A mockery of fathers

Men like J.D. Vance hate ‘childless cat ladies' and single moms for the same reason: they challenge patriarchal values. Just ask Murphy Brown.

The fictional Murphy Brown with her newborn baby. Screenshot: archive.org

As a presenter at the Emmys on Sunday, actress Candice Bergen was the perfect person to take a swing at J.D. Vance—especially the week after Taylor Swift’s “childless cat lady” Instagram post.

“For eleven years, I had the tremendous privilege of playing the lead in a comedy series called Murphy Brown,” said Bergen, noticeably choked up. Then, her voice still wavering, she recalled that infamous moment of backlash to the show. In a 1992 speech, then Vice President Dan Quayle criticized her fictional character—a 40something single mother and TV broadcaster—for “mocking the importance of fathers” by raising a child alone.

Bergen steeled herself to deliver the sarcastic kicker to her remarks: “Oh, how far we’ve come,” she said. “Today, a Republican candidate for vice president would never attack a woman for having kids. So as they say, my work here is done. Meow.”

She drew wild applause, and it’s one of the most talked about moments from the night, but this fleeting awards-show joke didn’t fully convey the aptness of the comparison between Quayle and Vance.

When Quayle attacked Bergen’s fictional single woman, it was within the context of a speech about the Los Angeles riots. Of course, the riots emerged from outrage over the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, but Quayle blamed them on something else—perhaps you can guess. “I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw is directly related to the breakdown of the family structure,” he told a crowd at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club.

He blamed a “welfare ethos” for preventing certain people from taking “advantage of the opportunities America offers.” Then he bemoaned the emergence of a Black “underclass,” which he blamed on the sexual revolution. Changing social mores, casual sex, drugs. Middle-aged, middle-class boomers eventually clawed their way out of that debauchery by settling down and having families, Quayle argued, but poor people didn’t. You see, intergenerational poverty was really “a poverty of values,” he said.

This was the same shit Patrick Moynihan had spouted decades earlier in his infamous 1965 report The Negro Family, in which he blamed Black single mothers for all manner of social problem, including poverty.

“The anarchy and lack of structure in our inner cities are testament to how quickly civilization falls apart when the family foundation cracks,” Quayle continued. “Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father.” Marriage, he said, “is probably the best anti-poverty program of all.” Then Quayle advocated for the “use of social sanctions” to strengthen the institution of marriage. “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” he said.

It was at that point that he invoked Murphy Brown. “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly-paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice,” he said.

Revisiting Quayle’s speech, I’m struck by just how much his rhetoric around “anarchy” and the “inner city” echoes Vance’s recent racist attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Vance wrote on X that immigrants were “draining social services” and “generally causing chaos,” before dangerously spreading racist pet-eating conspiracy theories.

Add in Vance’s hateful remarks on “childless cat ladies” and, fundamentally, you’ve got the same thing: a racist defense of white patriarchy, which is the animating force behind so much reproductive history in this country.

Now, Quayle attacked women for having kids but doing it “irresponsibly,” while J.D. Vance attacks women for not having kids. More specifically, beyond the cat ladies, he has attacked “miserable women” who “can’t have kids” and expressed his dismay at teachers who don’t have kids. What Quayle and Vance share is a belief in “family values” (read: patriarchal values). They are all about men. Why was Quayle so mad about Murphy Brown? She made patriarchs look optional.

These politics go way back: In the postwar era, Black women were stereotyped as matriarchs who emasculated Black men, and white women were accused of “momism,” a domineering style of mothering believed to emasculate sons.

Given this shared history, it’s no real surprise that remarks from Quayle and Vance are sometimes indistinguishable, despite being made decades apart. Case in point, guess who said this: “Two parents married to each other are better in most cases for children than one.” That was Quayle in his 1992 speech, but it’s reminiscent of Vance’s commentary implying that marriage is so important for the wellbeing of kids that couples should stick together, perhaps even through domestic violence.

At times, Vance has tried to appear friendly to single moms: “Our movement is about single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction, but never gave up,” Vance said during his RNC speech. That is laughable, of course, because he has no interest in supporting struggling single moms; instead, he’s in favor of creating incentives for women to get married, including through a “marriage bonus.” As Jessica Winter has written, his movement is about single mothers like his mom only “in the sense that it seems deeply motivated by what she didn’t give him, and by what Vance longed for most: a traditional nuclear family.”

For Vance, marriage alone is not enough. He went after Kamala Harris, a married stepmother, and Pete Buttigieg, a gay married man with two adopted children, for being “childless cat ladies.” Only reproductive heteronormative marriage is enough (and not through IVF). Vance has said that his staunch anti-abortion stance is “pro-family” and, in the most fucked-up sense, that’s accurate: he advocates for coercing and forcing women into family life.

Here, I’m reminded of a statement from Diane English, the creator of Murphy Brown, in response to Quayle’s speech: “If the vice president thinks it's disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he'd better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.” Men like Vance and Quayle, who argued for weaning single mothers off the “narcotic of welfare,” instead want to strong-arm women into marriage.

After revisiting this decades-old single-mom fracas—in which a front page New York Times article asked, “Is Murphy Brown really a tramp?”—I found myself watching that old episode. There is plenty that feels dated: the comedic bits about Brown’s water breaking on-air, the pain of childbirth, and the bumbling men in her life who fail to coach her through contractions. You can feel the momentous cultural weight of representing a career woman stepping into single motherhood. “I’m not gonna be like other mothers,” she tells her newborn baby in their first moment together in the hospital. “I don’t cook or sew or make stuffed animals talk in funny voices.”

A beat later she asks, “Are we bonding yet?” It’s clear that motherhood feels strange and frightening.

Then, in the final minutes of the episode, Brown suddenly finds her groove. While gazing at her baby, she starts tenderly singing Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” It’s a song that she had memorably sung in the pilot episode, as a childless single woman returning home after an eventful day at work. Brown had kicked off her heels and belted out those lyrics in a moment of joy, fulfillment, and self-realization. In the hospital with her baby, it’s the same: joy, fulfillment, and self-realization—and love.

Imagine watching that scene and being outraged by that love.

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