Emma Teitel: The social conservative case for childless cat ladies

Childless women play a critical role in helping family members raise children and care for elderly parents

Published Sep 10, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

I’ve always harboured a suspicion that politicians who rail against gay rights could be secretly gay themselves; an assumption well founded on more than one occasion.

However, by this logic, I suppose it only makes sense that I harbour another suspicion, too: that Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance is, in his heart of hearts, a childless cat lady. He may have appeared on numerous occasions to be extremely disdainful of Democrat-voting spinsters. But I wonder if this disdain masks a genuine longing to curl up at the end of a taxing day with the latest Roxane Gay and a warm tabby on his lap.

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And honestly, who could blame him? Campaigning is hard, but so is parenting. Granted, I’m not running for the second-highest political office in the world behind a megalomaniac, but like Vance, I have children in lieu of cats. Mine are under the age of five, a fact that leaves me with my own strong feelings about childless women. For starters, I am deeply, deeply jealous of them. However, unlike Vance, I would never in a million years do anything to cross them. After all, good babysitting is hard to find.

This is what strikes me as so off-base about Vance’s fixation with women who aren’t raising children — whether they are school teachers or presidential candidates. It’s not only mean-spirited; it is, from a social-conservative standpoint, self-defeating.

Consider: if it is Vance’s belief that the state encroaches too much on the role of the family in the rearing of children, and that the “private” community should intervene to help the nuclear family in place of the state, why has he chosen to vilify and alienate a demographic with the time, resources and often the desire to do just that?

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In a prohibitively expensive country with fraying social supports and fragmented family units, who does Vance think is helping young mothers with their kids when their own parents live out of state and child-care costs have outpaced inflation? The Amazon delivery guy?

In many cases, this help comes from friends and relatives who don’t have kids. There is a reason why, according to the Pew Research Center, 69 per cent of childless adults over the age of 50 in the United States who are aunts or uncles say they have a close relationship with at least one niece or nephew. Unsurprisingly, this number is highest among childless women over the age of 50, 74 per cent of whom report sharing a close bond with a niece or nephew.

In other words, the vast majority of childless women in America — those with and without cats — have a vested interest in the welfare of the nation’s children, and the parents of those children likely have a vested interest in keeping the childless women in their lives happy.

They aren’t the only ones. Indeed, the benevolence of the childless extends to all ages. Despite an unfounded reputation for “selfishness,” Pew found that 40 per cent of childless women over 50 say they would provide “more” care to elderly parents, if they needed it, than their siblings, not only because they live closer to their parents but because they report having “more time or flexibility.”

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This is fortuitous as the number of Americans aged 65 and older is expected to increase 47 per cent over the next three decades, according to the U.S. Population Reference Bureau, increasing to 82 million in 2050, from 58 million in 2022. What’s more, the number of American centenarians — people aged 100 and older — is expected to quadruple in the next 30 years to roughly 422,000.

That’s a lot of Republicans who will need a lift to the podiatrist. And they are unlikely to care that the childless women behind the wheel lean Democrat.

In the end, of course, it’s doubtful that Vance’s repeated disses aimed at women without children will be a deciding factor in the U.S. election, an impending spectacle bound to produce fresh hells we can’t even dream of.

In the interim, though, it’s probably a wise idea for him to keep his mouth shut about a demographic that is to many of us — American and otherwise — a godsend.

National Post

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