The History of Women and Cats: From Goddesses to Witches to Modern Day

How the cat became a mirror

 

In ancient Egypt, harming a cat was a crime. In Japan, the cat stood at the entrance of homes as a symbol of fortune. In China, the cat goddess Li Shou was called upon to protect crops and bring fertility. Across the ancient and Eastern world, the cat held a position of genuine reverence, and so (more often than not) did women.

The two have rarely been separated for long.

If you have spent any time with a cat, you know it is not an animal that performs for you. It keeps its own hours, makes its own decisions, and offers affection only when it feels like it. For thousands of years, the cultures that kept cats close understood this as a kind of dignity rather than a flaw. The same cultures that elevated the cat tended to hold real space for feminine power, in their temples, their stories, their daily life. The cat and the goddess were not symbols of each other so much as companions in the same world, one that took both seriously.

What the West Did

The shift happened gradually, and as Western power consolidated, the demonization came quickly. As Christianity spread across medieval Europe, it needed new images of heresy and threat. The cat, with its nighttime habits and its refusal to be fully tamed, filled that role. Pope Gregory IX's papal bull of 1232 named black cats as sacrilegious. The association between cats and witchcraft followed, and with it, the association between cats and the women accused of practicing it.

The witch trials of the 15th through 17th centuries were not incidentally connected to cats. They were intentionally connected. The women most frequently accused were those who lived alone (aka owned their own property), kept animals for company, and had built lives that looked nothing like what was expected of them. An animal found in a woman's home became a familiar, a demon in disguise, evidence of a pact with darkness.

It was not really about superstition. The women who refused the expected arrangement of a woman's life, and the cats they kept, were targeted by the same institutions at the same time. Both represented something that would not be fully controlled, and that was the actual problem.

The stain it left lasted a long time. For centuries in Western culture, the image of the woman with cats carried the weight of that association. These women were eccentric at best, pitiable or threatening at worst. The cat lady was an intentionally diminishing label. She was what you became when you had failed to secure the life you were supposed to want.

The Reclamation

What is happening now is not a trend. It is a return.

As women across the West have gained legal, economic, and reproductive autonomy, cat ownership has shifted with it. Cats are the preferred companion of people who have built lives on their own terms. They are not low-maintenance animals; they need attention, consistency, and genuine care. But they do not require their owner's entire life to be organized around them. For women who have deliberately built lives outside what was traditionally expected, that dynamic makes sense.

The cat lady stereotype has not gone away. But something has changed in how it lands and how its received. What was once a warning, ending up alone with a house full of cats, has been taken back by the women it was meant to shame. The reclamation is deliberate. It says "this path is not a failure." This is a choice, and its quite a deliberate one. 

This reclaimed lineage runs back through the women accused at Salem, through the medieval anchoresses who kept cats in their cells, through the temple priestesses of Bastet, through every culture that understood the cat as a creature worth taking seriously.

The cat has always reflected how society treats women. Revered when it was convenient, feared when it was not. We are in a period when women are rewriting those terms, and the cat, as it always has been, is right there with them.