.