An incisive, fresh take on the cat lady’s place in our cultural imagination—why the term haunts English teachers and politicians alike, and what it would take for the cat ladies among us to flip the script

She’s single. She’s childless. She lurks at the end of the block: a stale-bathrobe-wearing, frizzy-haired, pet-food-eating scarecrow. Miss Havisham without the wedding dress. A walking cautionary tale about what happens to women who step off the straight and narrow. And all around her swarm those living symbols of failure to wed: cats, cats and more cats.

How did single women and their feline companions become the joint targets of cultural distrust and scorn? Cat Lady maps the odyssey of the ubiquitous yet mysterious cat from solitary savanna hunter to pro bono pest control, from agent of Satan to domestic companion who might eat your eyeballs. Alongside that trajectory, it charts the evolution of women in the West from goddesses to witches, and from property to citizens whose legal status remains terrifyingly tenuous.

Cat Lady is a whip-smart hidden history of the archetype that will both provoke and amuse readers as they join Meredith W. Reiches on her journey to make heads or tails of a term that sells calendars and greeting cards while simultaneously being flung like rotten eggs by those criticizing ways of life that challenge patriarchal power.

Reiches leaves no couch cushion unturned, no pillow free from hunting spoils, and no tchotchke safe on the shelf as she explores the Cat Lady Industrial Complex to ask: whose agenda does the cat lady insult serve, and how might the cat ladies among us claw their way to liberation that transcends gender and species?