From Pussy Panic to a Fascination with Felines

In certain cultures, at certain moments, yet enduringly, cats have been depicted as the wilful companions of equally wilful women – witches, spinsters and suffragettes. Cats have often been associated with women, particularly in Victorian England: the cute, domesticated kitten representing the passive homemaker; the feral outside ally cat, the wilful woman. The suffragette was the stereotypical woman who would not be domesticated around 1900. Anti-suffragette propaganda therefore sometimes depicted cats. In some instances, the suffragette cat was repurposed by the suffragettes to convey a positive message. In this essay, I draw out the gendered dimensions of how cats became entwined with both pro- and anti-suffrage campaigning by making use of various postcard archives, including the Curt Teich Postcard Archives Digital Collections and the John Hopkins Sheridan Libraries Special Collections. Why were cats and wilful women such ‘natural’ companions in the eyes of both friend and foe? In the essay, I also reflect on the ways in which cats are used as political imagery in our twenty-first-century social media sphere. I ask what it might mean that the political imagery surrounding cats has changed so much over the past century, in particular regarding its gendered dimensions. What does it mean that the meaning of cats in political messaging seems to have shifted from a pussy panic to a fascination with felines?