While Donald Trump hides out in Mar-a-Lago, JD Vance has spent the past few weeks taking point on the G.O.P.’s continued struggle to define Kamala Harris. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s beef with women who don’t have children, as outlined in an interview in 2021, has resurfaced. At the time, Vance derided Harris as emblematic of “childless cat ladies” who don’t have a “direct stake” in America. He now claims this “childless cat lady” routine was sarcasm, stating that he meant only that making more babies is a good thing for this nation. That still implies that not having children is un-American. It also underscores how Trump and Vance have very few pro-family policy proposals for actual babies, as opposed to talking about imagined babies that women should be having. Vance’s ham-handed attempts to have it both ways reveal the wink-wink of today’s egregious right-wing identity politics and point to the ways that this election’s identity politics might play out through innuendo and metaphor.
The idea of a childless cat lady is an uninspired dog whistle among others — old maid, crone, witch — that are designed to reduce a woman’s social value to her ability and willingness to reproduce. When Vance says that Harris is one of many childless cat ladies who are miserable and trying to make the rest of the world miserable, he is calling on a set of sexist, racist ideas about which women are even allowed to count as real women. Namely, married mothers are real women, and the rest of us are horrible divergences from the social contract.
Vance’s commentary hints at a decades-old idea, popular in overlapping antidemocratic circles, that this country has a demographic crisis, couched in the notion that declining birthrates are destabilizing the economy. That idea is rife with xenophobic fears that white Americans are not having enough children and immigration is an undesirable way to bolster demographic growth. Fears about population decline like this typically end up really being racist fears about this country’s declining white majority.
The gag is clear when you consider which issues pronatalists like Vance consider worthy and which he does not. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rates in this country, followed by Native American women. Yet his stated pro-birthing policy policies do not address the high cost of giving birth for minority women.
The G.O.P., in particular, has tapped into white male rage about women — especially educated white women — who can choose when and how they will have children. As a result, some commentators have begun to call this election the presidential contest of the genders, with male grievance finding an outlet in Trump’s brand of big man politics and women finding resonance for their post-Dobbs rage in the Democratic Party. Through Trump’s bluster and Vance’s comments, the G.O.P. has begun to lay a trap for Harris by calling her into a rhetorical war about motherhood that a Black woman of immigrant descent cannot win.
All female political candidates are expected to narrate their motherhood status or, at least, their mother-like qualities. But no other presidential candidate had to meet this challenge the way Harris will. Watching this campaign wrestle with the G.O.P.’s motherhood purity test, so far, has been a lesson in how not to fall for dog whistle traps.
In the 2020 primary contest, Harris introduced us to “Momala,” a term of endearment from her stepchildren. “Momala” gestures to her role as a woman who mothers but does not have biological children. That kind of mothering is familiar to millions of Americans who have blended families, but a broader concept of mothering is also cultural. In communities that do not hew as closely to the idea of a white Western nuclear family, anyone who invests in and cares for children and social relations can mother.
Vance’s cat lady comments are an early sign of the G.O.P.’s easiest attack on what “Momala” represents. In multiple public comments, Vance has hammered home that “real” Americans are those with children. His policy proposals show a preference for traditional, married households. Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, has said Vance deserves credit for the way that “family life, childbearing and pronatalism has gotten a lot more popular.” While Vance tries to backpedal from his 2021 remarks, he has a track record of claiming that people without children represent this nation’s “anti-child ideology.” He has referred to “our people” not having enough children, which raises the question: Who is included in “our,” and who is not?
It seems to exclude single parents, stepparents, gay parents and all manner of nontraditional families. These attacks are designed to bait Harris into attempting to prove that she is what many on the right imagine a real mother to be. That mother is not just a biological parent. She’s an iteration of another gendered G.O.P. trope: the mama bear. That’s the ferocious mother figure who enacts political consequences in defense of her children and in service of a white-first nation whose full franchise belongs to white men.
As much as Americans talk about Hillary Clinton when it comes to women in presidential politics, our country also owes a lot to Sarah Palin. In 2010 she was a political supernova. At an anti-abortion fund-raiser she introduced the world to a brand of “mama grizzly” conservative women in national politics. “Real” women, like her, did not enter the rough-and-tumble world of presidential politics for fame and glory. They ran and governed because they were afraid for their children’s future. And they carried guns — especially assault rifles — so they could defend their children, putting a charming face on the G.O.P.’s most important constituency: the N.R.A. evangelists.
Palin’s shtick had a clear message: Anything a mother like her did in defense of her young was also good for America. Since then, her archetype morphed into the mama bear brand of retail politics deployed by women like Kari Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Whereas Palin’s branding played up her homespun Alaskan frontier image, mama bear politics encompass something bigger. It is a female conservative political brand that embraces gun rights and female aggression in defense of traditional family values.
Harris cannot be a mama bear. No one who looks like Harris can be a mama bear. When Black mothers take up arms in defense of their children, they are threats to social order. When Black mothers grieve their children’s deaths in public — like Mike Brown’s mother, like Eric Garner’s mother, like Emmett Till’s mother — they indict the very white violence that the mama bear symbolizes. The power of their grief visibly threatens the power structures of white supremacy.
Immigrant mothers, especially those of brown complexions, embody similar threats. In the imagination of many Americans, they have “anchor babies” to steal white Americans’ rights and tax dollars. They cross the border, dirtying the nation’s sovereignty. As a woman of color, Harris is more likely to embody the nation’s fears about violent nonwhite Americans, dangerous borders and a multiracial democracy than its hope for a white nation.
Given how powerful all of these triggers are in political discourse, it would be natural to want to fight back with proof that Harris is a real mother and women like her are real mothers. That would be a mistake. However charming “Momala” is as a political biography, it is in no way powerful enough to counter the racial fears that nonwhite motherhood stokes in this nation’s soul.
The Harris campaign has, so far, toned down the mother-in-chief narrative that her 2020 primary campaign prioritized. Instead, they are focusing on how, as vice president, she has championed policies that benefit all mothers, like child care, maternity leave and motherhood mortality research. She led the Biden administration’s first Maternal Health Day of Action. As a candidate, she is working family-friendly policies into her economic platform, such as restoring the administration’s child tax credit, giving families with a newborn a $6,000 credit, and expanding the earned-income tax credit for low-wage workers. That is not as powerful as the G.O.P. mama bear symbolism. But it does not have to be.
It just has to resist the temptation to fall for the trap that Vance has set — worrying about the talk of motherhood — and instead focus on policies that actually help parents of all types and their children.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.
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